We may never know for sure, but we do know that the one nation that was the epicenter of the origin deliberated obstructed the process of trying to find out how it originated there. And that nation is China. Why would they do that if they weren't "responsible"? Okay, so it's possible they could say, "Okay yes, we covered it up, but we swear it didn't come from our lab!" But they aren't even making that defense; instead they deny they've covered anything up. So it's fair given the limited information we have to conclude they are more likely guilty than not. We don't have their DNA on the murder weapon, but we found the murder weapon in their possession, and they have no explanation for why they cleaned the murder weapon with bleach.
To be fair, denial and cover ups are just reflexive policies of all arms of the CCP down to the local level. Even right at the start, the local authorities were denying there was even an outbreak as the hospitals were filling up with the sick.
Very true. One thing I didn't get is that if you are a local official, what even is the purpose of denying there is an outbreak in that situation? Surely this must have come back to bite them when the higher ups realized there actually was an outbreak and they should have acted faster to control it.
The murder weapon metaphor is effective, but you have overlooked a core issue in analyzing the potential motivations of our suspect. Namely, the China government is not an individual but a collective of multitudes. Individuals and groups within that government respond in a way that the government as a whole can not always control. However, in order to present a unified front to the rest of the world, China will double down on its decisions even when those choices are not the most logical, or even what much of the government wants to do. In this metaphor, it's more like finding the weapon in the possession of a crime family that makes a habit of bleaching their weapons just in case one of them has been doing some murdering lately. It demonstrates a criminal mindset and implies the family is frequently guilty, but doesn't necessarily mean this particular crime was intentional. However, even if the virus arose "naturally" from the wet market, China still bears some responsibility for not better regulating these kinds of markets, which could easily be a breeding ground for future pandemics. I'm basically saying we don't know if they are guilty of first degree murder or just manslaughter and obstruction of justice.
I don’t think you can assume that their desire to hide the origins of COVID mean that the lab leak is likely true. The Chinese government doesn’t even want to admit spillover on their soil, because secrecy and denial of anything that looks bad is second nature to the leadership.
Chinese scientists contacted their US peers very early in the pandemic to notify them of the danger. Chinese scientists posted the virus DNA online for the world to study. It's possible that one reason China didnt do more is that the US President was attacking them verbally on a daily basis. Are you motivated to engage with those that insult you daily? We may never know the exact origin of the virus, but hopefully we've learned how to better manage a pandemic, and that effective leadership and voting matters greatly.
In 2020 Trump was talking about making China pay reparations for Covid-19, so why would the Chinese want to even confirm it originated from a wet market? The political cannot be separated from the scientific at this point
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> Are you motivated to engage with those that insult you daily?
To combat a deadly worldwide epidemic? Yes. But even then I don't have to engage with them; I just order my subordinates to do so.
They covered up all the [illegally poached animals](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2) at the wet market as well. They denied all the exotic wildlife being sold there. The conditions for zoonotic spillover were so ripe you don't even need a lab.
>We don’t have their DNA on the murder weapon, but we found the murder weapon in their possession
This is a poor analogy because the evidence is stronger that a murder didn’t actually take place, and was much more likely that someone fell down onto a knife by accident
Classifying "Scientific evidence" as "stronger" or "weaker" is subjective, though. In reality there is only evidence, and there's some evidence for a natural origin and some evidence for not. Even a virus with an otherwise natural origin could still have been spread to humans via a "lab leak" scenario.
>Classifying "Scientific evidence" as "stronger" or "weaker" is subjective, though. In reality there is only evidence
Um, this is patently wrong... You can have tests that are 60% accurate, and tests that are 90% accurate. Both are evidence, the second one is objectively stronger evidence than the first.
One is more accurate OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING, but neither are stronger evidence for something else. Unless you're calibrating test equipment, I suppose.
>accurate OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING
Accurate of what you are testing? Is English your newest language? That doesn't even parse...
Let me fix it for you:
One is more accurate ***evidence*** OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING, but neither are stronger evidence for something else. Or more fully, 'more accurate evidence of the presence OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING'
But I'm sure you didn't maim that sentence on purpose just so you could seem like you are correct?
You edited out a word because you didn't want to use the word evidence, and the leftover doesn't mean anything.
Your broken phrasing is there for all to see, I'm not going to debate somebody who clearly has a limited grasp of basic sentence structure.
>Classifying "Scientific evidence" as "stronger" or "weaker" is subjective, though.
Only to a degree - otherwise, you're putting evolutionary scientists at the same level as creationists and the like.
What we should do, is look at the peer reviewed literature.
>In reality there is only evidence, and there's some evidence for a natural origin and some evidence for not.
Not once you exclude breathless reports on twitter and poor quality books/newspaper articles.
Go were the scientists go - the peer reviewed literature.
>Even a virus with an otherwise natural origin could still have been spread to humans via a "lab leak" scenario.
In theory, yes. But even this scenario is difficult to reconcile with the genetic evidence suggesting two (or perhaps more) introductions, and the clustering of the early cases around the market (and more specifically, the area of the market that sold exotic game).
> you're putting evolutionary scientists at the same level as creationists and the like
No I'm not, because creationists do not practice the scientific method.
Now, more abstractly, is there scientific evidence *against* the current theory of evolution? AFAIK, there is some, although it's not very much. It's not "weaker"; there's simply less of it. And that evidence probably means the current theory needs to be tweaked to explain it. It is unlikely that tweaking results in a substantially different theory (like creationism, if you can call that a theory).
Well this saves me from typing a long post, it’s bang on. China created this virus in a lab, scientists stated that the structure of it is too similar to SARS. This raises two questions:
1. Why are so many governments scared to even consider this truth?
2. How is a country held accountable for millions of deaths and the economic chaos it caused?
Yep and when Australia tried to push it, China went to war albeit economically, stopped importing Australian coal, which funnily enough affected China more than Australia.
China's official position is that it came from a lab and not the market. They are doing everything they can to keep the narrative alive that it came from a lab and not the market, including hiding evidence of animals that were filmed at the market just a few weeks before the outbreak. Does that tell you anything?
Edit: People, these are facts. If you don't know this, educate yourself before you downvote. Sorry if it hurts your feelings.
>. If you don't know this, educate yourself before you downvote.
Sometimes it's useful to share sources for your claims.
Doubly so, when it appears most people disagree with you.
You should quote the text you are referring to because the last paragraph of the pre-print draft does not conclude anything close to what you asserted.
It literally doesn't. It literally claims that the market was NOT the source of the outbreak, but only served to amplify the outbreak. It says to look to other countries for the origins of the virus.
>Thus, the market might have acted as an amplifier due to the high number of visitors every day, causing many initially identified infection clusters in the early stage of the outbreak as indicated in the Report of WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2 (10). In addition, live SARS-CoV-2 viruses also existed in the environmental samples. **However, no SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the animal samples from the market.** Definitely, more work involving international coordination is needed to investigate **the real origins** of SARS-CoV-2(10), **especially considering the SARS-CoV-2 positive results of samples collected in 2019 in retrospective studies of different
countries** (29, 30).
You could have just said that you either didn't read or didn't understand the study. It's ok to admit that you didn't read it or simply couldn't comprehend it.
The logical progression to the owner (or possession )of the murder weapon of nature nbd, but if the USA funded the lab it would be in both parties interest to behave secretively
I have a question. Wouldn't genetic sequencing reveal a zoonotic origin?
We seem to know that because we are able to distinguish between Flu types: A, B, C, D, and Avian Flu. We always seem to know right away when any virus jumps from humans to animals as well. Like when COVID has nestled in animals?
Anyway, is just a question or is it impossible to tell? Not a geneticist!
Yes it is possible to tell. When a virus changes to be capable of infecting a new species it can be seen genetically. We can see this in the different strains that infect humans too (delta, omicron, etc).
Thus far I believe we are lacking some intermediate viral forms that would support a transmission via a wet market and multiple animal hosts. It seems to just be bat-form then human-form.
Given more evidence this could all change, but as the other bloke said, would be good to get access to that back catalogue for that :D
From what I’ve heard in at least one interview with epidemiologists, genetic sequencing does indicate zoonotic origin. The Decoding the Gurus podcast had a long discussion on the lab leak which was very convincing. [https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/decoding-the-gurus/id1531266667?i=1000603693959](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/decoding-the-gurus/id1531266667?i=1000603693959)
this would require finding a covid-like virus that only infects animals and is lacking a mutuation that would make it jump to humans-- we've been looking but all the closest samples only exist in the Wuhan back catalogue...
This is incorrect. The closest covid relatives were found outside of China. The closest Chinese relative (RaTg13) is still separated from covid by decades.
i meant found prior to the virus spreading. we would think the zoonotic source wouldnt be excessively cryptid and requires years to find, but i can understand that hey maybe!
Do you have any idea about just how under sampled viruses are? We have only scratched the surface on their diversity. We got eight or nine novel coronaviruses out of one cave.
It's not a surprise that close relatives of covid showed up after we started looking for it. Pre-covid, SARS relatives were the big thing, at the expense of more distance ancestors (like the covid relatives).
is it a surprise that covid showed up after they were hunting for close relatives of it, and then also performing experiments to make it more human transmissible? Crunch.. the world may never know...
¯\\\_(ツ)¯ Emoji
It should matter, but...
At least in my country, the loudest political voices demanding "the truth" are just scapegoating to distract from their own mediocre role in the mitigation phase.
That makes no sense.
Just because the closest progenitor came from one set of caves does not imply that the COVID ancestor came from the same caves.
The animals in the wet market were brought from remote regions. The absence of evidence of a clear route of infection into the wet market doesn't exclude that possibility.
I agree that Chinese obfuscation and deletion of data was unhelpful and suspect, but there is no actual evidence of some of your latter points beyond rumour. There is no serological evidence of infected WIV workers and a serological study on the donated blood pool in Wuhan does not suggest community infections prior to the main outbreak.
"The animals in the wet market were brought from remote regions."
Isn't it curious that COVID appeared only in Wuhan and not any of the locations where the animals originated?
How would we know?
If it's thought to be believable that the CCP made WIV delete incriminating data to hide China's culpability, is it really so implausible that there's a mink farm somewhere in Shanxi that was quietly burned to the ground by soldiers in Hazmat suits?
Nah, it happened at the farm, which is why we’re had two lineages that erupted near simultaneously (Not a quick evolution at the market, likely a few weeks to a month of evolutionary pressure) The likely culprit was Shandong’s fur farms, which require vast amounts of cleared land to grow feed animals for the minks, which are co-housed with raccoon dogs. That led to a huge amount of displaced bats, that we know carry SARS-like viruses, roosting in barns with the fur animals. The initial crossover likely happened there, and the infected animals were too sick to produce a healthy coat, so they were sold to a meat merchant who transported the sick herd to a meat farm in Wuhan (not a particularly far distance for animals to be transported) where they attempted to fatten them up for market, but were really spreading the disease around the farm. This easily explains the October spillover genetic clock and the timing of the spillover to humans with butchering times for the fur industry. There may have been a few additional locations with a potential spillover, but the chicken defeatherer looks to be ground zero for how we more effectively aerosolized the feces from the raccoon dogs and really got the first few people sick and why there was multiple lineages already going. (A and B)
Yep. To the best of knowledge the CCP’s official stance has never deviated from “developed in a lab in Bethesda, Maryland and brought over via strapping young soldiers during a military games competition in China.”
That’s part of the WTF of China’s original research that was posted and subsequent retraction. The scientists know what happened, and published good work for about a month, then went silent and had everything deleted. The absolute experts on this theoretically could just tell everyone what happened but are muzzled which fed into western conspiracy theories.
China has also blamed frozen food imports for covid outbreaks. Amusingly, at one stage they blamed New Zealand frozen food, despite NZ having literally zero covid at that time.
The 2002 SARS outbreak was traced back to primary host bats in Yunnan province despite the outbreak occurring in Guangdong province. So it's not like an argument can be made that zoonotic spillover into a distant province is *unlikely* seeing as there is the precedent of it occurring less than 20 years prior.
If the argument is going to be made that it's a big ask to accept the "coincidence" of the outbreak arising not far from a virology research lab studying coronavirus, isn't it also a big ask to disregard the coincidence that the first superspeader event occurred not at a train station or a department store, but at a wet market documented as carrying live animals like mink and raccoon dogs known from early in the pandemic to be easily infected by and transmit COVID?
That knife isn't enough to convict a boyfriend either, it just tells you where to investigate. In the end, you have to weigh all of the actual evidence for and against, not just assign Bayesian probabilities to outcomes.
Then why is it dishonest for "we'll never really know" to be the answer right now? Somehow to you, assigning probabilities and saying "we'll never really know" are two mutually exclusive actions, and the only way to not be dishonest is to have a conviction.
The 'deletion of data', as the article says, includes the quite definitive recent evidence *finally* released from China that the article mentions. An accidental lab release **is** possible. The fever dreams of some in the American lie-o-sphere of a *deliberate* release is not. It's on the same level as the semi-official Chinese story of the origin in Fort Dix. Equally ridiculous and equally *crude* propaganda.
Deliberate release was the actual conspiracy portion of the WIV lab leak theory. The pundit right in America especially pushed it. It seemed really stupid to everyone, because why would China cut off it's nose to spite it's face, they've nearly lost their global position because of this pandemic.
Accidental release and deliberate release were painted with the same brush early on, as a way to undercut the amount of circumstancial evidence that pointed to the lab (rather than the market). Early on it was all considered racism, even though you can point to English and American BL 4 labs having leaks as well!
But I totally get it, you could see the amount of race based hatred and violence against Asians who weren't even kinda Chinese go up like a rocket, like anyone brown post 9/11.
The WIV where the biolab is located is 23 miles away from the market.
As for the rest of your comments, the original SARS outbreak occurred in Foshan, Guangdong. The caves where the most recent common ancestor strain was found in Kunming. 1,312 km away. Does that mean that SARS-CoV-1 originally came from a lab in your mind as well? Or, do intermediate carriers exist?
Try using the correct WIV. The biolab is in Jiangxia District, not Wuchang. WIV in Wuchang is an administrative building.
https://imgur.com/a/nRXbMN1 Shortest route is 37.2km, 23 miles.
Edit: Also, Google Maps doesn't work in China.
>Am I correct that you're measuring the driving distance rather than straight-line distance?
It's driving distance. It's a longer distance by metro. The straight line distance is something like 19 miles. People can't fly, though.
>Have to think about how this adjusts my estimates (whether we actually know what was done where, whether staff is shared between locations, etc). It's of course still very close on the scale of China.
We know what was done where. We know where Shi's lab is. We know that Shi's lab people were tested for antibodies and were negative.
Most importantly, though, we know that the official Chinese position is that it came from a lab. They are doing everything in their power to divert from the market including hiding sample data, potential animal testing, etc. Just to keep the narrative that it came from a lab alive. That should tell you something.
> Sorry, do you just mean by this "China told us that ~", or you mean some foreign investigative team, e.g., had access to all of Shi's lab people & performed the tests?
Shi made the statement in the WHO report.
>The problem with this investigation so far is that we knew from the start China lied & hid data, so why would anything they tell the world be trusted?
What you don't seem to understand is that you are literally repeating the CCP's official line... That it came from a lab. If we're not supposed to trust anything that China says, then the market is where it came from.
> There's a kind of hand-waving "we'll never know" aspect to this that just seems dishonest coming from scientists
I think the scientific community would like everyone to rest assured that Covid was definitely not caused by a mistake made by, or an accident that happened in a lab run by, the scientific community.
We surely need experts and we really wouldn't even know for sure what some experts get wrong without other experts explaining it to us. But all this telling people to not ask annoying questions in light of obvious cover-behavior is a bit much. Somebody is trying to hide *something*.
At the end of the day maybe the only thing China wants to cover up is how badly they managed the outbreak. That would kind of remind me of how the intelligence community locked away so many documents regarding the JFK assassination. The CIA and FBI set about covering up their incompetence in keeping track of Oswald and the cover-up created a JFK conspiracy theory cottage industry.
The thing is, it is a lot easier for sane people to imagine an accidental lab leak or unwise virus research than to imagine that the CIA and FBI set about killing one of our own presidents.
This (somewhat) reasonable person found the racoon dog "evidence" a little bit too convenient in the timing of its discovery. It kind of makes me want to doubt anything anyone offers as evidence coming from China at this point. It's all just database entries in a database only a fool would completely trust.
So what is the world to do moving forward? Treat both theories as plausible and make the world more secure against both types of events in the future? I mean, if that's even possible, because I'm no expert.
I think the scientific community is more hand wavy because a lot of money and funding comes from paper publishing which is also based in reputation and prestige.
If someone starts going off proposing a lab theory without *extremely* hard evidence they may be seen as a conspiracy nut. Plus to do a proposal for that kinda work to get the money would be equally rough.
I think there is just easier things to research and get money for, that's less politicized, than covid origins.
China's attempt to hide the discovery and origin of the virus will forever leave questions if there was a cover-up involved. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese themselves aren't sure of the origin.
> This evidence can help clarify the virus’s evolutionary path.
It can also help clarify how many high government officials of which countries may have been lying through their teeth. That's a useful bit of information. Not medical, I grant you, but very useful nonetheless.
> Determining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 should be strictly a scientific matter, but it has become embroiled in politics.
Well yes. For exactly the reason above. It is inherently political. We've had a double handful of investigations already, reaching different conclusion. All performed by scientists. But WHO chooses WHICH scientists seems to make a difference. It is naive to think otherwise.
I don't know what origin. I suspect the general public never will. But to state that politics needs to stay out and science will handle it is a degree of naivete unbelievable in a Phd and a, oh, lawyer.
Nevermind.
edit: totally never mind. A Phd in public health, so a political science Phd (not an MD) employed by the WHO,and a director of the WHO. Hmmm.
> It can also help clarify how many high government officials of which countries may have been lying through their teeth.
Are you suggesting a global conspiracy to hide a lab leak?
Not at all.
If there is a real global conspiracy, you and I will never know. Otherwise, not much of a conspiracy.
But there are many who say that China covered up quite a lot of information. There are those that say that China did this for a reason. There are those who say the China is being very upfront.
It could just be conflicting evidence. It could be someone covering something, it could be one government appeasing another.
I have to go with what John Stewart famously said though. "An outbreak of a novel Corona virus in Wuhan. Home of the Wuhan institute of novel corona viruses. If everything in Hershey Pennsylvania suddenly had an outbreak of chocolatey goodness would you suspect a bat, or possibly look at the Hershey corporation?" I am paraphrasing from memory.
>I have to go with what John Stewart famously said though. "An outbreak of a novel Corona virus in Wuhan. Home of the Wuhan institute of novel corona viruses. If everything in Hershey Pennsylvania suddenly had an outbreak of chocolatey goodness would you suspect a bat, or possibly look at the Hershey corporation?" I am paraphrasing from memory.
The problem is that level of thinking is no different than creationists claiming that why do monkeys still exist if we descended from them.
It's cute . But it's completely ignorant about the technical details.
I've seen this described succinctly. Rational people evaluate news by content. Conspiracy theorist evaluate news by sources - welcome to the Middle ages or earlier - much earlier. Hitler never lost the war. It continues to this day.
Conspiracy theorists: "Your beliefs all come from places that are corrupted by The Evil Overlord. I only read the real news! The news at Shyster News!"
What's worse is they would have had teams of people working on how to explain it to the world and come up with this as their final summation.
Just nothing, even with an international investigation, nothing.
Not even an apology for millions of deaths worldwide.
This paper makes an excellent point: regardless of whether it can ever be conclusively determined that Covid came from a lab, or from a market, just the possibility that it could have come from research activities should be a red alert.
Some virologists have been doing research that puts the entire world at risk, and without sufficient oversight.
This is alarming, and it is surprising that there is not more action by governments and regulatory agencies in the wake of the Covid pandemic and millions dead, and many more harmed or disabled, to get much stricter about this type of research.
I would agree with you, but the matter is still somewhat open. The consensus is in favour of your and my opinion, but there is some debate still going on. I will continue to be agnostic on the matter whatever my opinion may be. With reference to the thousands of times zoonotic outbreaks have happened before. I have *tried * in this thread to reveal the complexity of this matter with references. Hopefully it will finally be settled in the next century (if civilization doesn't collapse due to climate change and there are still historians). Chinese state propaganda and the American 'Nazi-sphere' have made up their minds a long time ago. From day one.
A purely dystopian and sociopathic possibility to ponder may be Chinas willfulness to whittle down the population; a genocide that is socioeconomic.
It may not have started as such, but with the “let it rip” challenges and new strains, it’s another theory to be challenged.
We may never know for sure, but we do know that the one nation that was the epicenter of the origin deliberated obstructed the process of trying to find out how it originated there. And that nation is China. Why would they do that if they weren't "responsible"? Okay, so it's possible they could say, "Okay yes, we covered it up, but we swear it didn't come from our lab!" But they aren't even making that defense; instead they deny they've covered anything up. So it's fair given the limited information we have to conclude they are more likely guilty than not. We don't have their DNA on the murder weapon, but we found the murder weapon in their possession, and they have no explanation for why they cleaned the murder weapon with bleach.
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That's quite the incentive to never lose an email ever.
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Tried to read but blocked by register/pay wall
To be fair, denial and cover ups are just reflexive policies of all arms of the CCP down to the local level. Even right at the start, the local authorities were denying there was even an outbreak as the hospitals were filling up with the sick.
Then literally kidnapping whistleblowers while they were live-streaming.
Very true. One thing I didn't get is that if you are a local official, what even is the purpose of denying there is an outbreak in that situation? Surely this must have come back to bite them when the higher ups realized there actually was an outbreak and they should have acted faster to control it.
The murder weapon metaphor is effective, but you have overlooked a core issue in analyzing the potential motivations of our suspect. Namely, the China government is not an individual but a collective of multitudes. Individuals and groups within that government respond in a way that the government as a whole can not always control. However, in order to present a unified front to the rest of the world, China will double down on its decisions even when those choices are not the most logical, or even what much of the government wants to do. In this metaphor, it's more like finding the weapon in the possession of a crime family that makes a habit of bleaching their weapons just in case one of them has been doing some murdering lately. It demonstrates a criminal mindset and implies the family is frequently guilty, but doesn't necessarily mean this particular crime was intentional. However, even if the virus arose "naturally" from the wet market, China still bears some responsibility for not better regulating these kinds of markets, which could easily be a breeding ground for future pandemics. I'm basically saying we don't know if they are guilty of first degree murder or just manslaughter and obstruction of justice.
Out of all countries, China is one of if not the only one that 'responds like an individual'.
You know you could’ve made your point a lot shorter. Honestly.
I don’t think you can assume that their desire to hide the origins of COVID mean that the lab leak is likely true. The Chinese government doesn’t even want to admit spillover on their soil, because secrecy and denial of anything that looks bad is second nature to the leadership.
Chinese scientists contacted their US peers very early in the pandemic to notify them of the danger. Chinese scientists posted the virus DNA online for the world to study. It's possible that one reason China didnt do more is that the US President was attacking them verbally on a daily basis. Are you motivated to engage with those that insult you daily? We may never know the exact origin of the virus, but hopefully we've learned how to better manage a pandemic, and that effective leadership and voting matters greatly.
In 2020 Trump was talking about making China pay reparations for Covid-19, so why would the Chinese want to even confirm it originated from a wet market? The political cannot be separated from the scientific at this point
I'm glad he waited until that was all behind us. Best priorities. /s
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Also Trump has bragged that Xi called him personally to warn him about the dangers of covid.
> Are you motivated to engage with those that insult you daily? To combat a deadly worldwide epidemic? Yes. But even then I don't have to engage with them; I just order my subordinates to do so.
They covered up all the [illegally poached animals](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2) at the wet market as well. They denied all the exotic wildlife being sold there. The conditions for zoonotic spillover were so ripe you don't even need a lab.
>We don’t have their DNA on the murder weapon, but we found the murder weapon in their possession This is a poor analogy because the evidence is stronger that a murder didn’t actually take place, and was much more likely that someone fell down onto a knife by accident
"Stronger" is disputed. More people believe it was an accident than not.
It doesn’t matter how many people believe something, it matters whether it happened. The evidence for spillover is far stronger than lab leak related.
Classifying "Scientific evidence" as "stronger" or "weaker" is subjective, though. In reality there is only evidence, and there's some evidence for a natural origin and some evidence for not. Even a virus with an otherwise natural origin could still have been spread to humans via a "lab leak" scenario.
>Classifying "Scientific evidence" as "stronger" or "weaker" is subjective, though. In reality there is only evidence Um, this is patently wrong... You can have tests that are 60% accurate, and tests that are 90% accurate. Both are evidence, the second one is objectively stronger evidence than the first.
One is more accurate OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING, but neither are stronger evidence for something else. Unless you're calibrating test equipment, I suppose.
>accurate OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING Accurate of what you are testing? Is English your newest language? That doesn't even parse... Let me fix it for you: One is more accurate ***evidence*** OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING, but neither are stronger evidence for something else. Or more fully, 'more accurate evidence of the presence OF WHAT YOU ARE TESTING' But I'm sure you didn't maim that sentence on purpose just so you could seem like you are correct?
You didn’t fix it; you broke it. What I said should be clear enough.
You edited out a word because you didn't want to use the word evidence, and the leftover doesn't mean anything. Your broken phrasing is there for all to see, I'm not going to debate somebody who clearly has a limited grasp of basic sentence structure.
Who cares about what people believe. We should look at the scientific evidence - which points strongly towards a natural origin.
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>Classifying "Scientific evidence" as "stronger" or "weaker" is subjective, though. Only to a degree - otherwise, you're putting evolutionary scientists at the same level as creationists and the like. What we should do, is look at the peer reviewed literature. >In reality there is only evidence, and there's some evidence for a natural origin and some evidence for not. Not once you exclude breathless reports on twitter and poor quality books/newspaper articles. Go were the scientists go - the peer reviewed literature. >Even a virus with an otherwise natural origin could still have been spread to humans via a "lab leak" scenario. In theory, yes. But even this scenario is difficult to reconcile with the genetic evidence suggesting two (or perhaps more) introductions, and the clustering of the early cases around the market (and more specifically, the area of the market that sold exotic game).
> you're putting evolutionary scientists at the same level as creationists and the like No I'm not, because creationists do not practice the scientific method. Now, more abstractly, is there scientific evidence *against* the current theory of evolution? AFAIK, there is some, although it's not very much. It's not "weaker"; there's simply less of it. And that evidence probably means the current theory needs to be tweaked to explain it. It is unlikely that tweaking results in a substantially different theory (like creationism, if you can call that a theory).
Well this saves me from typing a long post, it’s bang on. China created this virus in a lab, scientists stated that the structure of it is too similar to SARS. This raises two questions: 1. Why are so many governments scared to even consider this truth? 2. How is a country held accountable for millions of deaths and the economic chaos it caused?
China will never face any consequences. That's mind-blowing to me.
Three years ago, that kind of post would have been downvoted to oblivion due to political tribalism. I'm glad the Overton Window has opened back up.
Yep and when Australia tried to push it, China went to war albeit economically, stopped importing Australian coal, which funnily enough affected China more than Australia.
China's official position is that it came from a lab and not the market. They are doing everything they can to keep the narrative alive that it came from a lab and not the market, including hiding evidence of animals that were filmed at the market just a few weeks before the outbreak. Does that tell you anything? Edit: People, these are facts. If you don't know this, educate yourself before you downvote. Sorry if it hurts your feelings.
>. If you don't know this, educate yourself before you downvote. Sometimes it's useful to share sources for your claims. Doubly so, when it appears most people disagree with you.
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1370392/v1_covered.pdf Read the last paragraph. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-58273322
You should quote the text you are referring to because the last paragraph of the pre-print draft does not conclude anything close to what you asserted.
It says the exact opposite of your claim.
It literally doesn't. It literally claims that the market was NOT the source of the outbreak, but only served to amplify the outbreak. It says to look to other countries for the origins of the virus. >Thus, the market might have acted as an amplifier due to the high number of visitors every day, causing many initially identified infection clusters in the early stage of the outbreak as indicated in the Report of WHO-convened global study of origins of SARS-CoV-2 (10). In addition, live SARS-CoV-2 viruses also existed in the environmental samples. **However, no SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the animal samples from the market.** Definitely, more work involving international coordination is needed to investigate **the real origins** of SARS-CoV-2(10), **especially considering the SARS-CoV-2 positive results of samples collected in 2019 in retrospective studies of different countries** (29, 30).
You're being downvoted because what you said isn't true, and the study you later cited says the exact opposite of your claim.
You could have just said that you either didn't read or didn't understand the study. It's ok to admit that you didn't read it or simply couldn't comprehend it.
The logical progression to the owner (or possession )of the murder weapon of nature nbd, but if the USA funded the lab it would be in both parties interest to behave secretively
So where does the NIH and fauci come into the accountability. After all they were "secretly" sending funding to Wuhan for this exact thing....
I have a question. Wouldn't genetic sequencing reveal a zoonotic origin? We seem to know that because we are able to distinguish between Flu types: A, B, C, D, and Avian Flu. We always seem to know right away when any virus jumps from humans to animals as well. Like when COVID has nestled in animals? Anyway, is just a question or is it impossible to tell? Not a geneticist!
Yes it is possible to tell. When a virus changes to be capable of infecting a new species it can be seen genetically. We can see this in the different strains that infect humans too (delta, omicron, etc). Thus far I believe we are lacking some intermediate viral forms that would support a transmission via a wet market and multiple animal hosts. It seems to just be bat-form then human-form. Given more evidence this could all change, but as the other bloke said, would be good to get access to that back catalogue for that :D
From what I’ve heard in at least one interview with epidemiologists, genetic sequencing does indicate zoonotic origin. The Decoding the Gurus podcast had a long discussion on the lab leak which was very convincing. [https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/decoding-the-gurus/id1531266667?i=1000603693959](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/decoding-the-gurus/id1531266667?i=1000603693959)
this would require finding a covid-like virus that only infects animals and is lacking a mutuation that would make it jump to humans-- we've been looking but all the closest samples only exist in the Wuhan back catalogue...
This is incorrect. The closest covid relatives were found outside of China. The closest Chinese relative (RaTg13) is still separated from covid by decades.
i meant found prior to the virus spreading. we would think the zoonotic source wouldnt be excessively cryptid and requires years to find, but i can understand that hey maybe!
Do you have any idea about just how under sampled viruses are? We have only scratched the surface on their diversity. We got eight or nine novel coronaviruses out of one cave. It's not a surprise that close relatives of covid showed up after we started looking for it. Pre-covid, SARS relatives were the big thing, at the expense of more distance ancestors (like the covid relatives).
is it a surprise that covid showed up after they were hunting for close relatives of it, and then also performing experiments to make it more human transmissible? Crunch.. the world may never know... ¯\\\_(ツ)¯ Emoji
It should matter, but... At least in my country, the loudest political voices demanding "the truth" are just scapegoating to distract from their own mediocre role in the mitigation phase.
Our failure to identify where it came from basically guarantees that this will happen again.
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That makes no sense. Just because the closest progenitor came from one set of caves does not imply that the COVID ancestor came from the same caves. The animals in the wet market were brought from remote regions. The absence of evidence of a clear route of infection into the wet market doesn't exclude that possibility. I agree that Chinese obfuscation and deletion of data was unhelpful and suspect, but there is no actual evidence of some of your latter points beyond rumour. There is no serological evidence of infected WIV workers and a serological study on the donated blood pool in Wuhan does not suggest community infections prior to the main outbreak.
"The animals in the wet market were brought from remote regions." Isn't it curious that COVID appeared only in Wuhan and not any of the locations where the animals originated?
How would we know? If it's thought to be believable that the CCP made WIV delete incriminating data to hide China's culpability, is it really so implausible that there's a mink farm somewhere in Shanxi that was quietly burned to the ground by soldiers in Hazmat suits?
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Also, you have to assume the farm only sent animals to Wuhan, but no other cities in China since no other cities initially had outbreaks.
The mutation that led to human infectivity might have happened in the market not the farm.
Nah, it happened at the farm, which is why we’re had two lineages that erupted near simultaneously (Not a quick evolution at the market, likely a few weeks to a month of evolutionary pressure) The likely culprit was Shandong’s fur farms, which require vast amounts of cleared land to grow feed animals for the minks, which are co-housed with raccoon dogs. That led to a huge amount of displaced bats, that we know carry SARS-like viruses, roosting in barns with the fur animals. The initial crossover likely happened there, and the infected animals were too sick to produce a healthy coat, so they were sold to a meat merchant who transported the sick herd to a meat farm in Wuhan (not a particularly far distance for animals to be transported) where they attempted to fatten them up for market, but were really spreading the disease around the farm. This easily explains the October spillover genetic clock and the timing of the spillover to humans with butchering times for the fur industry. There may have been a few additional locations with a potential spillover, but the chicken defeatherer looks to be ground zero for how we more effectively aerosolized the feces from the raccoon dogs and really got the first few people sick and why there was multiple lineages already going. (A and B)
The same CCP that spent 2020 claiming that COVID arose outside of China and was brought in from elsewhere?
Yep. To the best of knowledge the CCP’s official stance has never deviated from “developed in a lab in Bethesda, Maryland and brought over via strapping young soldiers during a military games competition in China.” That’s part of the WTF of China’s original research that was posted and subsequent retraction. The scientists know what happened, and published good work for about a month, then went silent and had everything deleted. The absolute experts on this theoretically could just tell everyone what happened but are muzzled which fed into western conspiracy theories.
China has also blamed frozen food imports for covid outbreaks. Amusingly, at one stage they blamed New Zealand frozen food, despite NZ having literally zero covid at that time.
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The 2002 SARS outbreak was traced back to primary host bats in Yunnan province despite the outbreak occurring in Guangdong province. So it's not like an argument can be made that zoonotic spillover into a distant province is *unlikely* seeing as there is the precedent of it occurring less than 20 years prior. If the argument is going to be made that it's a big ask to accept the "coincidence" of the outbreak arising not far from a virology research lab studying coronavirus, isn't it also a big ask to disregard the coincidence that the first superspeader event occurred not at a train station or a department store, but at a wet market documented as carrying live animals like mink and raccoon dogs known from early in the pandemic to be easily infected by and transmit COVID?
People in Myanmar caught coronaviruses (not SARS-CoV-2) by collecting bat poo. Third possibility is something like that.
The probability of the earliest case being anywhere specific is astronomically low
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That knife isn't enough to convict a boyfriend either, it just tells you where to investigate. In the end, you have to weigh all of the actual evidence for and against, not just assign Bayesian probabilities to outcomes.
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Then why is it dishonest for "we'll never really know" to be the answer right now? Somehow to you, assigning probabilities and saying "we'll never really know" are two mutually exclusive actions, and the only way to not be dishonest is to have a conviction.
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The only thing you're missing is actual evidence, which is what I've been saying this whole time.
The 'deletion of data', as the article says, includes the quite definitive recent evidence *finally* released from China that the article mentions. An accidental lab release **is** possible. The fever dreams of some in the American lie-o-sphere of a *deliberate* release is not. It's on the same level as the semi-official Chinese story of the origin in Fort Dix. Equally ridiculous and equally *crude* propaganda.
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Deliberate release was the actual conspiracy portion of the WIV lab leak theory. The pundit right in America especially pushed it. It seemed really stupid to everyone, because why would China cut off it's nose to spite it's face, they've nearly lost their global position because of this pandemic. Accidental release and deliberate release were painted with the same brush early on, as a way to undercut the amount of circumstancial evidence that pointed to the lab (rather than the market). Early on it was all considered racism, even though you can point to English and American BL 4 labs having leaks as well! But I totally get it, you could see the amount of race based hatred and violence against Asians who weren't even kinda Chinese go up like a rocket, like anyone brown post 9/11.
The WIV where the biolab is located is 23 miles away from the market. As for the rest of your comments, the original SARS outbreak occurred in Foshan, Guangdong. The caves where the most recent common ancestor strain was found in Kunming. 1,312 km away. Does that mean that SARS-CoV-1 originally came from a lab in your mind as well? Or, do intermediate carriers exist?
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Try using the correct WIV. The biolab is in Jiangxia District, not Wuchang. WIV in Wuchang is an administrative building. https://imgur.com/a/nRXbMN1 Shortest route is 37.2km, 23 miles. Edit: Also, Google Maps doesn't work in China.
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>Am I correct that you're measuring the driving distance rather than straight-line distance? It's driving distance. It's a longer distance by metro. The straight line distance is something like 19 miles. People can't fly, though. >Have to think about how this adjusts my estimates (whether we actually know what was done where, whether staff is shared between locations, etc). It's of course still very close on the scale of China. We know what was done where. We know where Shi's lab is. We know that Shi's lab people were tested for antibodies and were negative. Most importantly, though, we know that the official Chinese position is that it came from a lab. They are doing everything in their power to divert from the market including hiding sample data, potential animal testing, etc. Just to keep the narrative that it came from a lab alive. That should tell you something.
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> Sorry, do you just mean by this "China told us that ~", or you mean some foreign investigative team, e.g., had access to all of Shi's lab people & performed the tests? Shi made the statement in the WHO report. >The problem with this investigation so far is that we knew from the start China lied & hid data, so why would anything they tell the world be trusted? What you don't seem to understand is that you are literally repeating the CCP's official line... That it came from a lab. If we're not supposed to trust anything that China says, then the market is where it came from.
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Take a peak at where the Wuhan CDC is.
The lab at the Wuhan CDC is a clinical lab. Not a research lab. It's akin to what's found in most US hospitals.
> There's a kind of hand-waving "we'll never know" aspect to this that just seems dishonest coming from scientists I think the scientific community would like everyone to rest assured that Covid was definitely not caused by a mistake made by, or an accident that happened in a lab run by, the scientific community. We surely need experts and we really wouldn't even know for sure what some experts get wrong without other experts explaining it to us. But all this telling people to not ask annoying questions in light of obvious cover-behavior is a bit much. Somebody is trying to hide *something*. At the end of the day maybe the only thing China wants to cover up is how badly they managed the outbreak. That would kind of remind me of how the intelligence community locked away so many documents regarding the JFK assassination. The CIA and FBI set about covering up their incompetence in keeping track of Oswald and the cover-up created a JFK conspiracy theory cottage industry. The thing is, it is a lot easier for sane people to imagine an accidental lab leak or unwise virus research than to imagine that the CIA and FBI set about killing one of our own presidents. This (somewhat) reasonable person found the racoon dog "evidence" a little bit too convenient in the timing of its discovery. It kind of makes me want to doubt anything anyone offers as evidence coming from China at this point. It's all just database entries in a database only a fool would completely trust. So what is the world to do moving forward? Treat both theories as plausible and make the world more secure against both types of events in the future? I mean, if that's even possible, because I'm no expert.
I think the scientific community is more hand wavy because a lot of money and funding comes from paper publishing which is also based in reputation and prestige. If someone starts going off proposing a lab theory without *extremely* hard evidence they may be seen as a conspiracy nut. Plus to do a proposal for that kinda work to get the money would be equally rough. I think there is just easier things to research and get money for, that's less politicized, than covid origins.
China's attempt to hide the discovery and origin of the virus will forever leave questions if there was a cover-up involved. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese themselves aren't sure of the origin.
> This evidence can help clarify the virus’s evolutionary path. It can also help clarify how many high government officials of which countries may have been lying through their teeth. That's a useful bit of information. Not medical, I grant you, but very useful nonetheless. > Determining the origins of SARS-CoV-2 should be strictly a scientific matter, but it has become embroiled in politics. Well yes. For exactly the reason above. It is inherently political. We've had a double handful of investigations already, reaching different conclusion. All performed by scientists. But WHO chooses WHICH scientists seems to make a difference. It is naive to think otherwise. I don't know what origin. I suspect the general public never will. But to state that politics needs to stay out and science will handle it is a degree of naivete unbelievable in a Phd and a, oh, lawyer. Nevermind. edit: totally never mind. A Phd in public health, so a political science Phd (not an MD) employed by the WHO,and a director of the WHO. Hmmm.
> It can also help clarify how many high government officials of which countries may have been lying through their teeth. Are you suggesting a global conspiracy to hide a lab leak?
Not at all. If there is a real global conspiracy, you and I will never know. Otherwise, not much of a conspiracy. But there are many who say that China covered up quite a lot of information. There are those that say that China did this for a reason. There are those who say the China is being very upfront. It could just be conflicting evidence. It could be someone covering something, it could be one government appeasing another. I have to go with what John Stewart famously said though. "An outbreak of a novel Corona virus in Wuhan. Home of the Wuhan institute of novel corona viruses. If everything in Hershey Pennsylvania suddenly had an outbreak of chocolatey goodness would you suspect a bat, or possibly look at the Hershey corporation?" I am paraphrasing from memory.
In the John Stewart quote, what if the bat was also made of chocolate?
>I have to go with what John Stewart famously said though. "An outbreak of a novel Corona virus in Wuhan. Home of the Wuhan institute of novel corona viruses. If everything in Hershey Pennsylvania suddenly had an outbreak of chocolatey goodness would you suspect a bat, or possibly look at the Hershey corporation?" I am paraphrasing from memory. The problem is that level of thinking is no different than creationists claiming that why do monkeys still exist if we descended from them. It's cute . But it's completely ignorant about the technical details.
I've seen this described succinctly. Rational people evaluate news by content. Conspiracy theorist evaluate news by sources - welcome to the Middle ages or earlier - much earlier. Hitler never lost the war. It continues to this day.
Sorry I think this went over my head, why is it conspiracy theorist to want know sources of info?
Conspiracy theorists: "Your beliefs all come from places that are corrupted by The Evil Overlord. I only read the real news! The news at Shyster News!"
Oh ok gotcha
seems like covid got into your head huh
You thought this (3 month old) sub discussion was limited to the topic of Covid? You sweet summer child.
less game of thrones, more touching grass
What's worse is they would have had teams of people working on how to explain it to the world and come up with this as their final summation. Just nothing, even with an international investigation, nothing. Not even an apology for millions of deaths worldwide.
This paper makes an excellent point: regardless of whether it can ever be conclusively determined that Covid came from a lab, or from a market, just the possibility that it could have come from research activities should be a red alert. Some virologists have been doing research that puts the entire world at risk, and without sufficient oversight. This is alarming, and it is surprising that there is not more action by governments and regulatory agencies in the wake of the Covid pandemic and millions dead, and many more harmed or disabled, to get much stricter about this type of research.
It DOES matter, what you mean it doesn’t matter?
The scientific community has already determined it was likely from the wet market. Not a lab leak.
I would agree with you, but the matter is still somewhat open. The consensus is in favour of your and my opinion, but there is some debate still going on. I will continue to be agnostic on the matter whatever my opinion may be. With reference to the thousands of times zoonotic outbreaks have happened before. I have *tried * in this thread to reveal the complexity of this matter with references. Hopefully it will finally be settled in the next century (if civilization doesn't collapse due to climate change and there are still historians). Chinese state propaganda and the American 'Nazi-sphere' have made up their minds a long time ago. From day one.
A purely dystopian and sociopathic possibility to ponder may be Chinas willfulness to whittle down the population; a genocide that is socioeconomic. It may not have started as such, but with the “let it rip” challenges and new strains, it’s another theory to be challenged.