Well, that's an interesting question. If the public health dept wants to inspect a restaurant to make sure its hygiene standards are adequate, and the restaurant goes out of its way to try to delay or block such an inspection, should we lean towards:
a) The restaurant has something to hide and is therefore likely to have poor standards
or
b) It is irrational to hold ANY position on the hygiene standards of the restaurant, given the lack of dispositive data
This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of the potential for embarrassment and retaliation. They might even have sought to destroy as much evidence as possible rather than trying to uncover the truth internally: if nobody knows the truth, the truth can never leak out.
The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.
You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.
Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirmation bias.
Hmm, but have there been any other pandemics that started close to a lab researching the kind of pathogen involved in the pandemic? Funny you should ask. There was this one:
By “came about the same way”, I’m assuming you mean “by zoonotic transfer”. But the 1977 Russian flu pandemic is now widely believed to have been a lab leak, or a vaccine trial that went wrong.
Rubbish. The response would not be to increase surveillance near labs. It would be to float a moratorium on GoF research and to increase biosafety at labs. Much of the work being done at the WIV was carried out at BSL-2, which is absolutely shocking.
“In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, China (Fig. 1A), located 1.1–6.0 km from two caves (Yanzi and Shitou). We have been conducting longitudinal molecular surveillance of bats for CoVs in these caves since 2011 and have found that they are inhabited by large numbers of bats including Rhinolophus spp., a major reservoir of SARSr-CoVs.
[…]
As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.”
Also:
Even the founders of Moderna would have had their lives made worse overall by SARS-COV-2. Money and utility are different things. They and their families now live in a shittier world. Even a (rational) psychopath would not gain overall from unleashing COVID on the world. Nobody wins.
She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelmingly probable, why would the news have triggered the kind of reaction she later reported having?
Bear in mind that your analysis is predicated on the falsehood that the WIV had been set up in Wuhan because that was a bat virus hotspot. So you’ll need to revisit that line of reasoning.
If I could Snopes-whack just one persistent myth in this debate, it would be that one. It’s completely untrue. And the WIV used the human population of Wuhan as a control in their experiments because there was so little exposure to zoonotic viruses within that population.
I’m not entirely sure where this pernicious myth started. I do remember Maggie Koerth pushing that line on Twitter with some kind of smug joke at some point, and it getting lots of enthusiastic upvotes. When it was later pointed out that Koerth had got it wrong, she pretended that by claiming the WIV had been built in the area to study bat coronaviruses, the area she had in mind was “China”. This is like arguing that it makes perfect sense to set up a lab in New York to study rattlesnakes. (Of COURSE you would; the USA is where the rattlesnakes are!)
So Shi Zhengli’s comment makes perfect sense, and was not taken out of context. The WIV was not studying bat-borne sarbecoviruses in Hubei, and had not been set up there to do so. All the interesting viruses were down in Yunnan, a thousand miles away. She meant exactly what she said.
The main reason to suspect that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV is that we know that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV.
No, we don’t know there were two separate crossover events. The two lineages are more likely to be the result of a minor mutation having occurred during human-human transmission, i.e. subsequent to the initial (single) crossover event.
A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant.
We do know that the pandemic started in Wuhan, or certainly that that’s the first major population centre it hit. Had it started elsewhere that’s where all the early hospitalizations would have been.
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