I don't know whether SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. But if it did, then not only is it probably not the first lab-origin pandemic, but it's also not the first time the WHO initially excluded that possibility.
The 1977 Russian Flu pandemic was genetically near-identical to a strain from 1950, without the expected mutations that should have appeared after 27 years of undetected circulation among humans or animals. It's been widely suspected in mainstream literature to have escaped from a research or vaccine manufacturing accident, to the point that the NEJM casually wrote:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
And it's absolutely bizarre to me that people are asking why the origin even matters. After thousands of people died in Bhopal, did it matter whether better chemical safety standards could have prevented that? So with millions dead now, how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
Summary (IIRC): The most likely explanation of its origins is a person who collected bats for a lab in Wuhan contracted the disease in the cave where bats were collected.
Almost certainly a false positive. You can't have a virus propagating with a R0 of 2-4 and a cycle of ~1 week start in September 2019 yet have almost no cases by December 2019.
According to this article, 11.6% of 959 healthy volunteers in a random sample were positive on their antibody test. so 12% of italians had had Covid in September? And antibody levels decline after a while, so probably even more.
Sorry, but this would be pretty insane. Most likely explanation is probably false positives or scientific fraud or a combination. Antibody tests don't really prove much anyway since they are not directly identifying the virus. A full sequencing of a virus would be much better. The RNA would also give us information about the evolution of the virus.
> how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?
Wait are we looking to improve and make sure that this doesn’t happen again, or do we just want someone to blame so we can continue to do nothing?
For the most probable outcomes, it's about improving (whether it's a lab escape that requires tightening how labs work, or a natural origin that requires, well, something).
Of course, if theoretically this or another pathogen was discovered to be human-made / engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical), then obviously it might have "holding someone responsible" repercussions.
And there might be other scenarios I can't think of that would engender different reactions.
Bottom line, when investigating to discover the truth, I don't think it's valid to beforehand decide on the reason that you're seeking the truth.
The "on purpose" bit seems highly implausible. AFAIU the ones with the means would have been the Chinese national labs and maybe their US collaborators. But releasing this right in their backyard would be an implausibly idiotic move on the Chinese part. Planting it by the US would both be terribly hard and a predictable own goal.
Would your definition of "on purpose" cover the following?
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12]
You make a good point. The wet market is only 20km from the lab, so if this one is lab-based (and not a bizarre coincidence) it seems much more likely to be an accident.
Oh, I read more into the "on purpose" than probably meant. Yes, a lab accident looks like a completely reasonable hypothesis to me. What I meant is that it's implausible that this has been released on purpose.
Just to be clear, I completely agree with you. That's why I said:
> engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical).
Because I'm thinking of future scenarios where this kind of thing happens and we want to uncover the truth, and in which it's more likely to be on purpose. Probably more relevant to a nuclear strike or cyber attack or whatever than a biological weapon, given collateral damage.
The western world just wants to find an excuse to blame the Chinese, so that they can fulfill their wet dreams of invading China, and starting world war 3 with them.
They were even demanding reparations too! If the Chinese didn’t have ICBM nukes to defend themselves, then you can bet that the western nations would’ve mounted a multi-country alliance to attack China by now.
Read up Jack London’s The Unparalled Invasion from 1910. The Grand Master Plan is all laid out right there for you. It’s disgusting. You’ll want to throw up after you read it. But yet, this is how the white people of the western world sees China.
The 1977 Russian Flu pandemic was genetically near-identical to a strain from 1950, without the expected mutations that should have appeared after 27 years of undetected circulation among humans or animals. It's been widely suspected in mainstream literature to have escaped from a research or vaccine manufacturing accident, to the point that the NEJM casually wrote:
> The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322
But at the time, the WHO said:
> Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...
And it's absolutely bizarre to me that people are asking why the origin even matters. After thousands of people died in Bhopal, did it matter whether better chemical safety standards could have prevented that? So with millions dead now, how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate?