Ok, I’ve always expected that a natural virus was accidentally released by a scientist from the virus lab. Not necessarily gain of function, but simply this is the place where all the weird Covid viruses are brought to when gathered from across the world. It’s the place which would have ALL the possible Covid viruses, from the least concerning to the one which escaped.
Every article countering that angle just feels light gaslighting.
That IMHO is a likely scenario, not that the outbreak was intentional (reptiles!) or engineered (secret technology!), but escaped from a lab that had been previously criticized for lax security.
One has to take into account that a global pandemic started just 800 meters away in a wet market in the heart of an 11-million metropolis. It could've been anywhere but it happened right next to the facility that was set up to collect and study viruses that could be dangerous to people.
One strange coincidence that is hard to assess is that the physician who first reported unusual cases of pneumonia-like infections, Li Wenliang, was an ophthalmologist; it just so happens that in the 2nd story of the Wuhan Huanan wet market (武汉华南海鲜批发市场) is a wholesale opticians' market (Huanan Glasses Wholesale City, 华南眼镜批发城).
What am I disproving? A Covid virus could have been in the wild, not yet transmitted to humans, and was then collected and brought to the lab. Only once it was accidentally released from the lab, (possibly having infected one of the workers), was it transmitted to the larger human population.
1) The Covid virus ended up in the Wuhan wet market from an animal for sale there, brought with the virus from the wild and got introduced into a human. Sure, that’s possible, but why there, and why at that time?
2) A worker from the Wuhan Covid Lab got infected with a sample that had been collected in the wild previously, and transmitted it to people or animals in the Wuhan wet market which then set off the pandemic.
3) The virus was engineered in the lab for gain of function, making it more likely to be transmitted between people, and then accidentally infected a worker in the lab who went to the wet market, infected people or animals there, which set off the pandemic.
I believe these are the three hypothesis which we are discussing.
1) possible, but seems unlikely.
2) seemed extremely possible. The lab is known to contain samples of Covid. It’s right next door to the wet market.
3) Gain of function happened to introduce exactly the capability this virus needed to infect others.
Hanlon’s Razor - never attribute to Malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Suggests that #2 is more likely than #3.
As for the wet market, I’d assume there are 10,000 similar wet markets in China. Only 1 is next door to a lab which studies covid. Why would this one wet market be the source, instead of the other 9,999?
If you have other hypothesis, happy to consider other ways this virus was introduced.
But, suggesting that it didn’t come from the Wuhan lab, feels like Chinese propaganda trying to gaslight.
All of these are addressed by Peter Miller in his debate with Saar Wilf[1].
What you're proposing isn't probabilistically sound. I'd really encourage you to watch the whole thing. They dive into likelihoods in much greater depth.
“The only lab leak scenario that fits is just someone going straight from the lab to the market”
So, let’s just assume there was an infected scientist from the Wuhan lab, but instead of him/her going to the Wuhan wet market, they went to another market 800 meters from the lab, and that was the source of the outbreak. These talking heads would then be telling me the same infinitesimal probability of it coming from the Covid lab.
The people with access to a known Covid source are literally 800 meters from the Wuhan wet market.
An asymptomatic scientist walked to the Wuhan market, spent some time at one stall, and then went home. I find no improbable scenarios there.
> "The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not 400 meters away from the Huanan seafood market. It is roughly 26,912 meters (or about 17 miles) away." ... "there are at least eight "Wuhan Disease Prevention and Control Center" locations in the Jianghan district of Wuhan (where the market is located) alone."
If "why there, and why at that time?" is a valid scissor, then it can't just apply to some scenarios and not others. It must be a universal scissor.
> An asymptomatic scientist walked to the Wuhan market, spent some time at one stall, and then went home. I find no improbable scenarios there.
Why there, and why at that time?
To me at least the probability of a virologist traveling to the wet market and then spreading the virus as if it were originated by zoonosis is strictly less probable than the scenario where it's simply zoonosis.
Then why was this virus only found at this wet market. I’m assuming there are 10k other wet markets in China. How many others found different strains of Covid?
How many different locations would you like it to spread from? Wuhan is actually a large transit hub for bringing in wet-market animals from all over southern China and many foreign sources, including Laos where the BANAL covid virus was found.
When SARS broke out in 2002 the first case
was an animal handler in a town 50 miles from Hong Kong. The initial spread of the SARS
virus infected farm workers, butcher shop workers, grocery store
workers, and people at farmers markets, just like the wet market in
Wuhan 17 years later. There were no virus labs anywhere near Foshan
(upriver of Hong Kong). The 2002 SARS epidemic started from natural
animal-to-human transmission, in an animal-handling complex, with a naturally occurring
coronavirus.
This question could be applied to every other case of zoonosis and reach the conclusion that zoonosis does not exist.
The expectation that explanations be satisfying is not an unbiased razor.
An infected animal had a chance encounter with a person that resulted in a transmissible infection. The desire to uncover who this is and when is admirable, but again. I suggest we apply the same standard to the lab leak hypothesis, there are plenty of labs why this one and why covid? Again, it's a satisfying explanation, but satisfiability and reality are orthogonal. Shall we need to track the lab leak down to a specific lab employee and ask them why it was leaked by them even if inadvertently?
The specific lab employee may not have even known they were infected. Many cases of Covid are asymptomatic. They may not even remember that they went to that wet market on the way home from the lab. Just because we don’t have a smoking gun now 4 years later, doesn’t mean that this wasn’t the cause.
Again, go with the “wild” scenario in which a lab worker in the only lab in the city (country? World?) which studies Covid, got infected, and went to the wet market, just 800M away, and infected other people/animals.
Now, given that’s the reality in this “hypothetical” scenario, what would the data look like when analyzed by the talking heads in the YouTube videos?
Again, they would come to the same conclusion - that it was impossible. And you would still say that satisfiability and reality are orthoganal, even though, in this hypothetical scenario, this was reality.
Clearly their brilliant deductive approach would have been wrong in this scenario, and your dismissal would have been equally wrong.
Now let’s talk about another scenario, in which the Covid epicenter started not in Wuhan, but in some wet market in Laos. No Covid research center within 800M of this wet market. No Chinese government trying to avoid international embarrassment of causing the pandemic, and attempting to cover up. Would I suggest that a researcher from the Wuhan Covid lab caused the infection in the Laos wet market? Of course not. In that scenario, naturally infected animals are the most likely cause. But, just for amusement, let’s think about the reality where it actually was caused by a worker in the Wuhan Covid lab. They got infected in the lab, travelled 2000 miles to Laos, went to this specific market, and infected some people and animals in the market. In this scenario, that’s the reality. The person had to travel for likely days, and not infect anyone else. The person likely only had dense public transport to get from A to B. They would have encountered thousands of people, for a collective tens of thousands of “interaction hours”, and nobody else got sick. The probability of this happening is extremely low.. but in this scenario is did happen.
What’s the difference in these two scenarios? The distance and time to travel between the Wuhan lab and the respective wet markets, which then results in more interaction hours, and the number of times a worker from the Wuhan lab visits each of these wet markets. How many times has a Covid Lab worker visited a random wet market in Laos? Once? Twice? How many times has a Wuhan Covid lab worker visited the specific wet market 800 meters away from the lab? I’m going to go with more than once or twice. Probably thousands of times.
I don’t live in Wuhan, or any city likely close to the same density, but I can walk out my front door, and walk to one of two coffee shops. One is 500 meters away, the other 800 meters away. There are some days in which I can walk to the coffee shop and not pass a single person. There are other days in which I pass 50 people. It takes roughly 5 minutes to walk to either coffee shop and the interaction with each of those 50 people take less than 2 seconds, for roughly 100 interaction-seconds. During the entire Covid lockdown, I make this walk daily, likely passing people with Covid, and never got infected.
An infected Wuhan Covid lab worker could walk from the lab to the wet market, and not infect anyone along the way.
While they were in the lab, wearing their faulty PPE which allowed them to get infected, their coworkers were properly using their PPE and were protected.
The worker walked to the wet market, infecting nobody along the way, because it was a walk outdoors, and there was a breeze, and it was an unusually empty time of the day, and he/she only passed a few people and only briefly.
Carving out a geographic region of zoonosis improbability around virology centers is not unbiased. That's the issue with starting with "it could have been any wet market," and then subtracting "but it couldn't be wet markets around virology centers," because then it would be "virology centers." Probability doesn't work like that.
I'm not sure what you mean here? The presence of the world's biggest collection of novel sarbecoviruses in Wuhan doesn't decrease P(Wuhan|natural), but it does increase P(Wuhan|research-related). So it absolutely should change your estimate of P(research-related|Wuhan) in the obvious way, unless your prior for a research-related pandemic is zero. I don't see how that prior could be zero, since the 1977 flu pandemic already killed ~700k people and is uncontroversially accepted to be of research-related origin.
The arguments today are much more sophisticated, though. The debate that you linked relied heavily on Pekar's "The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2". It took those conclusions at face value, apparently since nobody on the other side had the mathematical skills to go deeper.
But not only is their fundamental approach questionable (why would you trust a model that complex with no opportunity to validate it?), but their implementation was filled with careless mistakes:
They partially addressed this in their erratum, but made minimal changes to the language of their conclusions despite the Bayes factors changing by factor of ~10.
Assuming P(Wuhan|natural) and P(Wuhan|research-related) are mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and sum to unity then can you explain how one probability can increase without the other decreasing?
If the presence of virology institutes lowers the probability of zoonotic spillover then a great defense against zoonotic spillover is simply building a bunch of virology institutes.
I think you may have your conditional probabilities backward? P(research-related|origin-place) and P(natural|origin-place) do sum to one, since those are mutually exclusive and exhaustive outcomes.
P(origin-place|research-related) and P(origin-place|natural) don't, though. For example, if "origin-place" is "anywhere in the universe", then they're both exactly equal to one, so they sum to two. If it's "Mars", then they're both approximately zero.
The virology institute (again, not just any virology institute; the single largest collection of novel related viruses in the world by far) doesn't decrease the probability of natural pandemics. It increases the probability of research-related pandemics, so natural becomes a smaller fraction of that larger total.
The WIV is 17 miles away from the wet market. They are on opposite sides of the river. There were zero covid cases on the south side of the river during the first month of the outbreak.
Oh, but they do state that the infection cluster would have started in the lab.
I disagree with this premise, as the lab workers are likely all wearing PPE. Just one had a protocol lapse and got infected. The rest were protected by their masks.
Infected lab worker gets sick, but nobody else in the lab.
As the NY times notes in the URL its under /opinion/
The author of an NY times article is on record thusly:
In 2021, the same Alina Chan who penned the NYT op-ed said the following:
“I have days where I think this could be natural. And if it’s natural, then I’ve done a terrible thing because I’ve put a lot of scientists in a very dangerous spot by saying that they could be the source of an accident that resulted in millions of people dying. I would feel terrible if it’s natural and I did all this.”
She also wrote a book with a famous climate change denier, which is a bad move if you're trying to convince scientists, but a great move if you want to reach an audience of conspiracy theorists.
This article does not cast itself in a strong light by immediately calling the lab leak hypothesis a conspiracy theory. The lab leak hypothesis is another valid and plausible theory that could explain the origins of the pandemic. One must question the motives and obvious bias of anyone who feels compelled to call a scientific theory or hypothesis a conspiracy theory.
The central idea of the lab leak hypothesis, that the virus spilled over from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is only possible if the virus from which SARS-CoV-2 originated was actually ever inside the institute itself. If the virus originated naturally, with parts of it found in animals that were located in a wild population in Laos, which genetic sequencing uncovered in 2021 indicates, the lab leak hypothesis is ruled out as a possibility. You cannot create something through gain-of-function research that will have an identical genetic code to something that came about in the wild through natural processes such as recombination.
Why can’t they simply have that virus in the lab, collected from that wild population in Laos, and it was accidentally released? Still a lab leak. Just an accident.
Every article countering that angle just feels light gaslighting.