I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
> there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist. Christians use similar arguments to try and disprove evolution.
> thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
so you think a single person in the lab was infected (with no evidence), and then right as they were contagious, went straight to the wet market and on the way, infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it? this is the case you are making?
> There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist.
yes and no. in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid. its not definitive, but it is strongly dispositive.
> no there aren't
the article you linked is contradicting you, but regardless the claim isnt falsifiable:
"If Huanan Market was the source, why were “only” one- to two-thirds of early cases linked [...] why would one expect all cases [...] to be confined to one market?"
the article's thesis is that there are multiple cases not linked to Huanan market, but thats expected because of asymptomatic transmission. That argument could be used in favor of either side, so its not particularly meaningful.
> infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it
as I just mentioned, the article you linked makes this very claim. you cant have it both ways.
> in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid
I'm ignorant but thought that the evidentiary record for ebola was also really thin? Where we have lineages and source animals, sometimes that has taken many years, I think?
I mean you need to show that trail Covid was very infectious even before it mutated more. It's been estimated to have a R-naught above 2. It seems incredulus that their is a hypotehtical lab worker who is infected who takes the train 7 miles to the wet market (distance from lab) infects no one, but than infects 1 person at the wet market. Than goes home on the train, infects no one afterwards after proving they have virulent infection. It seems to go against how virus work. Because they need to not only infect anyone after the ride home but also no infect anyone ever again execpt at the wet market. You need to show evidence of or you are just engaging in conspricy thinking
Also we don't have the Zoonosis of the plauge, or the spanish bird flu but we are very confident they came from animals because we can tell that. So that claim we always now is just dumb we are mising many origin animals for many diseases because can back generate dieasese lineages from the DNA of the disease sometimes we can't and I am sure there are some back traces that just go to the wrong animal.
China didn't help with the fact they killed and bleached every animal at that wet market but that is documented to have happened but that is not proof of lab leak.
-- There's so much heated speculation in this thread as to make all arguments worthless. What isn't speculation however, is that the international treaties against bio-weapons are a joke that can result in a global tragedy at any moment.
Bio-weapons are untraceable, one side can seed an infection in a way to frame another player, and all that could be done about it, would be heated but fruitless speculations. There's no point in arguing about "who's done it", actually that line of argument is a huge distraction causing a lot more harm than good.
Learn and argue about the dysfunctional internal and international bio-regulations, they are the reason for the uncertainty and lack of accountability which enable and invite truly global and truly disastrous villainy.
Yeah, it would have killed a friend or relative of the lab worker, or someone living in the same building as the lab worker, and then you would have your smoking gun of a lab leak.
Going from infecting a lab worker to a high-precision spillover in a wet market, without leaving a trace anywhere else, is just not how a viral infection is likely to work.
SARS-CoV-2 has relatively low IFR, especially among younger people, and a mild case is easily dismissed as a flu or cold. Transmission is also heterogeneous, with most patients infecting no one while a few infect huge clusters; R = 2 absolutely does not mean one patient infects two, who infect four, who infect eight, etc.
> An important feature in this distribution, consistent with earlier findings (4), is that the majority (76%) of infected cases shows no evidence of onward transmission amongst any of their contacts.
So there's no reason to expect that the first cluster that generates enough sickness and death to attract official attention will occur near the point of introduction. If we look at North America, then it in fact did not--the introduction must have been at an airport or seaport, but the first large clusters were in nursing homes, church choir practices, etc. This is different from SARS-1 or MERS, which were deadly enough to make that cryptic spread much less likely.
I think perhaps there is a correlation with population density as well. Wuhan is fairly dense, and the wet market that is subject to speculation is located in the most densely populated district of wuhan.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
China denies the claim that these lab workers were sick at all. Even if they're lying, there is no proof they fell sick with Covid-19 and there is strong evidence they did not. All workers at the lab were later tested for Sars-CoV-2 antibodies and came up negative. Unless that's also a lie.
The bioengineering origin is, according to the overwhelming consensus of virologists, not plausible scientifically. It also requires a large and airtight conspiracy involving a number of respected scientists. Conspiracy theories are possible, but never parsimonious.
If we're going in for conspiracies, you should consider that the US intelligence community has a proven track record of lying for political gain. The Iraq War was started by a conspiracy.
Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.
So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
My understanding is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only 2 BSL-4 labs in china in 2019, and the only one focused on emergent viruses. This is out of 684 major Chinese cities.
The good thing about free will is that one can just believe that something is true, regardless of how much people on the web hit oneself over the head for it.
Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
> But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
Another poster above has quoted that US intelligence report that you mention, and it concluded that there is no evidence that any earlier illness was related to COVID.
« Their source was a U.S. intelligence report. » — In other words, blowing smoke around some important government lies.
« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.
Even when there’s not a direct connection, it’s usually a good sign to take a look at what’s going on. In this case, even if COVID was a random isolated mutation in an unrelated marketplace nearby, it shone a spotlight on a place doing gain of function research on novel coronaviruses where if one did escape lab confinement, we were woefully unprepared to deal with the full consequences of that outbreak (eg: COVID). Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, we should be taking exactly the same precautions as if it were.
> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
Nobody expected natural zoonotic spillover near Wuhan, and Dr. Shi's lab was not situated with that in mind. In her own words:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
The virus doesn't seem to have been engineered from any previously known sarbecovirus, but the WIV had the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses collected from nature in the world, and had proposed in DEFUSE to engineer them in collaboration with Dr. Baric at UNC. DARPA rejected that proposal, in part for safety reasons, but the WIV was technically capable of doing the work alone.
> Dr. Shi's lab was not situated with that in mind
Never said that, labs are close to places with high viral reservoirs because it is easier to get animal samples to study, obviously, not to guard against outbreaks. Neither one "expects" such an outbreak, obviously. The fact that it is a tail event does not mean it is arbitrary, though, ie that it can just happen anywhere with equal chance.
The other arguments have been answered 1 million times and they are not worth even discussing about anymore. They only exist as justification for somebody really wanting certain conspiracy theories to be true.
> Never said that, labs are close to places with high viral reservoirs because it is easier to get animal samples to study, obviously,
You are continuing to imply that Dr. Shi's lab was "close to places with high viral reservoirs", but nobody--lab leak advocate, zoonosis advocate, or otherwise--thinks that's true. She collected "animal samples to study" from Yunnan and surrounding areas, >1000 km from Wuhan. For example, RaTG13 came from Tongguan (thus TG), in Mojiang County. The location of her lab did not make those samples "easier to get".
There are probably lots of other labs that are deliberately placed near natural reservoirs of the organisms that they study, but Dr. Shi's was not. If anything, she thought those sarbecoviruses were less abundant near Wuhan than in some random location in China, not more.
She could be wrong, but no evidence has yet emerged that she was. Even among advocates for theories of natural zoonosis, the pathway is usually proposed to be smuggling of an unknown intermediate host rather than any natural reservoir in Wuhan, thus the attention on the wet market (since a similar pathway probably did explain SARS-1).
As to the rest, what evidence do you think could distinguish one natural novel virus from a laboratory chimera of two novel viruses? I think it would be more helpful to explain the basis for your belief than to smear mine as a "conspiracy theory".
> "when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
You're implying that the virus got out of the lab without saying it.
Where you tricked yourself is you have a line so catchy it stops scrutiny.
Maybe the two are connected, but what's the cause and what's the effect? Maybe they built the lab in Wuhan because there's a lot of undiscovered Corona viruses in Wuhan...?
Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.
According to partisan online newsletter "public.news" that claims to have interviewed anonymous US government sources.
Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
That is all based on the claim that they had illnesses with symptoms consistent with COVID. But those are also consistent with the flu and with the common cold and with other seasonal viruses which were also active at the time, since November is in the respiratory illness season there.
yes of course they all denied ever being sick in November 2019. China even denied that the wet market was the original source of infection. China also disputed any claims that they practiced "gain of function" research at all at WIV, even though that was uncovered by the recent evidence presented in Congress against Anthony Fauci, who funded the whole thing in the first place.
Conspicuous absence of evidence in a place where there'd almost have to be evidence one way or another, may be evidence of a cover-up, yes.
Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.
Normally, I would count that as a strong signal that the origin was said lab. But with the current government, I don't think such a report in isolation should be considered as strong evidence. The US is not trustworthy at the moment.
It wasn't the current government. The statement was published at the tail end of the first Trump administration but the Biden administration continued to say they had serious questions about the lab leak hypothesis.
> “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”
That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.
Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.
For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
What are the two extraordinarily improbable events here? There's a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic getting into humans, and then... what's the other one?
Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...
...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
The Wuhan institute was the world leader in bat coronavirus research. They were not studying random animals from their local wet market, they were studying bats with coronavirus which they shipped in from the only location in the world where they could be found, thousands of miles away. Then, coincidentally, coronavirus broke out in Wuhan.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
It is not in Beijng's interest to know. The truth that is convenient for the Chinese government is that it had nothing to do with Chinese government research. Therefore that is the truth and nobody is going to go digging much deeper, or if they do it's going to be buried in some report that never gets published.
In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
The NSF was funding Gain-of-function research in Wuhan at a lab overseen and managed by an international scientific consortium. All these institutions have incentives to modify the narrative. At the start of the outbreak I would have bet anyone ten bucks that we'd never get to the bottom of it.
this is one of the leaps of faith I allude to in my top level comment - just because a bad actor is involved and would be incentivized to cover something up, doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is correct. Those two ideas are not connected.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
They're not seen as equal in China. A virus leaking from a lab would be seen as a failure of the bureaucracy, and people would blame the authorities. If it came from a wet market, people would be more likely to blame the buyers and sellers, while the authorities would take much less of the blame.
Furthermore, within China, alternative conspiracy theories claiming that the virus came from the US were allowed to circulate. A significant number of people in China actually believe that theory.
Internet comments are beyond lousy with people of a a certain ideological bent that makes them love institutionalized science while also paternalistically racist.
Given the choice between blaming "the system" and all the ideologically unimaginable questions that would come with that and blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough, well that's not really a choice.
Imagine trying to tell some mid tier guy in the Taliban about the pros of educated women. It's just gonna bounce right off. That it could ever be worth it is just incomprehensibly foreign to him.
The lab leak theory bounced right off of a lot of people here for all the same reasons.
> blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough
that's also a bit racist. they just eat raccoon dogs, which we don't. and they bring live animals into the market, that people browse, which is the bigger problem.
and ask devoutly religious people what they think of americans eating pork and beef...
I agree it's clear they knew something was up and tried to control information getting out.
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
For about two years the vitriol people received for daring to suggest the virus might have leaked from a poorly secured lab near the origination site was unbelievable. I would like to believe everyone involved would take a long, hard look at themselves but I highly doubt they will. My favourite bit from the time was from [Jon Stewart on Colbert.](https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?si=qypQLgxKq2IbagfN) I've never seen Colbert so uncomfortable.
To a certain extent I can understand why no country wanted to point fingers at China because they didn't want to piss off their biggest trading partner. Especially by Germany, given how much they relied on China to buy their cars back then.
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
I think the desire to protect trading relations was a component, but there were plenty of politicians willing to call for proper investigation in China. My perception was that the larger suppression was cultural. I myself was called racist on many occasions because I thought the risk was quite high that it came from a lab. For some reason it was less racist to suggest the virus came from a web market.
I agree with your comment re trust. I'm not sure institutional trust (at least in healthcare) will be regained in our lifetimes. I love vaccines, and I had all of them prior to and during the outbreak. Since then I have become profoundly wary of taking any medication without extensive longitudinal research.
I think a lot of people associate the lab leak theory with racism because it was most loudly championed by racists who were 100% sure it was a Chinese lab leak and they were not shy about sharing that opinion, well before there was enough evidence to support either claim (lab or wet market).
It seems people who actually looked at the evidence and came to the lab leak conclusion independent of racism got caught up in a 'racist by association' event.
I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations, like since when was it wrong to question the authority demanding truth and facts.
But then again 2020 was the start of woke culture and everything and everyone has to be politically correct even though whatever you said ended up offending some group.
The vaccines work, however there will always be side effects to significant portion of people when it’s administered to billions of people. Although I find it dumb that young healthy people still get covid booster shots like you have the immunity already and your immune system now knows how to handle the virus
> I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations
Here's the setting, 1000s are dying in hospitals every day. People know very little about how to protect themselves. The first country that was really hit locked everything down hard to reduce transmission.
Regardless of how you feel, separation and isolation is sure fire to prevent grandma dies via drowning in her own mucus.
But preventing deaths is anti-freedom. We can't prevent the deaths, but we can find someone to blame.
So we blame China because our own public health facilities cannot keep up with the actual virus. It's a human right to infect as many people as possible. It's a human right to have a 7th grade reading level while also telling doctors to "do their research".
Vaccines and quarantine have been selected as a culture war target. It's all over facebook now. Minions are telling your mother only dumb people get vaccines.
Since you can't be mad at a force of nature, you create conspiracies that the dastardly Chinese have released a virus while simultaneously moving mountains to prevent the spread within China.
The smart thing would be to follow the moves of the supposed evil country that wanted to kill americans, by doing what they do to protect their own citizens. Not today commies, they're both at fault for creating a virus, and any attempt at not dying is communism.
It seems like you’re just creating a narrative in your mind to make yourself feel better for veiling the truth.
Accidents happens and results in disasters. China could have been transparent and accepted that it was an accident and they are doing the best they can to contain it. Also they could have shared their research on the virus strain they have been experimenting in the research facility with the world immediately so the vaccine creation would have been faster.
Of course people would have been mad, but that would have ultimately resulted in a much safer and strict Lab safety measures enforcement to prevent a disaster like that in the future and faster vaccination and less number of deaths.
One cannot hide and coverup the truth, ultimately it would come out. One perfect example is Chernobyl. Soviet Union tried their best to keep it secret because admitting the disaster would have made them look weaker, but ultimately the truth came out.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
It wasn’t the exact strain, the mutations were nothing like you’d expect them to make, and good lord people on HN need better news and science sources if this is still the level of discussion on the topic.
> You can find reputable sources for either theory.
I get so tired of hearing this rationalization. It's anti-science. Not all evidence is equal and the preponderance of evidence is heavily skewed to it being zoonotic.
almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
Quite the opposite. We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin. They were lying and knew they were lying, and the entirety of academia went along with it because they didn't want to take the blame for COVID or risk the funding that Fauci controlled.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
>We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin.
They said those things before publishing their paper.
From what I can see, they start off by saying that the lab leak seems likely, and then re-evaluate in light of new evidence (see page 65, page 67 "again, it doesn't rule out lab infection/release, however, there is now no longer any ‘mysteries’ to explain"). This is just science being done. You can see them discover new evidence and update their beliefs. You can read how they revise their paper over time.
You can also see that they criticize other researchers for publicly decrying the lab leak theory absent sufficient evidence (page 23).
Here is the statement from the paper that you claim is a lie:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
I think that statement is measured and supported by the available evidence. They state that they can't rule out a lab origin but that it does not seem likely. If you don't buy the conclusion, the evidence to support that conclusion is all accurately laid out in the paper. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
"Things like" encompasses similar sentiments and yes some of them expressed similar sentiments in private, even after publishing the paper.
I've read the logs. They didn't re-evaluate in light of new evidence and no science was being done. They steadily talked themselves into believing what they wanted to believe from the start, while ignoring all the facts that would point in the other direction.
But really - why do we care what virologists think, of all people? Of course they claimed it couldn't have been them, who wants to get the blame for COVID? Their "expertise" certainly can't be cited in their own defense. When the evidence is evaluated objectively - and there is so much of it - it becomes clear that the pandemic was man made.
TBH I've found this isn't controversial anywhere outside of HN. Most people seem to accept what happened. It's only here that people cling to the idea it was natural. Heck for most people "it emerged right next to the only lab in the world doing experiments on coronaviruses" is enough by itself.
>yes some of them expressed similar sentiments in private, even after publishing the paper.
Prove it.
>They steadily talked themselves into believing what they wanted to believe from the start, while ignoring all the facts that would point in the other direction.
They stated early on what reasons they had to believe it came from a lab and what evidence would disprove that, then got exactly the evidence that they previously said would disprove it. The unusual features of the virus are found in nature. The evidence that it was a lab leak is then reduced to "it was kind of near a lab", which is pretty wimpy.
>Of course they claimed it couldn't have been them, who wants to get the blame for COVID?
So why did the virologists in question called out their colleagues for unscientifically circling the wagons and, in their published work, explicitly decline to rule out the lab leak hypothesis?
You cannot point out any bad behavior in their publications or internal communications, so you resort to innuendo.
>it emerged right next to the only lab in the world doing experiments on coronaviruses
Lots of labs are doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. The "lion's share" is done in the United States. The Wuhan lab was unusually large, granted.
do you realize that the entirety of the "evidence" you have presented is just hearsay? Slack messages and a diary? Seriously?
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
No it's not "hearsay", you can download the logs and diaries and read them for yourself. They are verified documentation.
I only bothered citing evidence relevant to your claim:
> almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory
... which isn't true. Some of the people who pointed out early on that there was a coverup were molecular biologists (e.g. Alina Chan), virologists themselves admitted right up front it probably came from the lab despite their massive incentive to not conclude that, and it is obvious to anyone regardless of background that a novel coronavirus appearing literally right next to the only lab in the world doing GoF research on coronaviruses is not likely to be a coincidence.
The wet market was a distraction in the end caused by ascertainment bias. Most cases, once the data was fully collected, appeared along the length of a railway line with Wuhan Airport at one end and the WiV at the other.
But I have weary experience of this debate on Hacker News. Before anyone goes further with you, please confirm you do not yourself get grant money to do scientific research, nor have you in the past? Because way too many times over the years when this topic has come up the people most dismissive of the obvious facts about COVID have turned out to be epidemiologists, public health workers, virologists and so on - people with incentives to mislead the public about this topic and who have done so repeatedly. Fauci being a case in point, where there is abundant proof that he misled the public.
> Before anyone goes further with you, please confirm you do not yourself get grant money to do scientific research, nor have you in the past?
You can't see that this is perfectly in line with conspiratorial thinking? You think everyone who has disagreed with you are essentially "paid shills"?
I'm good. I can see this is not going to be productive.
I've had multiple experiences in the past where that turned out to be the case. The fact you won't deny it does say a lot, actually.
And for the last time, the existence of conspiracies in this case has been proven. We know guys like Fauci deliberately misled the public because he has admitted it in writing several times. And there were many other cases too.
> The fact you won't deny it does say a lot, actually.
Yea I know you think everyone is a paid shill. Very rational, very reasonable.
> And for the last time, the existence of conspiracies in this case has been proven.
nope. Conspiracy theorists were wrong about essentially every single thing during the pandemic (as they are with almost everything).
> We know guys like Fauci deliberately misled the public because he has admitted it in writing several times.
writing in a diary at a time when information was still very much coming in and nobody really knew what was the most likely source is not a conspiracy, but keep digging!
>"it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface. Arguing that hard scientific evidence is required for us to come to any conclusions is a de facto rejection of any scenario in which China, its provinces, or any individuals are culpable of anything. Ever. This is much closer to an ideological position than a logical or evidence-based position.
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
> I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface.
you aren't saying anything here. "well the evidence could have been destroyed because China doesn't want it exposed" is not an argument for or against a lab leak. In fact, you and most people in these threads arguing for lab leak theory aren't providing evidence at all - you are just doing the classic "well isn't this weird"
You are making the same argument they are: that China cannot ever, for any reason be responsible for doing anything bad. I'm sorry, but I don't find your ideological position tenable. Destroying evidence doesn't exonerate one of culpability.
Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
>In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services
I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
>The National Intelligence Council and four other IC
agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was
caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close
progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2
> Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
They cannot evaluate evidence if all evidence has been destroyed.
> I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
To point, the US intelligence report “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses.” Its purpose was to declassify information concerning potential WIV connections and describe what US intelligence knew about WIV activities. You cited a report you didn't read or didn't understand.
I should also point out that the US agencies couldn't agree. In 2023, FBI favoured a lab incident, Department of Energy favoured a lab incident, CIA favoured lab incident, and NIC + four other (name withheld) intelligence agencies favoured natural spillover.
> I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not sure if you just aren't engaging with what is being said or are not reading the full post - he only shared that link IN RESPONSE TO you appealing to intelligence services. Read again:
"I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. >>>BUT if we go by who has the better data<<<"
He is saying "well IF we ARE going by intelligence services because YOU made that argument, then what about this?"
He is implying that America is also an authoritarian, autocratic state. This was in response to my comment explaining why China will not comply with investigations. He is arguing that America cannot be trusted to provide accurate information, or comply with investigations. He argues this first, then attempts to argue that America is a more trustworthy source than Germany.
I'm just using your argument against you. Both are unreliable, China is authoritarian, America has been taken over by an authoritarian and science denying regime.
Because people who spewed all manner of vitriol on pretenses that now with hindsight should have been visible as shaky at the time would rather bicker trying to justify it than examine how they could've done that.
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".
This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.
there is zero evidence for zoonotic. Contact tracing in Wuhan skipped the stop at the zoo or contacting any zoonauts, which is a necessary link for a zoonotic hypothesis. Human-human contacts, even if they took place at the wet market, something that's not known, equally implicates the Wuhan lab which is a short distance away
there is evidence for a long history of discovery of a bat coronaviruses, and manipulation/splicing of those genes https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744920/ One of those scientists pieced together this information in the early months after the covid outbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug Don't tell me "I don't like Bret Weinstein"; your mission is to listen to what Yuri Deigin was saying way before any information had come out. The only way he could be that accurate that early is if he found the information he cites. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe that he had access to the conspiracy plans.
there is evidence dating to before the covid outbreak for proposed laboratory experiments putting the spike protein at the furin cleavage site in a Chinese lab which is exactly what appears to have happened.
>but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market
I literally had to check the date on this post.
Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I don't the formula: place + virus is racist. Racism is a serious issue and shouldn't be labelled on things that aren't making judgement using someone's race.
Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
People immediately started suggesting that the idea to close the border to Chinese travelers was racist. After it happened you even had the ever-politicized Lancet jump in claiming that such actions were "anchored in fear, misinformation, racism, and xenophobia." [1]
Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
That's a bit misleading: "The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain's health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected."
In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter (even within Spain!), even though it ultimately wasn't.
> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....
They were right, closing borders with China doesn't stop the virus from spreading, there's no scientific basis for that claim.
It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
> It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I think you are misremembering.
> The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
> The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
instead of like this:
Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
> Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
How on Earth is a conspiracy theory? It doesn't require any conspiracy for a lab working on virus gain-of-function research to accidentally leak a virus. This HN thread is literally about a disease leaking from a biolab!
It's a "conspiracy theory" because the Chinese and their funders like Fauci/NIH deny it, thus, it requires a conspiracy to cover up what really happened.
But it's more like conspiracy fact by now. We have written records of NIH funded scientists literally conspiring with each other, even debating how to throw journalists off the trail.
The Science community says no. And Statisically I say no as well. The strongest piece of evidence in my opinon is that for this virus to NOT have come from the lab is this.
A lab worker would need to have taken public transit for 7 miles through a place more densely populated than Manhattan infect no one arrive at the wet market infect 1 person than leave and go several miles home without infecting anyone. This basically seems impossible and if it did happen it would have radically changed the infection pattern and with how we know how covid works seems impossible. Its not bullet proof but it basically requires us abandoning everything we know about epidemology for it to have come from that lab.
Now there are issues we never found the animal of origin but its hard because China killed and bleached the whole market trying to hid evidence. It seems very consistent though with China trying to perserve reputation. There could be scheme to sell infected dead animals from the lab to the wet market but its conspiry theory seeking as there is no evidence supporting lab leak besides China bad. (And Trust me I think China is bad they are a horrible government who definitely hid covids existence and that behavior propably enhanced the likelyhood of it become the pandemic it was but there is just no hard evidence that lab leak as theory is true just scary hypothetic and stories. I hate that I sound like a China shill here)
We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
A near guarantee when it shows up in the city that hosts the only lab in the world doing advanced research and gain of function on coronavirus... but the reason the US hasn't made too big of a stink (and early on perpetuated the "wetvmarket" nonsense) is that the research was funded by the US and essentially outsourced to this lab with less sophisticated safety standards. So there was blame and humiliation all around.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
I don't have resources, to conduct studies, this was just an impression from reading Wikipedia pages and random websearch. Major news publishers in my language seem to convey the image, that intelligence agency generally agree on the lab hypothesis. Not just as side topic, but as the settled mainstream opinion. (The links were already shared here, that's how I read them in the first place.)
Yet the comments here seem to indicate, that that would be not the case from an US-centric perspective even if the publishers in my language claim it comes from the US intelligence agencies. And indeed that seems to be the tenor to a larger percentage in English publications.
> I have no idea what “ whether there are still in service or not.” means
Officials that are still in office seem to it's fringe to say it comes out of a lab, while does that are retired seem to claim, that it is obvious. Even if these are the identical person at different times.
That's an issue when you listen to health officials (political appointments) or intelligence services. I want to listen to actual virologists - the people who have worked or are working in the kind of labs it might have leaked from.
The reality is nobody can say confidently that it did, or that it didn't leak from a lab. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. But what virologists can say with some degree of confidence is that covid was probably NOT the product of genetic manipulation.
So if there's no evidence it was the subject of research, all we are left with is the coincidence of the wet market and the lab being a 40 minute drive away from each other.
> But what virologists can say with some degree of confidence is that covid was probably NOT the product of genetic manipulation.
Whether covid is the product of genetic manipulation and whether covid was released from a lab, due to an improper safety culture are completely different questions, and nobody has talked about the former question yet.
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
So the suggestion is that it occurred naturally in China and then military games happened near Wuhan which spread the virus? Or did someone from Wuhan with ties/service in the Chinese military contract the virus locally and then spread it throughout China via travel to these military games?
Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
Half the people downvote cause they know it’s from animals. Other people know it was a lab leak. Meanwhile I get downvoted by saying the evidence doesn’t prove anything or people would be shouting it from the hills note I have no dog in this race , just pointing out there’s uncertainty
I enjoyed it but it felt more sci-fi than the Nuclear War book. Mainly because it centers around a pathogen that is engineered for maximal transmission and it seemed quite unbelievable that so many things that came down to bad luck would all happen at the same time. The Nuclear War scenario seemed a lot more plausible because only a couple of bad things need to happen to set off the chain of events and they all seemed plausible.
I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
You're absolutely right! I was excited about this book, having heard Ms. Jacobsen discuss it on a podcast. She was a great guest, and her book is well researched, for sure. Unfortunately, I found the prose unbearable and gave up half-way through. To me, it reeks of LLM. If you can somehow set that aside, you might enjoy it.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence.
There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
You're claiming that everything is fine because Russians have procedures in place. Russians. You're appealing for calm based on the trust in Russian competence, after referencing Sverdlovsk incident. It's just too funny.
I am listening, please explain what else would show competence in the regard of biodefense, than that the people in charge of Russian biodefense can and will reliably identify and contain outbreaks of dangerous pathogens in time to prevent a national or even global outbreak reliably, since at least ’79?
If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.
There were multiple recorded incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil (Broken Arrow operations). Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.
But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.
Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.
There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.
It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission. Russia is no different from any other army in that regard.
But I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.
In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in charge if you do that.
Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.
[Maj Gen Carey] insists that we go to this place called La Cantina, I think it was... it was a Mexican place. And I was kind of surprised... I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go to in Russia but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there.
So we show up and it turns out that I guess he somehow found out that this place had a band that plays and
so he was really intent on singing with the band. He wanted to sing with the band. So we get in and it's extremely loud and the band is playing and he keeps asking the waitress
and the bartender if he can sing with the band and they want nothing to do with this. And so he kept having our translator go up with him and ask them well can I sing with the band.
[Maj Gen Carey] said, "go ask them if I could play the guitar." I said okay, I, I asked one of the band members and the guy said, no, I mean, you know, I can't do that.
He goes if you really want to play this guitar go ahead and talk to the restaurant owner or the administrator or the manager, the restaurant manager and I didn't feel like doing that because I didn't want to go find the manager so I, told the General that basically, uh, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars and then he said, well try again, so I asked him to get up and we both stood next to this rock band and watched them up close.
I was hoping to keep his interest in doing so and, uh, he, um, and then I said, listen if you really want to play the guitar maybe if you ask him, you know, um, maybe they'd listen to you more than would to me. And I'm not sure if he asked him or not because I, I, you know, I, I sat back down at the table, but he stood there for a while in front of this band and then he came back to the table a little later also, he came back later and sat down also,
and said well, no they won't let me play.
There's no need to bring US nuclear forces into this discussion, we're talking about Russian authorities and their competence here.
Sure, it's possible that this one specific force is more professional than the rest, but the bar is low. Soviet Union is the state that gave us Chernobyl after all. For more recent evidence, do check out the recent Russian track record with space technologies - the 2018 ISS air leak incident is particularly telling. Or, you know, the whole war thing that's been going on.
Let me be clear, I 1000% agree that large parts of the Russian government and military are blatantly incompetent. We are on the same side of history, I make fun of the three-day special operation often, and I have nothing but respect for the fight the Ukrainian people put up against a superpower as the aggressor.
Unfortunately, that competence thing counts for everyone else as well. So if you talk about Russian incompetence, we also need to make sure that people understand that this is by design and applied to every military force in existence, and put it into proper context.
This is not about bashing militaries or being American or Russian or European or Chinese, it’s a good example to showcase how the world really works.
If any army becomes extremely competent in executing the best possible outcomes for the people of their country, what keeps them from taking over and getting rid of the layer of decision-making that is causing the most problems?
So the people making their livelyhood from mostly talking about problems and solving them for domestic intesterest groups that don’t necessarily have the best interest of the average citizen in mind make sure they can not be overthrown by their military.
That’s why you see Hegseth dumbing down the force at record speed and Russia is sending the kids of farmers into war and not those of the oligarchs or duma politicians. No matter the color of the pin they wear or what language they speak, it’s all the same filth.
Anyway, a competent military full of competent specialists taking over is what we call military dictatorship, and we tried it often enough collectively that we can confidently say, sometimes the way to get somewhere is just as important as getting there, so democracy and convincing a majority of citizens is better than simply suppressing them.
Because it allows us to think and collectively learn, whereas military decision-making is always a bit backwards and pushes for results at neck-breaking speed.
You cannot apply military optimisation to a healthy civil society. It’s incompatible. Military is a necessary evil, it’s not how the main branch of civil society should work.
If the leaders of the mightiest nations on the planet were competent, we would all live in peace and happily ever after, but conflict is in human nature and incompetence fuels conflict and puts a lot of money into the pockets of everyone who profits from conflict and putting the most incompetent people into the most powerful positions.
Glad we can agree that Russia sucks and hopefully on that almost none of the people in charge of our fate are competent in what they do and we are always an inch away from catastrophic global events.
And that’s why I am now baking some cinnamon buns. Good talk.
So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).
I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.
Polymer coated glass is commonplace in chemistry labs for large containers of hazardous reagents held in storage. There's no chemical leaching concern because it's on the outside.
If anything, disposable plastic test tubes are the norm in microbiology labs at this point. No need to autoclave because they come sterile and you throw them away after a single use.
Plenty of plastic that's designed for it goes through the autoclave. For example micropipette tips. Nearly all of it is disposable single use so it only has to withstand a single cycle.
Disposing of and throwing away are two different things. Throwing away is a subclass of 'disposing of' and there are many other such subclasses including safe destruction, for instance by incineration.
I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
>The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
The article links to a telegram post [1] as source, which links to another telegram post [2], which now has an update:
>It is not known exactly how Darya Shipilova contracted the plague. Currently, the theory involving a broken test tube is the leading one, but there is no official confirmation or independent verification of this information.
That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.
This is a human thing, of course, but in different cultures the emphasis on following the rules and taking safety measures is different. In Russia, there isn't one.
Not sure what you mean by "stints" but I grew up there and experienced a lot of this myself. It has nothing to do with Kremlin, btw, Kremlin is not Russia. Kremlin rules Russia, but these are two completely different worlds. I know nothing about the former, but quite a bunch about the latter.
According to aquaintances in a few different industries where some of their competition is Russian: They basically work for vodka, then their equipment breaks down, they can't fix it and the customer has to call a western company. They apparently have no consistent maintenance or service protocol whatsoever, and in some rather safety critical areas.
According to my third cousin twice removed who once spelled the word "industry" (mostly correctly) - Americans basically work for McDonalds burgers. That's why they had to outsource high-precision manufacturing to Taiwan; they tried to make GPUs and phone chipsets in the US, but the 'muricans just kept getting their greasy fingers all over everything.
You are losing the topic. We aren't talking about manufacturing capability - which Russia still has a lot - but about safety culture. US and Russia are almost polar opposites here. While there are countries more safetyist than the US, not a lot of them. In current US culture, something "unsafe" just can't be done, and there are a myriad regulations which ensure everything is as "safe" as possible in a thousands of meanings of it. Of course, there are exceptions, there are crazy people everywhere, but the dominant culture is very safety-oriented. In Russia, this culture just does not exist. It doesn't mean there are no rules and regulations - but the cultural space they occupy are completely different. Sometimes it could be a huge advantage - you can move much faster if you don't have to pass 27 inspections each time you retighten a bolt - sometimes it could have very high costs.
Irregardless of the claim of correlation, between Russia and a lack of safety culture, it is currently a country in a war economy with populace shortages.
Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?
This is the exact reason that the Lab Leak vs Natural Origin question around COVID-19 matters. If it was a Lab Leak, then we should probably be scaling these labs down and restricting what they can research. But if COVID really did come from a wet market, then the risk is probably worth it.
One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
> One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
Just go find a list of vaccines? I followed a tracked of vaccines which were under development during the pandemic, that tracker appears to be down, but even Wikipedia claims at least 50 got far enough to gain approval in at least one country.
There is far more knowhow and supply chain that goes into keeping labs working than just documentation. Also, research requires labs, and so it is kind of already there sort of thing.
Yes, this is why doctors are only required to read textbooks and pass a written exam before practicing. Only mastery of the documentation is necessary. /s
For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.
It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.
Can we really? Can we really have a discussion if suggesting that COVID-19 may have come from a lab leak at a top tier virology lab doing cutting edge GoF research gets one labeled a racist?
First of all I said we didn’t have to resolve whether or not COVID-19 came from a lab in order to have a discussion of whether or not we should have bioweapons and other viral research labs.
Haha, I get where you're coming from but I still disagree. It's a question of the baseline risk, if COVID occurred naturally then there's a much higher chance of similar pandemics happening again and risky research like GoF makes sense. But if it was a lab leak, then it's harder to justify. There are other parts to if of course, if you think that covert bioweapon research is common then it probably doesn't matter.
No one wants to give up their grant money. That was a big part of the letters floating around during covid asking/begging to keep things quiet IIRC. No one wanted their money pulled.
I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
bingo. my mom logs into ChatGPT and uses it for basic stuff.
nothing like a dev getting whole APIs built, but she understands what the tool is and how it may impact office workers, even if on a superficial, sci-fi sort of way.
i don't think she could tell you anything about RNA vaccines or mitosis
Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers
I wonder if people downvoting consider your question to be a thoughtcrime or something. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Research happens because somebody is interested and writes a grant request that is accepted. Governments and institutions where the research happens have rules as well. It’s possible that the researchers, the folks reviewing the grants, and the people making the rules haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis that adequately covers the tail risks. For some kinds of research, the answer can be: no, we shouldn’t do this. It’s reasonable to publicly discuss these concerns.
Plague exists naturally. It's not some kind of a movie-land bioweapon McGuffin. The US has half a dozen cases of plague each year.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
Bubonic plague is not a good bioweapon. It doesn't form spores and requires fleas to spread. It can spread through aerosolized droplets, but that's really no better than a regular chemical weapon.
It's great for terrorist attacks, but not really a good weapon.
The Soviets developed antibiotic resistant strains of the plague meant to be dispersed over cities as aerosolized droplets. Inhaling these droplets causes pneumonic plague (coincidentally the type of infection this lab worker supposedly had which seems odd) and pneumonic plague can be spread human to human via coughing once the infection has been allowed to incubate for a few days. It can also be passed to animals from humans which could result in another vector for infection via handling, butchering or eating infected animals resulting in either primary bubonic plague or pharyngeal plague. Untreated pneumonic plague is almost always fatal so it goes without saying that antibiotic resistant plague is effectively 100% fatal in all contracted cases.
It would be more effective than chemical weapons in that it is more persistent, has delayed action and can be spread person to person or through animal vectors. This means it would be possible to deploy it more discretely and that it requires greater effort to contain. You're right that it is a better weapon for a terrorist attack or asymmetric warfare. It would still make a good weapon for creating an undue amount of stress on a region's medical capacity, if enough people were infected then a significant amount of antibiotics would initially be used attempting to treat them and a lot of resources would go to containing the spread, quarantining the infected or potential exposures and providing supportive care to a lot of people that would inevitably die very miserable deaths.
Too bad you're not condemning the live animal / wet market trade because from that we've had SARS, H5N1, H7N9 and Covid19, so are you fairly confident the wet markets are doing a public good or just condemning research labs for some reason?
Do you think bird flu came from a lab?
Chinese authorities considered to crack down on these markets before Covid 19 but didn't...because the markets are a major source of income for the peasant class in China so it's politically dangerous to do it because it would put millions out of their businesses.
This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
Of course, Russias pure animals have no stinky diseases, and we can trust their officials every word they say. Also, Russia doesn’t have any gays, because that is a “western disease”.
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
The Irkutsk governor, Igor Kobzev, seems to actually have experience in emergency management, and has served for many years in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. This makes the serious response a little bit less surprising (actually doing something instead of just covering it up is the thing that made me actually worried about this situation).
Yersina Pestis is endemic to the southwest areas of the United States, and causes an average of seven cases of plague per year.
'The “young adult male” died eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had hantavirus disease or bacterial pneumonia. Post-mortem testing confirmed Y pestis presence in his blood and lung tissue. It's Arizona’s first pneumonic plague death since 2007.'
"Plague was first introduced into the United States in 1900, from rat–infested steamships that had sailed from affected areas. Epidemics occurred in port cities. The last urban plague epidemic in the United States occurred in Los Angeles from 1924 through 1925."
Weaponize? Why? Bubonic plague has never gone away. Russia did a lot to control its spread so that human infections are very rare. There are mandatory vaccinations for cattle, for example.
How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.
The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
There is an interesting (and frankly terrifying) book called biohazard by the former head of the soviet covert bioweapons program during the cold war and it seemed it was not that uncommon to have random screw ups at even high level labs resulting in the deaths of sometimes a lot of unfortunate people. Of course there was also a culture of cover up and not admitting mistakes as well for all sorts of reasons including the fact that they aren't supposed to be working on bioweapons in the first place as well as the usual punishments for screwing something up.
Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
I've read this story before, in Russian, and, honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me.
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
On the other hand "Baikal People" post from today is more worrying, as it says they quarantined 4 hospitals for 3 weeks: https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651
> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction
I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.
Sounds implausible, because even if you can rationalize, "I probably didn't get contaminated" after breaking the test tube and being worried about retaliations, once you start developing symptoms, why would you go to a normal hospital and not tell them that you suspect plague, almost surely guaranting your own death?
"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.
>Irkutsk region Governor Igor Kobzev urged the public to remain calm after meeting with Rospotrebnadzor chief Anna Popova to coordinate emergency containment measures.
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
SS were from the ones who were spreading nationalistic hatred dehumanizing the "other" (not only jews, but slavic people as well, though the west does not talk about it very often for "some reason").
Now who would be that today, I wonder..
And why do you find it strange that people, who are subject to a tsunami of slander, and dehumanized by you (because this is what it is), try to counter that?
That's russia of course, you are spewing lies about Ukrainians, keep harassing other Slavic countries and so on. You'd like to very much have imperialistic politics like US, but fortunately you lack strength to enforce your will. And that's great - history shows us that being conquered by russia results only in poverty.
Than russians? For sure, you are from some weird alternative universe with extremely gullible and sheepish population. In our universe for example we'd never believe bullshit such as CIA-funded genetic labs in Ukraine as a casus belli.
I am sure not America and not your closest "ally" develop biological weapons. It is all stories, invented by the Novichok guys which plan yo poison every Russian dissident just to provoke you, after all "this is how Putin thinks".
Remember, CIA is the good guys. I mean, if Holywood says so..
You are just so incredibly.. and here I better stop
As the pro-COVID-measures-crowd largely overlaps with the Putler-crowd it’s going to be interesting to see their agenda re-alignment.
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
> I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
It's "sowed" from the concept of "sowing seeds" not from sewing textiles.
From Google: `Combined Metaphor: Just as a farmer scatters seeds into soil expecting a harvest, to "sow division" means to plant small acts, words, or policies of conflict that grow into a larger harvest of hostility and separation between people.`
> When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime
oh well then I guess if your personal contacts were 100% sure then case closed
Are you speculating? Or what are you basing this off of? Are you saying this is the next COVID and the government will use it to crack down on protests?
I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
> The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
> there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist. Christians use similar arguments to try and disprove evolution.
> thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
so you think a single person in the lab was infected (with no evidence), and then right as they were contagious, went straight to the wet market and on the way, infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it? this is the case you are making?
> There were early cases outside of the wet market.
no there aren't
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454?referrer...
> Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
that's because your way of thinking is conspiratorial and so you assume malintent with very little evidence
> just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist.
yes and no. in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid. its not definitive, but it is strongly dispositive.
> no there aren't
the article you linked is contradicting you, but regardless the claim isnt falsifiable:
"If Huanan Market was the source, why were “only” one- to two-thirds of early cases linked [...] why would one expect all cases [...] to be confined to one market?"
the article's thesis is that there are multiple cases not linked to Huanan market, but thats expected because of asymptomatic transmission. That argument could be used in favor of either side, so its not particularly meaningful.
> infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it
as I just mentioned, the article you linked makes this very claim. you cant have it both ways.
> in every other zoonosis, we have lineages and source animals and collateral infections. we have none of that for covid
I'm ignorant but thought that the evidentiary record for ebola was also really thin? Where we have lineages and source animals, sometimes that has taken many years, I think?
I mean you need to show that trail Covid was very infectious even before it mutated more. It's been estimated to have a R-naught above 2. It seems incredulus that their is a hypotehtical lab worker who is infected who takes the train 7 miles to the wet market (distance from lab) infects no one, but than infects 1 person at the wet market. Than goes home on the train, infects no one afterwards after proving they have virulent infection. It seems to go against how virus work. Because they need to not only infect anyone after the ride home but also no infect anyone ever again execpt at the wet market. You need to show evidence of or you are just engaging in conspricy thinking
Also we don't have the Zoonosis of the plauge, or the spanish bird flu but we are very confident they came from animals because we can tell that. So that claim we always now is just dumb we are mising many origin animals for many diseases because can back generate dieasese lineages from the DNA of the disease sometimes we can't and I am sure there are some back traces that just go to the wrong animal.
China didn't help with the fact they killed and bleached every animal at that wet market but that is documented to have happened but that is not proof of lab leak.
-- There's so much heated speculation in this thread as to make all arguments worthless. What isn't speculation however, is that the international treaties against bio-weapons are a joke that can result in a global tragedy at any moment.
Bio-weapons are untraceable, one side can seed an infection in a way to frame another player, and all that could be done about it, would be heated but fruitless speculations. There's no point in arguing about "who's done it", actually that line of argument is a huge distraction causing a lot more harm than good.
Learn and argue about the dysfunctional internal and international bio-regulations, they are the reason for the uncertainty and lack of accountability which enable and invite truly global and truly disastrous villainy.
Yeah, it would have killed a friend or relative of the lab worker, or someone living in the same building as the lab worker, and then you would have your smoking gun of a lab leak.
Going from infecting a lab worker to a high-precision spillover in a wet market, without leaving a trace anywhere else, is just not how a viral infection is likely to work.
SARS-CoV-2 has relatively low IFR, especially among younger people, and a mild case is easily dismissed as a flu or cold. Transmission is also heterogeneous, with most patients infecting no one while a few infect huge clusters; R = 2 absolutely does not mean one patient infects two, who infect four, who infect eight, etc.
> An important feature in this distribution, consistent with earlier findings (4), is that the majority (76%) of infected cases shows no evidence of onward transmission amongst any of their contacts.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7523148/
So there's no reason to expect that the first cluster that generates enough sickness and death to attract official attention will occur near the point of introduction. If we look at North America, then it in fact did not--the introduction must have been at an airport or seaport, but the first large clusters were in nursing homes, church choir practices, etc. This is different from SARS-1 or MERS, which were deadly enough to make that cryptic spread much less likely.
I think perhaps there is a correlation with population density as well. Wuhan is fairly dense, and the wet market that is subject to speculation is located in the most densely populated district of wuhan.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
The first corona identified. The Wuhan workers got sick around a month before.
They also didn’t find any animal corona samples at the market. Also around 50% of people of the initial cluster had no connection to the market.
Also the hospital where the lab workers were treated was on the corner of this market.
Now, we just need a few sources for these claims.
There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
Update: apparently the US intelligence report was eventually declassified and published in 2023: https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Rep...
Quoting the report:
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
That article was written by the same journalist who co-wrote the aluminum tubes story for the NYT that was part of the justification for the Iraq War.
Iraq war, Gulf of Tonkin, Spanish American war, and whatever the hell you call the cluster fuck with Iran.
There are a few with dubious origins.
China denies the claim that these lab workers were sick at all. Even if they're lying, there is no proof they fell sick with Covid-19 and there is strong evidence they did not. All workers at the lab were later tested for Sars-CoV-2 antibodies and came up negative. Unless that's also a lie.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/24/china-rejects-...
The bioengineering origin is, according to the overwhelming consensus of virologists, not plausible scientifically. It also requires a large and airtight conspiracy involving a number of respected scientists. Conspiracy theories are possible, but never parsimonious.
If we're going in for conspiracies, you should consider that the US intelligence community has a proven track record of lying for political gain. The Iraq War was started by a conspiracy.
Scientists have narrowed it down to the area in the market where the corona virus was first detected, what are you on about?
SARS-CoV-2–positive environmental samples were spatially clustered around vendors selling live mammals.
Also don't forget other pandemics have some from wet markets too. Bird flu and SARS. Do you think they were also lab leaks?
Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.
So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
My understanding is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only 2 BSL-4 labs in china in 2019, and the only one focused on emergent viruses. This is out of 684 major Chinese cities.
The good thing about free will is that one can just believe that something is true, regardless of how much people on the web hit oneself over the head for it.
Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
> But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
What do you know?
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-a...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.chann...
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
Another poster above has quoted that US intelligence report that you mention, and it concluded that there is no evidence that any earlier illness was related to COVID.
« Their source was a U.S. intelligence report. » — In other words, blowing smoke around some important government lies.
« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.
Even when there’s not a direct connection, it’s usually a good sign to take a look at what’s going on. In this case, even if COVID was a random isolated mutation in an unrelated marketplace nearby, it shone a spotlight on a place doing gain of function research on novel coronaviruses where if one did escape lab confinement, we were woefully unprepared to deal with the full consequences of that outbreak (eg: COVID). Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, we should be taking exactly the same precautions as if it were.
> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
Nobody expected natural zoonotic spillover near Wuhan, and Dr. Shi's lab was not situated with that in mind. In her own words:
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...
The virus doesn't seem to have been engineered from any previously known sarbecovirus, but the WIV had the largest collection of novel sarbecoviruses collected from nature in the world, and had proposed in DEFUSE to engineer them in collaboration with Dr. Baric at UNC. DARPA rejected that proposal, in part for safety reasons, but the WIV was technically capable of doing the work alone.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
> Dr. Shi's lab was not situated with that in mind
Never said that, labs are close to places with high viral reservoirs because it is easier to get animal samples to study, obviously, not to guard against outbreaks. Neither one "expects" such an outbreak, obviously. The fact that it is a tail event does not mean it is arbitrary, though, ie that it can just happen anywhere with equal chance.
The other arguments have been answered 1 million times and they are not worth even discussing about anymore. They only exist as justification for somebody really wanting certain conspiracy theories to be true.
> Never said that, labs are close to places with high viral reservoirs because it is easier to get animal samples to study, obviously,
You are continuing to imply that Dr. Shi's lab was "close to places with high viral reservoirs", but nobody--lab leak advocate, zoonosis advocate, or otherwise--thinks that's true. She collected "animal samples to study" from Yunnan and surrounding areas, >1000 km from Wuhan. For example, RaTG13 came from Tongguan (thus TG), in Mojiang County. The location of her lab did not make those samples "easier to get".
There are probably lots of other labs that are deliberately placed near natural reservoirs of the organisms that they study, but Dr. Shi's was not. If anything, she thought those sarbecoviruses were less abundant near Wuhan than in some random location in China, not more.
She could be wrong, but no evidence has yet emerged that she was. Even among advocates for theories of natural zoonosis, the pathway is usually proposed to be smuggling of an unknown intermediate host rather than any natural reservoir in Wuhan, thus the attention on the wet market (since a similar pathway probably did explain SARS-1).
As to the rest, what evidence do you think could distinguish one natural novel virus from a laboratory chimera of two novel viruses? I think it would be more helpful to explain the basis for your belief than to smear mine as a "conspiracy theory".
1) Historical levels of criminality in US administration 2) extraordinary break through in Super Intelligence
> "when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
You're implying that the virus got out of the lab without saying it.
Where you tricked yourself is you have a line so catchy it stops scrutiny.
Maybe the two are connected, but what's the cause and what's the effect? Maybe they built the lab in Wuhan because there's a lot of undiscovered Corona viruses in Wuhan...?
Were they first patients?
Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.
[0] https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19
According to partisan online newsletter "public.news" that claims to have interviewed anonymous US government sources.
Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
That is all based on the claim that they had illnesses with symptoms consistent with COVID. But those are also consistent with the flu and with the common cold and with other seasonal viruses which were also active at the time, since November is in the respiratory illness season there.
Not according to them and this little-known publication called "Science." I've never heard of it, but seems legit:
https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chin...
yes of course they all denied ever being sick in November 2019. China even denied that the wet market was the original source of infection. China also disputed any claims that they practiced "gain of function" research at all at WIV, even though that was uncovered by the recent evidence presented in Congress against Anthony Fauci, who funded the whole thing in the first place.
Yes, of course, the absence of evidence is always evidence of a cover up.
Conspicuous absence of evidence in a place where there'd almost have to be evidence one way or another, may be evidence of a cover-up, yes.
Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.
Normally, I would count that as a strong signal that the origin was said lab. But with the current government, I don't think such a report in isolation should be considered as strong evidence. The US is not trustworthy at the moment.
It wasn't the current government. The statement was published at the tail end of the first Trump administration but the Biden administration continued to say they had serious questions about the lab leak hypothesis.
Another poster above has quoted the declassified US intelligence report and the conclusion was that any connection with the lab was very unlikely.
Beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean impossible,any more than on the balance of probabilities means beyond reasonable doubt.
> “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”
That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.
Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.
I think we've overcorrected.
For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
What are the two extraordinarily improbable events here? There's a novel virus capable of causing a pandemic getting into humans, and then... what's the other one?
Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...
...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
> But it is awfully strange
Lazy, anti-science, conspiratorial way of going about it
> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
I might not have been the best student, but I wouldn't call studying "extraordinarily improbable".
So it's not improbable research lab that was testing off runs from a wet market found the stuff they were searching for?
The Wuhan institute was the world leader in bat coronavirus research. They were not studying random animals from their local wet market, they were studying bats with coronavirus which they shipped in from the only location in the world where they could be found, thousands of miles away. Then, coincidentally, coronavirus broke out in Wuhan.
> Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
It is not in Beijng's interest to know. The truth that is convenient for the Chinese government is that it had nothing to do with Chinese government research. Therefore that is the truth and nobody is going to go digging much deeper, or if they do it's going to be buried in some report that never gets published.
The local government could still fear retaliation for failure to regulate public health.
In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
The NSF was funding Gain-of-function research in Wuhan at a lab overseen and managed by an international scientific consortium. All these institutions have incentives to modify the narrative. At the start of the outbreak I would have bet anyone ten bucks that we'd never get to the bottom of it.
Not only that but we have direct evidence from Fauci’s diary that his main concern was “modifying the narrative”
this is one of the leaps of faith I allude to in my top level comment - just because a bad actor is involved and would be incentivized to cover something up, doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is correct. Those two ideas are not connected.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
But isn't the wet market hypothesis equally bad looking for China?
No?
To me it is a difference, if a naturally mutated virus caused a global epidemic, than a lab made one.
They're not seen as equal in China. A virus leaking from a lab would be seen as a failure of the bureaucracy, and people would blame the authorities. If it came from a wet market, people would be more likely to blame the buyers and sellers, while the authorities would take much less of the blame.
Furthermore, within China, alternative conspiracy theories claiming that the virus came from the US were allowed to circulate. A significant number of people in China actually believe that theory.
Agree. Not sure about Internet commenters' fascination with pinpointing lab vs wet market. Both are bad looks for China.
Internet comments are beyond lousy with people of a a certain ideological bent that makes them love institutionalized science while also paternalistically racist.
Given the choice between blaming "the system" and all the ideologically unimaginable questions that would come with that and blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough, well that's not really a choice.
Imagine trying to tell some mid tier guy in the Taliban about the pros of educated women. It's just gonna bounce right off. That it could ever be worth it is just incomprehensibly foreign to him.
The lab leak theory bounced right off of a lot of people here for all the same reasons.
> paternalistically racist.
> blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough
that's also a bit racist. they just eat raccoon dogs, which we don't. and they bring live animals into the market, that people browse, which is the bigger problem.
and ask devoutly religious people what they think of americans eating pork and beef...
Also the head of the US CDC at the time saying it was a lab leak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s
Of course, it should point to China. They're the ones who didn't shut down the wet markets after SARS-CoV-1.
Source? Your account is no better hearsay.
It’s clear that they knew about the extent of the issue weeks earlier and tried to contain it, rather than letting the world know
I agree it's clear they knew something was up and tried to control information getting out.
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
ur username?
The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...)
For about two years the vitriol people received for daring to suggest the virus might have leaked from a poorly secured lab near the origination site was unbelievable. I would like to believe everyone involved would take a long, hard look at themselves but I highly doubt they will. My favourite bit from the time was from [Jon Stewart on Colbert.](https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?si=qypQLgxKq2IbagfN) I've never seen Colbert so uncomfortable.
To a certain extent I can understand why no country wanted to point fingers at China because they didn't want to piss off their biggest trading partner. Especially by Germany, given how much they relied on China to buy their cars back then.
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
I think the desire to protect trading relations was a component, but there were plenty of politicians willing to call for proper investigation in China. My perception was that the larger suppression was cultural. I myself was called racist on many occasions because I thought the risk was quite high that it came from a lab. For some reason it was less racist to suggest the virus came from a web market.
I agree with your comment re trust. I'm not sure institutional trust (at least in healthcare) will be regained in our lifetimes. I love vaccines, and I had all of them prior to and during the outbreak. Since then I have become profoundly wary of taking any medication without extensive longitudinal research.
I think a lot of people associate the lab leak theory with racism because it was most loudly championed by racists who were 100% sure it was a Chinese lab leak and they were not shy about sharing that opinion, well before there was enough evidence to support either claim (lab or wet market).
It seems people who actually looked at the evidence and came to the lab leak conclusion independent of racism got caught up in a 'racist by association' event.
This might be correct. Hitler was a vegetarian, therefore vegetarians are fascists. What a sad indictment of modern discourse.
I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations, like since when was it wrong to question the authority demanding truth and facts.
But then again 2020 was the start of woke culture and everything and everyone has to be politically correct even though whatever you said ended up offending some group.
The vaccines work, however there will always be side effects to significant portion of people when it’s administered to billions of people. Although I find it dumb that young healthy people still get covid booster shots like you have the immunity already and your immune system now knows how to handle the virus
> I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations
Here's the setting, 1000s are dying in hospitals every day. People know very little about how to protect themselves. The first country that was really hit locked everything down hard to reduce transmission.
Regardless of how you feel, separation and isolation is sure fire to prevent grandma dies via drowning in her own mucus.
But preventing deaths is anti-freedom. We can't prevent the deaths, but we can find someone to blame.
So we blame China because our own public health facilities cannot keep up with the actual virus. It's a human right to infect as many people as possible. It's a human right to have a 7th grade reading level while also telling doctors to "do their research".
Vaccines and quarantine have been selected as a culture war target. It's all over facebook now. Minions are telling your mother only dumb people get vaccines.
Since you can't be mad at a force of nature, you create conspiracies that the dastardly Chinese have released a virus while simultaneously moving mountains to prevent the spread within China.
The smart thing would be to follow the moves of the supposed evil country that wanted to kill americans, by doing what they do to protect their own citizens. Not today commies, they're both at fault for creating a virus, and any attempt at not dying is communism.
The Aristocrats.
It seems like you’re just creating a narrative in your mind to make yourself feel better for veiling the truth.
Accidents happens and results in disasters. China could have been transparent and accepted that it was an accident and they are doing the best they can to contain it. Also they could have shared their research on the virus strain they have been experimenting in the research facility with the world immediately so the vaccine creation would have been faster.
Of course people would have been mad, but that would have ultimately resulted in a much safer and strict Lab safety measures enforcement to prevent a disaster like that in the future and faster vaccination and less number of deaths.
One cannot hide and coverup the truth, ultimately it would come out. One perfect example is Chernobyl. Soviet Union tried their best to keep it secret because admitting the disaster would have made them look weaker, but ultimately the truth came out.
It’s not even rumors. The MERS/SARS gain of function research started in UNC, US, then paused due to safety concerns, then moved to Wuhan.
The entire thing is very well documented by Nature and Science, among others.
Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV was involved in the original UNC research prior to 2014 defunding.
In 2017 she had combined DNA of few different bat coronaviruses to “study their virulence”.
In 2019 she published a paper forecasting a new virus outbreak likely to originate in China.
You know the rest of the story.
I mean it’s definitely rumours if “the rest of the story” is “Covid then happened”
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
If you enjoy diving deep on the topic I highly recommend watching the entire Rootclaim Covid Lab Leak debate https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
I believe it was zoonosis, not a lab leak: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...
That was exactly the strain of Coronavirus that the lab was working with, and exactly the kinds of mutations you'd expect them to make.
But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
It wasn’t the exact strain, the mutations were nothing like you’d expect them to make, and good lord people on HN need better news and science sources if this is still the level of discussion on the topic.
There is still no conclusive explanation. You can find reputable sources for either theory.
>You can find reputable sources for either theory.
So why are people citing 2020 reports from German intelligence agencies?
The expert consensus is that it was natural. It's not close. You are free to reject that consensus but should be aware that you are doing so.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
> You can find reputable sources for either theory.
I get so tired of hearing this rationalization. It's anti-science. Not all evidence is equal and the preponderance of evidence is heavily skewed to it being zoonotic.
The english indie rock band that formed in liverpool in 2003 did covid-19?
Pangolins actually - they carried a strain of the virus that had the ability to infect human cells via ACE2 receptor.
The bat variant did not have that - wet market - close proximity - a fortuitous gene swap and hey presto.
almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
Quite the opposite. We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin. They were lying and knew they were lying, and the entirety of academia went along with it because they didn't want to take the blame for COVID or risk the funding that Fauci controlled.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
>We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin.
They said those things before publishing their paper.
You can read the messages here:
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Proximal_Origin...
From what I can see, they start off by saying that the lab leak seems likely, and then re-evaluate in light of new evidence (see page 65, page 67 "again, it doesn't rule out lab infection/release, however, there is now no longer any ‘mysteries’ to explain"). This is just science being done. You can see them discover new evidence and update their beliefs. You can read how they revise their paper over time.
You can also see that they criticize other researchers for publicly decrying the lab leak theory absent sufficient evidence (page 23).
Here is the statement from the paper that you claim is a lie:
"Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible."
I think that statement is measured and supported by the available evidence. They state that they can't rule out a lab origin but that it does not seem likely. If you don't buy the conclusion, the evidence to support that conclusion is all accurately laid out in the paper. You are free to draw your own conclusions.
"Things like" encompasses similar sentiments and yes some of them expressed similar sentiments in private, even after publishing the paper.
I've read the logs. They didn't re-evaluate in light of new evidence and no science was being done. They steadily talked themselves into believing what they wanted to believe from the start, while ignoring all the facts that would point in the other direction.
But really - why do we care what virologists think, of all people? Of course they claimed it couldn't have been them, who wants to get the blame for COVID? Their "expertise" certainly can't be cited in their own defense. When the evidence is evaluated objectively - and there is so much of it - it becomes clear that the pandemic was man made.
TBH I've found this isn't controversial anywhere outside of HN. Most people seem to accept what happened. It's only here that people cling to the idea it was natural. Heck for most people "it emerged right next to the only lab in the world doing experiments on coronaviruses" is enough by itself.
>yes some of them expressed similar sentiments in private, even after publishing the paper.
Prove it.
>They steadily talked themselves into believing what they wanted to believe from the start, while ignoring all the facts that would point in the other direction.
They stated early on what reasons they had to believe it came from a lab and what evidence would disprove that, then got exactly the evidence that they previously said would disprove it. The unusual features of the virus are found in nature. The evidence that it was a lab leak is then reduced to "it was kind of near a lab", which is pretty wimpy.
>Of course they claimed it couldn't have been them, who wants to get the blame for COVID?
So why did the virologists in question called out their colleagues for unscientifically circling the wagons and, in their published work, explicitly decline to rule out the lab leak hypothesis?
You cannot point out any bad behavior in their publications or internal communications, so you resort to innuendo.
>it emerged right next to the only lab in the world doing experiments on coronaviruses
Lots of labs are doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. The "lion's share" is done in the United States. The Wuhan lab was unusually large, granted.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02873-2
do you realize that the entirety of the "evidence" you have presented is just hearsay? Slack messages and a diary? Seriously?
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
the irony
No it's not "hearsay", you can download the logs and diaries and read them for yourself. They are verified documentation.
I only bothered citing evidence relevant to your claim:
> almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory
... which isn't true. Some of the people who pointed out early on that there was a coverup were molecular biologists (e.g. Alina Chan), virologists themselves admitted right up front it probably came from the lab despite their massive incentive to not conclude that, and it is obvious to anyone regardless of background that a novel coronavirus appearing literally right next to the only lab in the world doing GoF research on coronaviruses is not likely to be a coincidence.
The wet market was a distraction in the end caused by ascertainment bias. Most cases, once the data was fully collected, appeared along the length of a railway line with Wuhan Airport at one end and the WiV at the other.
But I have weary experience of this debate on Hacker News. Before anyone goes further with you, please confirm you do not yourself get grant money to do scientific research, nor have you in the past? Because way too many times over the years when this topic has come up the people most dismissive of the obvious facts about COVID have turned out to be epidemiologists, public health workers, virologists and so on - people with incentives to mislead the public about this topic and who have done so repeatedly. Fauci being a case in point, where there is abundant proof that he misled the public.
> Before anyone goes further with you, please confirm you do not yourself get grant money to do scientific research, nor have you in the past?
You can't see that this is perfectly in line with conspiratorial thinking? You think everyone who has disagreed with you are essentially "paid shills"?
I'm good. I can see this is not going to be productive.
I've had multiple experiences in the past where that turned out to be the case. The fact you won't deny it does say a lot, actually.
And for the last time, the existence of conspiracies in this case has been proven. We know guys like Fauci deliberately misled the public because he has admitted it in writing several times. And there were many other cases too.
> The fact you won't deny it does say a lot, actually.
Yea I know you think everyone is a paid shill. Very rational, very reasonable.
> And for the last time, the existence of conspiracies in this case has been proven.
nope. Conspiracy theorists were wrong about essentially every single thing during the pandemic (as they are with almost everything).
> We know guys like Fauci deliberately misled the public because he has admitted it in writing several times.
writing in a diary at a time when information was still very much coming in and nobody really knew what was the most likely source is not a conspiracy, but keep digging!
>"it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
This sentence alone is rather telling...
I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface. Arguing that hard scientific evidence is required for us to come to any conclusions is a de facto rejection of any scenario in which China, its provinces, or any individuals are culpable of anything. Ever. This is much closer to an ideological position than a logical or evidence-based position.
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
> I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface.
you aren't saying anything here. "well the evidence could have been destroyed because China doesn't want it exposed" is not an argument for or against a lab leak. In fact, you and most people in these threads arguing for lab leak theory aren't providing evidence at all - you are just doing the classic "well isn't this weird"
You are making the same argument they are: that China cannot ever, for any reason be responsible for doing anything bad. I'm sorry, but I don't find your ideological position tenable. Destroying evidence doesn't exonerate one of culpability.
> China cannot ever, for any reason be responsible for doing anything bad
Nope didn't say anything like that. All I said was that the motivations of China does not prove or disprove either idea about the origin.
>China is an authoritarian, autocratic state.
As opposed to current America?
Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
>In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services
I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Rep...
>The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2
> Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
They cannot evaluate evidence if all evidence has been destroyed.
> I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
To point, the US intelligence report “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses.” Its purpose was to declassify information concerning potential WIV connections and describe what US intelligence knew about WIV activities. You cited a report you didn't read or didn't understand.
I should also point out that the US agencies couldn't agree. In 2023, FBI favoured a lab incident, Department of Energy favoured a lab incident, CIA favoured lab incident, and NIC + four other (name withheld) intelligence agencies favoured natural spillover.
> I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not sure if you just aren't engaging with what is being said or are not reading the full post - he only shared that link IN RESPONSE TO you appealing to intelligence services. Read again:
"I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. >>>BUT if we go by who has the better data<<<"
He is saying "well IF we ARE going by intelligence services because YOU made that argument, then what about this?"
You missed his first two sentences:
> > China is an authoritarian, autocratic state.
> As opposed to current America?
He is implying that America is also an authoritarian, autocratic state. This was in response to my comment explaining why China will not comply with investigations. He is arguing that America cannot be trusted to provide accurate information, or comply with investigations. He argues this first, then attempts to argue that America is a more trustworthy source than Germany.
I'm just using your argument against you. Both are unreliable, China is authoritarian, America has been taken over by an authoritarian and science denying regime.
That's fine - both are unreliable. So we should lean more on the source I cited at the beginning: Germany's intelligence agency.
no, you should go off of the preponderance of evidence. Why would we choose a report from a single country?
Pretty much confirmed by western intelligence including the German BND
Source?
Man, you started an off-topic subthread which, at the moment, contains 100 out of the 165 total comments.
Because people who spewed all manner of vitriol on pretenses that now with hindsight should have been visible as shaky at the time would rather bicker trying to justify it than examine how they could've done that.
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".
https://archive.ph/WTsga
This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.
there is zero evidence for zoonotic. Contact tracing in Wuhan skipped the stop at the zoo or contacting any zoonauts, which is a necessary link for a zoonotic hypothesis. Human-human contacts, even if they took place at the wet market, something that's not known, equally implicates the Wuhan lab which is a short distance away
there is evidence for a long history of discovery of a bat coronaviruses, and manipulation/splicing of those genes https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744920/ One of those scientists pieced together this information in the early months after the covid outbreak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug Don't tell me "I don't like Bret Weinstein"; your mission is to listen to what Yuri Deigin was saying way before any information had come out. The only way he could be that accurate that early is if he found the information he cites. You'd have to be a real conspiracy theorist to believe that he had access to the conspiracy plans.
there is evidence dating to before the covid outbreak for proposed laboratory experiments putting the spike protein at the furin cleavage site in a Chinese lab which is exactly what appears to have happened.
>but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market
I literally had to check the date on this post.
Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
Wild times!
it turns out it's possible to believe something out of racist and xenophobic furor that also ends up being true
Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I don't the formula: place + virus is racist. Racism is a serious issue and shouldn't be labelled on things that aren't making judgement using someone's race.
Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
The Spanish Flu's first known case was in Kansas. French papers changed from calling it American Flu to Spanish Flu to avoid angering an ally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#cite_note-fiction-...).
Maybe place + virus isn't inherently racist, but it's been politically charged & exploited; best to put the combination down.
People immediately started suggesting that the idea to close the border to Chinese travelers was racist. After it happened you even had the ever-politicized Lancet jump in claiming that such actions were "anchored in fear, misinformation, racism, and xenophobia." [1]
Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7133591/
> Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
> The earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States
Oh.
That's a bit misleading: "The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain's health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected."
In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter (even within Spain!), even though it ultimately wasn't.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid...
Okay, what about all the other examples?
> Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu,
Major outbreaks _were_ named like that, but as the other reply pointed out, the "Spanish Flu" did not actually originate in Spain at all.
It is for reasons like that, that WHO best practices now specifically say to not name diseases this way: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....
They were right, closing borders with China doesn't stop the virus from spreading, there's no scientific basis for that claim.
It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
> It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I think you are misremembering.
> The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
https://theconversation.com/covid-19-why-lab-leak-theory-is-... (2021)
> New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli deleted a tweet Wednesday night that said the COVID-19 "lab leak theory" had "racist roots."
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-covid-reporter-... (2021)
> The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/politics/lab-leak-theor... (2022)
Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
instead of like this:
Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
> Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
> Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”
No. I remember it being called a conspiracy theory. And it still is.
How on Earth is a conspiracy theory? It doesn't require any conspiracy for a lab working on virus gain-of-function research to accidentally leak a virus. This HN thread is literally about a disease leaking from a biolab!
It's a "conspiracy theory" because the Chinese and their funders like Fauci/NIH deny it, thus, it requires a conspiracy to cover up what really happened.
But it's more like conspiracy fact by now. We have written records of NIH funded scientists literally conspiring with each other, even debating how to throw journalists off the trail.
Yeah, it is indeed a conspiracy theory, that is also shared by the CIA, FBI, BND and public health officials.
We should not be eating animals period
They are so tasty though
Bill Gurley has a presentation about it, asking questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765794
There was endless discussion about how unlikely or reasonable it was with furin cleavage sites and whatnot. I wouldn't trust authoritative summaries.
Last I saw, plausible, unconfirmed, nobody is willing/able to provide enough information to be able to confirm one way or another.
The Science community says no. And Statisically I say no as well. The strongest piece of evidence in my opinon is that for this virus to NOT have come from the lab is this.
A lab worker would need to have taken public transit for 7 miles through a place more densely populated than Manhattan infect no one arrive at the wet market infect 1 person than leave and go several miles home without infecting anyone. This basically seems impossible and if it did happen it would have radically changed the infection pattern and with how we know how covid works seems impossible. Its not bullet proof but it basically requires us abandoning everything we know about epidemology for it to have come from that lab.
Now there are issues we never found the animal of origin but its hard because China killed and bleached the whole market trying to hid evidence. It seems very consistent though with China trying to perserve reputation. There could be scheme to sell infected dead animals from the lab to the wet market but its conspiry theory seeking as there is no evidence supporting lab leak besides China bad. (And Trust me I think China is bad they are a horrible government who definitely hid covids existence and that behavior propably enhanced the likelyhood of it become the pandemic it was but there is just no hard evidence that lab leak as theory is true just scary hypothetic and stories. I hate that I sound like a China shill here)
> The Science community says no
You mean Dr. Fauci?
Asking this question on an internet forum is like dumping a pound of sodium chloride in a bathtub: explosive, and highly unlikely to inform anybody.
Def not confirmed, just assumed. People act like it's a fact though because it's plausible.
We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
All the evidence was destroyed (probably just a coincidence, LOL), so it can't be proved either way.
A near guarantee when it shows up in the city that hosts the only lab in the world doing advanced research and gain of function on coronavirus... but the reason the US hasn't made too big of a stink (and early on perpetuated the "wetvmarket" nonsense) is that the research was funded by the US and essentially outsourced to this lab with less sophisticated safety standards. So there was blame and humiliation all around.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
Last thing I read on it, it was confirmed to originate from a wet market. The Wuhan lab theory has become a conspiracy theory lacking substance.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
> And I always felt like this.
Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
> I'm going to go with their majority opinion
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
Please, send a google translate link where the majority of virologists in a country/language say the genetic evidence points to a lab leak.
I have no idea what “ whether there are still in service or not.” means
I don't have resources, to conduct studies, this was just an impression from reading Wikipedia pages and random websearch. Major news publishers in my language seem to convey the image, that intelligence agency generally agree on the lab hypothesis. Not just as side topic, but as the settled mainstream opinion. (The links were already shared here, that's how I read them in the first place.)
Yet the comments here seem to indicate, that that would be not the case from an US-centric perspective even if the publishers in my language claim it comes from the US intelligence agencies. And indeed that seems to be the tenor to a larger percentage in English publications.
> I have no idea what “ whether there are still in service or not.” means
Officials that are still in office seem to it's fringe to say it comes out of a lab, while does that are retired seem to claim, that it is obvious. Even if these are the identical person at different times.
That's an issue when you listen to health officials (political appointments) or intelligence services. I want to listen to actual virologists - the people who have worked or are working in the kind of labs it might have leaked from.
The reality is nobody can say confidently that it did, or that it didn't leak from a lab. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. But what virologists can say with some degree of confidence is that covid was probably NOT the product of genetic manipulation.
So if there's no evidence it was the subject of research, all we are left with is the coincidence of the wet market and the lab being a 40 minute drive away from each other.
> But what virologists can say with some degree of confidence is that covid was probably NOT the product of genetic manipulation.
Whether covid is the product of genetic manipulation and whether covid was released from a lab, due to an improper safety culture are completely different questions, and nobody has talked about the former question yet.
Just read the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
> cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
So a guy who disagreed with the official CIA stance has been barred from obtaining funding for research from the US.
I mean, that just makes them seem more trustworthy.
I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
Do you have any thoughts as to why the FBI disagrees with your perspective?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903
Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
The US can just declare extraterritorial jurisdiction. We do it for bioweapons. Uncle Sam doesn’t need an invite.
IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”
Didn't the anthrax from the scares post 9/11 trace back to Fort Detrick?
Anyone can declare anything.
You think China just lets US law enforcement do investigations on their territory without their consent??
I don’t but this guy in your article does
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
So the suggestion is that it occurred naturally in China and then military games happened near Wuhan which spread the virus? Or did someone from Wuhan with ties/service in the Chinese military contract the virus locally and then spread it throughout China via travel to these military games?
Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
Your link also says
>> And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.
They don’t disagree. They don’t know. They just said what’s most likely. They don’t even give a %
Well if you want something with percentages, the BND claims it is 85-90% likely that it comes out of a lab. https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/corona-das-corona...
you get (rightly) downvoted for just saying nonsense.
Half the people downvote cause they know it’s from animals. Other people know it was a lab leak. Meanwhile I get downvoted by saying the evidence doesn’t prove anything or people would be shouting it from the hills note I have no dog in this race , just pointing out there’s uncertainty
How did you enjoy the book? I did like her nuclear war volume, but it could have used some editing.
I enjoyed it but it felt more sci-fi than the Nuclear War book. Mainly because it centers around a pathogen that is engineered for maximal transmission and it seemed quite unbelievable that so many things that came down to bad luck would all happen at the same time. The Nuclear War scenario seemed a lot more plausible because only a couple of bad things need to happen to set off the chain of events and they all seemed plausible.
I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
You're absolutely right! I was excited about this book, having heard Ms. Jacobsen discuss it on a podcast. She was a great guest, and her book is well researched, for sure. Unfortunately, I found the prose unbearable and gave up half-way through. To me, it reeks of LLM. If you can somehow set that aside, you might enjoy it.
How’d it turn out, are we boned?
No spoilers but Jacobsen's scenario books don't end with "and society came together, acted rationally, and solved the problem!"
Netflix ends up the series after Season 1, just after your are emotionally invested...
What are you reading next and what should we do to prepare?
I was planning to read this book but, now not really
"The Siberian Incident", "Devil's Pass", Incident", Lake" also all deal with outbreaks of various sorts originating from Siberia. It's a trope.
I wouldn’t worry too much.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
This is not 79' Sverdlosk.
https://meselsonarchive.hsites.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omn...
The lab in question in this incident has a documented Soviet Biodefense connection.
https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/cns-archive/...
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence. There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
You're claiming that everything is fine because Russians have procedures in place. Russians. You're appealing for calm based on the trust in Russian competence, after referencing Sverdlovsk incident. It's just too funny.
I am listening, please explain what else would show competence in the regard of biodefense, than that the people in charge of Russian biodefense can and will reliably identify and contain outbreaks of dangerous pathogens in time to prevent a national or even global outbreak reliably, since at least ’79?
If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.
There were multiple recorded incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil (Broken Arrow operations). Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.
But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.
Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.
There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.
It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission. Russia is no different from any other army in that regard.
But I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.
In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in charge if you do that.
Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.
I would link the official page on the Air Force website (https://www.compliance.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-1312...), but the Trump administration is silently deleting all of these documents.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/963093/afd-131219-045...
Just one of the highlights.
[Maj Gen Carey] insists that we go to this place called La Cantina, I think it was... it was a Mexican place. And I was kind of surprised... I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go to in Russia but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there.
So we show up and it turns out that I guess he somehow found out that this place had a band that plays and so he was really intent on singing with the band. He wanted to sing with the band. So we get in and it's extremely loud and the band is playing and he keeps asking the waitress and the bartender if he can sing with the band and they want nothing to do with this. And so he kept having our translator go up with him and ask them well can I sing with the band.
[Maj Gen Carey] said, "go ask them if I could play the guitar." I said okay, I, I asked one of the band members and the guy said, no, I mean, you know, I can't do that.
He goes if you really want to play this guitar go ahead and talk to the restaurant owner or the administrator or the manager, the restaurant manager and I didn't feel like doing that because I didn't want to go find the manager so I, told the General that basically, uh, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars and then he said, well try again, so I asked him to get up and we both stood next to this rock band and watched them up close.
I was hoping to keep his interest in doing so and, uh, he, um, and then I said, listen if you really want to play the guitar maybe if you ask him, you know, um, maybe they'd listen to you more than would to me. And I'm not sure if he asked him or not because I, I, you know, I, I sat back down at the table, but he stood there for a while in front of this band and then he came back to the table a little later also, he came back later and sat down also, and said well, no they won't let me play.
That shit is indeed funny.
There's no need to bring US nuclear forces into this discussion, we're talking about Russian authorities and their competence here.
Sure, it's possible that this one specific force is more professional than the rest, but the bar is low. Soviet Union is the state that gave us Chernobyl after all. For more recent evidence, do check out the recent Russian track record with space technologies - the 2018 ISS air leak incident is particularly telling. Or, you know, the whole war thing that's been going on.
Let me be clear, I 1000% agree that large parts of the Russian government and military are blatantly incompetent. We are on the same side of history, I make fun of the three-day special operation often, and I have nothing but respect for the fight the Ukrainian people put up against a superpower as the aggressor.
Unfortunately, that competence thing counts for everyone else as well. So if you talk about Russian incompetence, we also need to make sure that people understand that this is by design and applied to every military force in existence, and put it into proper context.
This is not about bashing militaries or being American or Russian or European or Chinese, it’s a good example to showcase how the world really works.
If any army becomes extremely competent in executing the best possible outcomes for the people of their country, what keeps them from taking over and getting rid of the layer of decision-making that is causing the most problems?
So the people making their livelyhood from mostly talking about problems and solving them for domestic intesterest groups that don’t necessarily have the best interest of the average citizen in mind make sure they can not be overthrown by their military.
That’s why you see Hegseth dumbing down the force at record speed and Russia is sending the kids of farmers into war and not those of the oligarchs or duma politicians. No matter the color of the pin they wear or what language they speak, it’s all the same filth.
Anyway, a competent military full of competent specialists taking over is what we call military dictatorship, and we tried it often enough collectively that we can confidently say, sometimes the way to get somewhere is just as important as getting there, so democracy and convincing a majority of citizens is better than simply suppressing them.
Because it allows us to think and collectively learn, whereas military decision-making is always a bit backwards and pushes for results at neck-breaking speed.
You cannot apply military optimisation to a healthy civil society. It’s incompatible. Military is a necessary evil, it’s not how the main branch of civil society should work.
If the leaders of the mightiest nations on the planet were competent, we would all live in peace and happily ever after, but conflict is in human nature and incompetence fuels conflict and puts a lot of money into the pockets of everyone who profits from conflict and putting the most incompetent people into the most powerful positions.
Glad we can agree that Russia sucks and hopefully on that almost none of the people in charge of our fate are competent in what they do and we are always an inch away from catastrophic global events.
And that’s why I am now baking some cinnamon buns. Good talk.
So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).
I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.
Polymer coated glass is commonplace in chemistry labs for large containers of hazardous reagents held in storage. There's no chemical leaching concern because it's on the outside.
If anything, disposable plastic test tubes are the norm in microbiology labs at this point. No need to autoclave because they come sterile and you throw them away after a single use.
Plenty of plastic that's designed for it goes through the autoclave. For example micropipette tips. Nearly all of it is disposable single use so it only has to withstand a single cycle.
Not sure that throwing away plastic tubes with samples of plague bacteria is a good idea
Disposing of and throwing away are two different things. Throwing away is a subclass of 'disposing of' and there are many other such subclasses including safe destruction, for instance by incineration.
That’s what the autoclave is for.
I'm pretty sure that it goes into a biohazard container that is then sterilized and probably incinerated.
My guess would be cost. Glass is cheaper and with sanctions and the economic strain of war I'm sure everyone in Russia is trying to cut corners
Or a double wall - one glass one polymer
There is regular soda-lime glass and there is borosilicate glass.
Why on earth would she have contact with 197 people after she got exposed to bacteria? She should have immediately triggered safety protocols
I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
> I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube
What does this mean? The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
>The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
The article links to a telegram post [1] as source, which links to another telegram post [2], which now has an update:
>It is not known exactly how Darya Shipilova contracted the plague. Currently, the theory involving a broken test tube is the leading one, but there is no official confirmation or independent verification of this information.
(Google-translated)
[1] https://t.me/Govorit_NeMoskva/70406
[2] https://t.me/Baikal_People/16629
That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.
> That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway.
Speaking as someone who has a part of their job convincing people to follow safety processes, this isn't a Russia thing, it's a human thing.
This is a human thing, of course, but in different cultures the emphasis on following the rules and taking safety measures is different. In Russia, there isn't one.
You sound like a proper Russia kremlinology expert. How many stints in Russia did you do?
Not sure what you mean by "stints" but I grew up there and experienced a lot of this myself. It has nothing to do with Kremlin, btw, Kremlin is not Russia. Kremlin rules Russia, but these are two completely different worlds. I know nothing about the former, but quite a bunch about the latter.
Imagine if someone said something like this of a brown country. They would be banned right away.
I say it all the time.
which country?
According to aquaintances in a few different industries where some of their competition is Russian: They basically work for vodka, then their equipment breaks down, they can't fix it and the customer has to call a western company. They apparently have no consistent maintenance or service protocol whatsoever, and in some rather safety critical areas.
According to my third cousin twice removed who once spelled the word "industry" (mostly correctly) - Americans basically work for McDonalds burgers. That's why they had to outsource high-precision manufacturing to Taiwan; they tried to make GPUs and phone chipsets in the US, but the 'muricans just kept getting their greasy fingers all over everything.
You are losing the topic. We aren't talking about manufacturing capability - which Russia still has a lot - but about safety culture. US and Russia are almost polar opposites here. While there are countries more safetyist than the US, not a lot of them. In current US culture, something "unsafe" just can't be done, and there are a myriad regulations which ensure everything is as "safe" as possible in a thousands of meanings of it. Of course, there are exceptions, there are crazy people everywhere, but the dominant culture is very safety-oriented. In Russia, this culture just does not exist. It doesn't mean there are no rules and regulations - but the cultural space they occupy are completely different. Sometimes it could be a huge advantage - you can move much faster if you don't have to pass 27 inspections each time you retighten a bolt - sometimes it could have very high costs.
Irregardless of the claim of correlation, between Russia and a lack of safety culture, it is currently a country in a war economy with populace shortages.
Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?
This is the exact reason that the Lab Leak vs Natural Origin question around COVID-19 matters. If it was a Lab Leak, then we should probably be scaling these labs down and restricting what they can research. But if COVID really did come from a wet market, then the risk is probably worth it.
One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
> One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
citation needed.
Just go find a list of vaccines? I followed a tracked of vaccines which were under development during the pandemic, that tracker appears to be down, but even Wikipedia claims at least 50 got far enough to gain approval in at least one country.
Not so much with gain of function and bio warfare type research.
knowledge. how to handle that and how it looks/works. if you forget it you will be reminded later.
You’re describing documentation though.
There is far more knowhow and supply chain that goes into keeping labs working than just documentation. Also, research requires labs, and so it is kind of already there sort of thing.
Yes, this is why doctors are only required to read textbooks and pass a written exam before practicing. Only mastery of the documentation is necessary. /s
Much like nukes game theory favours keeping them.
Russia has bioweapons labs and specifically did research on aerosolized anti-biotic resistant plague.
For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.
It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.
Covid can come from a wet market and we can have a discussion about virus research. These two things aren't connected.
Can we really? Can we really have a discussion if suggesting that COVID-19 may have come from a lab leak at a top tier virology lab doing cutting edge GoF research gets one labeled a racist?
First of all I said we didn’t have to resolve whether or not COVID-19 came from a lab in order to have a discussion of whether or not we should have bioweapons and other viral research labs.
Second of all. No, you racist.
Haha, I get where you're coming from but I still disagree. It's a question of the baseline risk, if COVID occurred naturally then there's a much higher chance of similar pandemics happening again and risky research like GoF makes sense. But if it was a lab leak, then it's harder to justify. There are other parts to if of course, if you think that covert bioweapon research is common then it probably doesn't matter.
No one wants to give up their grant money. That was a big part of the letters floating around during covid asking/begging to keep things quiet IIRC. No one wanted their money pulled.
I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
bingo. my mom logs into ChatGPT and uses it for basic stuff.
nothing like a dev getting whole APIs built, but she understands what the tool is and how it may impact office workers, even if on a superficial, sci-fi sort of way.
i don't think she could tell you anything about RNA vaccines or mitosis
Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers
I wonder if people downvoting consider your question to be a thoughtcrime or something. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Research happens because somebody is interested and writes a grant request that is accepted. Governments and institutions where the research happens have rules as well. It’s possible that the researchers, the folks reviewing the grants, and the people making the rules haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis that adequately covers the tail risks. For some kinds of research, the answer can be: no, we shouldn’t do this. It’s reasonable to publicly discuss these concerns.
Plague exists naturally. It's not some kind of a movie-land bioweapon McGuffin. The US has half a dozen cases of plague each year.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
Yes, but natural plague isn't what people are worried about here. Russia has worked on bioengineered versions that would be much worse.
Bubonic plague is not a good bioweapon. It doesn't form spores and requires fleas to spread. It can spread through aerosolized droplets, but that's really no better than a regular chemical weapon.
It's great for terrorist attacks, but not really a good weapon.
The Soviets developed antibiotic resistant strains of the plague meant to be dispersed over cities as aerosolized droplets. Inhaling these droplets causes pneumonic plague (coincidentally the type of infection this lab worker supposedly had which seems odd) and pneumonic plague can be spread human to human via coughing once the infection has been allowed to incubate for a few days. It can also be passed to animals from humans which could result in another vector for infection via handling, butchering or eating infected animals resulting in either primary bubonic plague or pharyngeal plague. Untreated pneumonic plague is almost always fatal so it goes without saying that antibiotic resistant plague is effectively 100% fatal in all contracted cases.
It would be more effective than chemical weapons in that it is more persistent, has delayed action and can be spread person to person or through animal vectors. This means it would be possible to deploy it more discretely and that it requires greater effort to contain. You're right that it is a better weapon for a terrorist attack or asymmetric warfare. It would still make a good weapon for creating an undue amount of stress on a region's medical capacity, if enough people were infected then a significant amount of antibiotics would initially be used attempting to treat them and a lot of resources would go to containing the spread, quarantining the infected or potential exposures and providing supportive care to a lot of people that would inevitably die very miserable deaths.
Too bad you're not condemning the live animal / wet market trade because from that we've had SARS, H5N1, H7N9 and Covid19, so are you fairly confident the wet markets are doing a public good or just condemning research labs for some reason?
Do you think bird flu came from a lab?
Chinese authorities considered to crack down on these markets before Covid 19 but didn't...because the markets are a major source of income for the peasant class in China so it's politically dangerous to do it because it would put millions out of their businesses.
This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
OP article claims the former. Is there a better source for the latter?
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
Of course, Russias pure animals have no stinky diseases, and we can trust their officials every word they say. Also, Russia doesn’t have any gays, because that is a “western disease”.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That was satire. Russian regimes have a long history of deception, so there is little reason to believe their claims.
In absence of sources, the latter sounds like government cover-up bs to me.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261003051644/https://www.gazet...
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
for the cattle epidemic see: https://ru-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1...
The Irkutsk governor, Igor Kobzev, seems to actually have experience in emergency management, and has served for many years in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. This makes the serious response a little bit less surprising (actually doing something instead of just covering it up is the thing that made me actually worried about this situation).
Yersinia Pestis is normally treated with doxycycline, cipro, or streptomycin.
Is this a resistant strain?
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/235627-medication#1
Unfortunately, even prompt antibiotics don't always help with the pneumonic form.
Wonderful. I’m so glad they’ve decided to weaponise a disease that can’t be treated. Just what the world needs.
Yersina Pestis is endemic to the southwest areas of the United States, and causes an average of seven cases of plague per year.
'The “young adult male” died eight hours after he was admitted to the hospital, where doctors initially suspected he had hantavirus disease or bacterial pneumonia. Post-mortem testing confirmed Y pestis presence in his blood and lung tissue. It's Arizona’s first pneumonic plague death since 2007.'
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/plague/cdc-reminds-doctors-southw...
"Plague was first introduced into the United States in 1900, from rat–infested steamships that had sailed from affected areas. Epidemics occurred in port cities. The last urban plague epidemic in the United States occurred in Los Angeles from 1924 through 1925."
https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps-statistics/index.html
Weaponize? Why? Bubonic plague has never gone away. Russia did a lot to control its spread so that human infections are very rare. There are mandatory vaccinations for cattle, for example.
This obviously requires ongoing research.
How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
There was a COVID 19 lab leak in Taiwan about a year into the pandemic.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4374289
Six errors contributed to this leak.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
Wow 500$ for an NGS kit to detect it before working there would have been money well spent
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
Bubonic plague is known to be active in Colorado, I think there are a handful of cases each year
Endemic in Antananarivo (very many deaths per year), not sure about the rest of Madagascar.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine
I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?
Current thought in the academy is that the flea-rat vector wasn't the dominant vector for the medieval plague "Black Death" mortality event, but human-flea-human. See also 2018 PNAS paper Katharine Dean, Nils Stenseth, Boris Schmid at Oslo. Basically, Northern Eurasian people were really gross, Mongols even moreso, and that provided the vector for a dominant human-flea-human spread. The rat vector, we're missing evidence that should be there: mass rat mortality; fast & huge mortality in areas with few rats; clustering followed human networks, not rodent networks. Also the kind of flea. Check the refs for more details.
The initial infection though, definitely from a central Eurasian rodent, likely a marmot somewhere near Kyrgyzstan.
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
There is an interesting (and frankly terrifying) book called biohazard by the former head of the soviet covert bioweapons program during the cold war and it seemed it was not that uncommon to have random screw ups at even high level labs resulting in the deaths of sometimes a lot of unfortunate people. Of course there was also a culture of cover up and not admitting mistakes as well for all sorts of reasons including the fact that they aren't supposed to be working on bioweapons in the first place as well as the usual punishments for screwing something up.
Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox and, yes, she caught it in a lab [1].
[1]: https://whyy.org/segments/the-tragic-case-of-smallpoxs-final...
>Oct. 2
Here's a newer CNN story from today:
>Researcher at Russian plague laboratory dies of ‘unknown’ infection
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/04/europe/russia-laboratory-...
This post from local Irkutsk region media (now in exile) is also interesting:
https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651 (in Russian)
I've read this story before, in Russian, and, honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me.
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
Don't be fixated on the "tube" thing; it's at the rumour-level certainty at this point (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960955).
On the other hand "Baikal People" post from today is more worrying, as it says they quarantined 4 hospitals for 3 weeks: https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651
> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
Of course, Russia...
It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction
I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
Hopefully long while is under 24 hours like this plague is.
bubonic, so while he looked at death's door, I don't think the timeline was as strict
>the exiled news outlet
i wouldn't rely as a source of information on some very niche outlet whose stuff located thousands kms from the place where something happens
> REN TV.
these are guys whose bread and butter are paranormal activity and UFOs
She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.
Sounds implausible, because even if you can rationalize, "I probably didn't get contaminated" after breaking the test tube and being worried about retaliations, once you start developing symptoms, why would you go to a normal hospital and not tell them that you suspect plague, almost surely guaranting your own death?
"Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's just the flu". Human capacity for denial is limitless.
Interesting theory.
"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.
>Irkutsk region Governor Igor Kobzev urged the public to remain calm after meeting with Rospotrebnadzor chief Anna Popova to coordinate emergency containment measures.
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
Because admitting there are problems causes the stock market to go down.
The Russian stock market is already down.
Because in at least some situations, panic can kill people, or at least make it more likely that they will die.
not only that but there are knock on effects like people hoarding toilet paper etc.
lol
Oh, I see a lot of interest here.. Russia, plague, laboratory..
You know where they do really develop biological weapons, on a much greater scale?
..but of course you do, this is the whole thing about your hypocrisy.
And you know why you are being fed with this, right?
..but of course you do..
Another account created just to defend ruSSia.
SS were from the ones who were spreading nationalistic hatred dehumanizing the "other" (not only jews, but slavic people as well, though the west does not talk about it very often for "some reason").
Now who would be that today, I wonder..
And why do you find it strange that people, who are subject to a tsunami of slander, and dehumanized by you (because this is what it is), try to counter that?
> Now who would be that today, I wonder..
That's russia of course, you are spewing lies about Ukrainians, keep harassing other Slavic countries and so on. You'd like to very much have imperialistic politics like US, but fortunately you lack strength to enforce your will. And that's great - history shows us that being conquered by russia results only in poverty.
You are living in another universe.
Than russians? For sure, you are from some weird alternative universe with extremely gullible and sheepish population. In our universe for example we'd never believe bullshit such as CIA-funded genetic labs in Ukraine as a casus belli.
I am sure not America and not your closest "ally" develop biological weapons. It is all stories, invented by the Novichok guys which plan yo poison every Russian dissident just to provoke you, after all "this is how Putin thinks".
Remember, CIA is the good guys. I mean, if Holywood says so..
You are just so incredibly.. and here I better stop
As the pro-COVID-measures-crowd largely overlaps with the Putler-crowd it’s going to be interesting to see their agenda re-alignment.
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
> I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
It's "sowed" from the concept of "sowing seeds" not from sewing textiles.
From Google: `Combined Metaphor: Just as a farmer scatters seeds into soil expecting a harvest, to "sow division" means to plant small acts, words, or policies of conflict that grow into a larger harvest of hostility and separation between people.`
> When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime
oh well then I guess if your personal contacts were 100% sure then case closed
Are you speculating? Or what are you basing this off of? Are you saying this is the next COVID and the government will use it to crack down on protests?
Sounds cartoon-like and unbelievable.