SunlitZelkova Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 From a purely logical standpoint, it does not matter. As to why people care so much, here are my guesses- 1. They just want to know what happened. 2. They think information about how it happened is necessary to prevent a similar occurrence. 3. They think that if it does turn out to be a human caused accident, appropriate punishment can be handed out to those responsible. Also, some people have a tendency to want to blame others for the problem occurring at the time. I am not accusing anyone on this forum of having such emotions/thoughts. But there are definitely those out there who "want to know" this was all someone else's (another country's) fault, not theirs. China has not actually broken any laws that would result in them being required to pay for damages or anything like that. So the third point is moot. Even if they had, there are no courts capable of holding a trial and properly convicting China. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KerikBalm Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 (edited) 18 hours ago, Beccab said: I read the whole thing, yes. I was questioning where exactly you saw the fact that a natural spillover was "extremely unlikely" while only the lab leak was "plausible", given that nothing in the article you mentioned or in the quotes you posted supports any of that Sorry, I was too concise, it was really 2 points. Point 1 is that the scientific consensus is shifting away from the conclusion that its a natural spillover, towards uncertainty or a lab leak. Point 2 is my own assessment of the data. Also I note that you misquoted me: I did not say "extremely unlikely", but rather "really implausible" - effectively the same, thing, I just expect quotes to be actual quotes and not paraphrasing. To those saying why does it matter, such as @mikegarrison and @SunlitZelkova , this is one reason why it matters: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08837-7 There is a difference between knowing something is a risk, and knowing how much of a risk it is. The determination here will affect all future risk assessments. Also I would like to point out that the absence of international law that could be enforced is not the same thing as an absence of reprecussions. The political implications are huge, which is why this is so contentious. @JoeSchmuckatelli Yes, if you hear hooves, think horses initially, but if you look around and realize that you are next to the Africa section of a zoo, that may change your assessment, no? I believe that is analagous ot what is happening here. Since the dawn of humanity, every new virus was essentially a spillover, until 1977 when an H1N1 flu strain escaped a lab that was using it to develop a vaccine. Natural spillover is the default assumption in the absence of further evidence. We saw what was clearly natural spillover in the first SARS outbreak at a wetmarket. Here we saw what seemed to be another SARS type virus outbreaking at a wetmarket. The natural spillover hypothesis seemed very likely, and the closeness to a coronavirus research center as just a coincidence. Further evidence has emerged that makes the probability of a natural spillover less likely, and a lab leak more likely (whether it can be properly said that the lab leak probability is now >50% is the subject of the current scientific debate). What is now clear is that a spillover did not occur at the Wuhan wet market. The WHO report agrees with this conclusion, the Chinese agree with this conclusion, basically all experts agree with this conclusion. The Wuhan wet market outbreak was just an early super-spreader event, the virus was circulating before reaching the wet market, and had already split into A and B lineages, with the B lineage being what super-spread in the wet market. Ok, so the spillover didn't happen at the wetmarket... well there are still other possibilites for natural spillover for what is clearly descended from a bat virus. What about Bats around Wuhan? Shi Zhengli, the lead researcher at the WIV herself, and the WHO report says that there was extensive sampling of the bats in the Hubei province where Wuhan is located, and there are no remotely similar viruses in bats. So it wasn't local bats, and it wasn't animals imported via the wetmarket. Rodents stowing away coming from another location? The early strains of SARS-CoV-2 didn't replicate in rodents (some of the variants now do), so it wasn't rodents. What about other farmed animals like Mink and such? well Shi and the WHO report both say that they sampled the farms in Hubei, and again found nothing. It wasn't farmed animals. What about people coming from other regions? The closest publicly disclosed bat virus comes from the Yunnan province, 1500 km away, and was collected (along with many other coronaviruses, and other viruses) following an incident in which 6 miners working in a bat cave fell ill, and 3 died. Their cause of death prior to the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak was said to be a viral pneumonia with secondary fungal infection, possibly due to a coronavirus or henipa-like virus. After the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, Shi Zhengli said in an interview that it was just a fungal infection (that's a suspicious change in diagnosis with no reason given). She also said that they looked for evidence of past infection in the residents of that town and province, nobody had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. So it wasn't someone from where the closest known animal virus came from, that travelled to Wuhan. The fact is that there has been no evidence for any proposed natural spillover scenario . Every specific natural spillover route proposed thus far appears to have been ruled out. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a natural spillover route that we just haven't thought of yet... but at the moment, there is no viable hypothesis that isn't extremely vague, retaining viability only because it lacks testable specifics. In contrast, we have an outbreak in close vicinity to a lab that: * was conducting spillover studies with live viruses * has a publication history of constructing infectious chimeric viruses and engaging in other gain of function research * has the worlds largest collection of coronavirus samples * has not made its sequence database public, and continues to refuse to do so * had a sample of the closest publicly disclosed virus to SARS-CoV-2 (RaTG13) for about 7 years before the outbreak * held on to the partial sequence data of RaTG13 virus for 4 years, and the full sequence data for 2 years before disclosing it * renamed the virus and initially implied that they did nothing with the RaTG13 sample after collection and only sequenced it after the outbreak, before being forced to disclose/clarify that they worked with it earlier after people noticed the connection with partial sequence data from a 2016 publication that used the old name, and found time stamps in the data they uploaded * refused to disclose sufficient raw sequence data for RaTG13 for 2 months, and did so only after it was noticed that it was impossible to obtain the published RaTG13 genome from the raw sequence data that they made available. * has said that the RaTG13 sample is gone, and comes from a 2013 fecal/poophole swab, yet the raw data they uploaded has a short description of the methods, which describes a broncho-alvelar lavage specimen, and there are nearly no bacterial reads in the NGS sequence data (about 0.6-0.7%) , when other sequences of this sample type uploaded from the same lab typically have 50%-90% bacterial reads... suggesting that it was not a fecal/poophole sample, and the lab has lied about the provenance of the sequence. * has not allowed the WHO team to see data on suspected earlier cases hospitalized for viral pnuemonia. * was criticized in 2018 for poor safety protocols, and is in a country that allowed SARS-CoV-1 to escape from a lab multiple times (after studying it from a natural spillover) On top of this the virus when it appeared was already well adapted to humans, being significantly more transmissible than late outbreak SARS-CoV-1 Notably, late outbreak SARS-CoV-1 was itself significantly more transmissible than eary outbreak SARS-CoV-1, because it had recently crossed over and was under strong positive selection pressure to adapt to humans. In contrast even the earliest SARS-CoV-2 lineages were observed to have high negative selection pressure accross most of the genome, and only "relaxed" selection pressure in others (note the variants we see are mainly adapting to population level immunity to the old variants, not to transmission within humans, with the apparent exception of just 3 mutations: D614G, N501Y, and a mutation in the Furin cleavage site) Also worth noting, none of the related coronaviruses have furin cleavage sites, only distantly related coronaviruses have them, and they are not homologous to the site in SARS-CoV-2. It did not come from recombination with another coronavirus. It must have arisen de novo (which can happen), but that is more likely, and indeeed fairly common in serial passage experiments. Furthermore, we have numerous publications describing addition of de novo furin cleavage sites (including at least 1 from the WIV). While the furin cleavage site is not the smoking gun that some claim it is, this feature is more expected from a lab leak than from a natural spillover. Then there are suspicious actions of the Chinese government that: * used police to silence doctors trying to draw attention to the outbreak of a new virus * publicly denied that there was human to human transmission, when the data was clear that there was * withheld the sequence data for the new virus for weeks * has banned publishing any papers that suggest a lab leak is a possibility * tacitly admits the virus may be artificial, by promoting the idea that it came from a US lab * promotes a hypothesis utterly without evidence that it was imported from outside china in frozen goods, when no such transmission has ever been confirmed, and would require high environmental levels of the virus, indicating widespread circulation before shipment (ie, an utterly implausible theory) * censored rumors that arose IN CHINA that a WIV researcher was patient zero, (said WIV researcher can be documented to have worked there, but canot be reached: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Yanling ) If, on top of this, the intelligence service reports are correct that multiple WIV researchers had to be hospitalized shortly before the outbreak began... the evidence looks pretty damning. I hear hooves, and I see that I'm in a zoo's africa section. Maybe I'm hearing some nearby Przewalski's horses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przewalski's_horse ), but I think its Zebras. Edited June 3, 2021 by KerikBalm Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DDE Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 (edited) 11 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said: 3. They think that if it does turn out to be a human caused accident, appropriate punishment can be handed out to those responsible. And this in turn is driven by a cognitive bias that whenever something big happens, it has a perpetrator. We really don't like to accept that a major catastrophe is no-one's fault. 11 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said: Even if they had, there are no courts capable of holding a trial and properly convicting China. Once you find a person you wish to convict, the way you dress up the ritual of condemnation becomes largely irrelevant. 13 hours ago, mikegarrison said: All of a sudden this is getting massive play in multiple forums I participate in. Looks like the Wuhan lab leak narrative has been officially upgraded from a marginal, racist red hatter cope to a respectable theory worth pursuing. I really don't like how the mood is looking these days: [snip] Edited June 3, 2021 by Vanamonde Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KerikBalm Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 (edited) 6 hours ago, DDE said: Looks like the Wuhan lab leak narrative has been officially upgraded from a marginal, racist red hatter cope to a respectable theory worth pursuing. I really don't like how the mood is looking these days: At the same time, one shouldn't shy away from a conclusion because you don't like the implications, or because of who else supported the idea. [snip] Racist [snip] may have been vocal proponents of this idea, with little evidence and incoherent arguments... but that doesn't mean that they are wrong. A broken clock is right twice per day... as the saying goes. I'm still not saying that this was engineered, or a bioweapon, just an accident and maybe a result of irresponsible but well intentioned research. I saw one proposal that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of an attempt to develop an attenuated vaccine against RaTG13 (or a similar virus isolated from the same cave, since we don't fully know what they found in that cave, they just published about another virus from there last month, collected back to 2015, called RaTG15), under the assumption that it may have been what killed that 3 out of 6 miners who were infected back in 2012. If that 2012 incident was caused by a SARS-like CoV, it had an apparent fatality rate of 50%, and SARS-CoV-2 is thus significantly milder... We can't call a lab nefarious for developing a vaccine for a disease that has a 50% fatality rate (even worse than the MERS coronavirus)... although that is pure speculation. Lab-leak does not mean they did anything nefarious like bioweapon research Edited June 3, 2021 by Vanamonde Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DDE Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 1 hour ago, KerikBalm said: Lab-leak does not mean they did anything nefarious like bioweapon research The extremely vague boundary between vaccine reaearch and bioweapon research would be exploited immediately. Hence, as I elucidated months ago, China has nothing to gain from transparency. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KerikBalm Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 1 hour ago, DDE said: China has nothing to gain from transparency. If you think China has nothing to gain from burying the lab-leak hypothesis, I must ask: why you think that they are trying so hard to do just that? Clearly they consider that they have something to gain from that. If it wasn't a lab leak, then they would have something to gain from some level of transparency. I get it, there was military biodefense research going on there, they aren't going to allow a full audit. However, they haven't even made an attempt to be helpful. There are various levels of transparency, and it is the world's foremost coronavirus research institute, and the worst pandemic in a century or more... and the WIV is being about as unhelpful as it could possibly be. Allowing the international team to request samples from WIV researchers in order to perform their own serology test would not lead to vaccine research being called bioweapons research, and would strengthen China's claim that there were no infected WIV researchers. Access to their database of sequences of samples collected in the wild would be helpful, and would not lead to vaccine research being called bioweapons research. Publishing the SARS-CoV-2 sequence as soon as they knew it wouldn't have been a problem if they had nothing to hide. Acknowledging human to human spread as soon as there was evidence: ditto Not lying about RaTG13 would have turned out better for them, and I can't imagine any incentive they'd have to do so unless they had something to hide. Similar comments about not jailing the doctors that alerted the public Similar comments about allowing access to the bat caves where related viruses have been found... Even discounting China's suspicious behavior, there's no evidence for any proposed lab leak scenario, and a ton of evidence pointing to a lab leak. I will grant that the evidence is mostly circumstantial, but that kind of evidence can actually be quite good despite the popular perception and derogarotry comments towards it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kerbiloid Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 Being transparent once, will make you look suspiciously next time when you would prefer to be opaque. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KerikBalm Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 fine, ignore the actions of china, and just look at the other evidence. The complete lack of evidence for a natural spillover in places you'd expect to find it The proximity to the lab in combination with the history of the lab, and the distance to any closely related virus in animals. The spillover studies with modified S proteins that we know the lab was doing The remarkable level of adaptation to humans in the earliest know strains The strange furin site that couldn't have arisen by recombination, and would take multiple non-functional mutation to arise and become functional, in combination with the use of furin cleavage sites in research The very large collection of CoVs there, in particular the presence of a sample of the closest knwon virus that had been there for 7 years. Does this really sound like a natural spillover should still be the preferred working hypothesis? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kerbiloid Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 Is there a statistics of lethality/contagiosity by race / major ethnicity? Those three (?) fungi in India - are they a problem somewhere else? How much do they add to the lethality? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adsii1970 Posted June 3, 2021 Share Posted June 3, 2021 This thread has been locked pending review. Thanks for your understanding. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vanamonde Posted June 4, 2021 Share Posted June 4, 2021 Politics is all around this subject but for the duration of the emergency we've let the thread run as a way for people to share our common experience with the crisis. But the pandemic is now thankfully passing, and the discussion is turning from commiseration to assigning blame. And assigning blame for a pandemic is off-topic for our friendly little space game forum. With that in mind, we are now closing this discussion and advising folks to move on to other topics. We hope you all are and remain well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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