“Low confidence it was a lab leak but could still be wild born” is a nothingburger article for clicks.
Honest question–why are so many people quick to dismiss the possibility that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab?
AFAIK the consensus is that COVID-19 originated in Wuhan. The same Wuhan that has a lab which had been studying coronaviruses for years prior to the outbreak.
Some folks vehemently dismiss the idea that the lab could be the origin point, but why? What makes them so sure that this would have been impossible?
I agree that it is ridiculous to claim that it is impossible and outright dismiss the idea. Nobody can say it doesn’t come from there and proving a negative is impossible. However there are a number of reasons which make the Wuhan thing a lot less suspicious than it seems at first glance.
Wuhan is the 7th largest Chinese city, and is among the most prolific research cities in China, so of course you’d have a lot of virology labs there and that would be the most probable location for coronavirus-related research. Remember that coronaviruses were kind of a hot topic in Asia after the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.
Respiratory viruses, obviously, thrive in high-density population centers, so it would stand to reason that a 13 million inhabitants agglomeration would be at the center of this kind of thing.
To put this into perspective : if COVID had appeared in France, near some podunk town of 30K inhabitants that just happens to have a coronavirus-related lab - OK that would be super suspicious. But most likely it would have originated near Paris which is the largest population center in the whole region. Well that’s also where the Pasteur Institute is, and the Pasteur Institute being the largest virology research center in the country is the most likely place where you’d find coronavirus research. All of a sudden that would be a lot less shady.
The other commenters have covered some of the points I’d make, so I’ll add: After decades of investigation into Patient Zero for AIDS/HIV, there wasn’t a single, identifiable transmission event to which the epidemic traced, but rather evidence that the virus was present here and there long before the disease was identified.
Intuitively, I think it’s the same with COVID-19, that there wasn’t a single, discrete animal-to-human transmission event. Even if my analogy to HIV is faulty, China built the lab in Wuhan to study endemic coronaviruses; that means that anything in the lab had been in the wild for years before researchers collected a sample of it. Therefore, it’s overwhelmingly likely that humans had already been exposed to some form of it, and it was present in local populations. At the very least, there would have had to be multiple exposures, because not everybody exposed to the virus got infected, not everybody infected showed symptoms, and not everybody with symptoms transmitted the virus to other people. That, and the fact that it’s a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
So, even if the Wuhan lab failed at biocontainment, and people caught a strain of virus it was studying, that wasn’t the cause of the pandemic, which could have kicked off any number of ways. I’m not going to dismiss the possibility of a lab leak outright, but on the other hand, even if it’s true, there’s little practical value to the knowing about it other than improving biocontainment procedures. It certainly doesn’t justify the Sinophobia that tends to accompany the lab leak theory, and the Sinophobia is what I think makes people reject the lab leak possibility so vehemently.
(The other “lab leak theory,” that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons. Nobody has that technology, not even close.)
That, and the fact that it’s a respiratory disease, and does not spread by surface contact, makes a lab leak seem exceedingly unlikely.
Wait, I thought it could spread from surfaces? Otherwise what was the point of all the handwashing/hand sanitiser advice?
The other “lab leak theory,” that it was an engineered bioweapon that escaped, is for drooling morons.
It’s definitely very, very unlikely it was engineered, that’s hogwash. But discovered in the environment and kept to use as a potential bioweapon shouldn’t be dismissed so readily. It terrifies me that the US has stores of smallpox, considering its history.
In saying that I very much doubt it was a lab leak. I think there’s something inherently racist there, that ties back to the whole “chinesium” bullcrap. As if Chinese labs are worse at maintaining containment somehow.
Turns out it was hygiene theater for a while. In the early days, we just didn’t know how it was transmitted, so the CDC recommended hand-washing and surface sanitizing out of an abundance of caution. I worked at a grocery store through the pandemic, where both of the owners were very community-oriented, and one was a low-key germophobe. They took the CDC recommendations seriously, and we all had to wear disposable gloves, as well as follow all sorts of protocols to sanitize surfaces.
Later on in the course of the pandemic, scientists started to question whether COVID-19 could spread on surfaces, because the evidence wasn’t showing up. In fact, there was a study done back in the 1980’s here at the University of Wisconsin in which volunteers who were sick with respiratory viruses (incl. coronaviruses) would read newspapers, play cards, play board games, etc. in a room, and then the researchers would bring healthy volunteers into the same room to do the same. Zero healthy volunteers got sick, so the researchers had the ill volunteers cough and sneeze directly on the shared objects before handing over the room. Again, zero healthy volunteers got sick. They were unable to demonstrate any surface-contact transmission.
This news came out, but the CDC was slow to update its recommendations. There was a period during which I was highly annoyed at having to wear the gloves, and spray surfaces with the extremely-expensive electrospray gun, when it was already scientific consensus (minus the CDC) that COVID-19 didn’t spread through surface contact. Eventually, they did update their recommendations, and we were able to stop with the rigamarole. Sales of hand sanitizer and wipes dropped off (but still were high, because the new information wasn’t universally known). If I understand it correctly (eh…), the virus which causes COVID-19 is relatively delicate, and its structure is supported by the water droplets which spread it. Once the droplets hit a surface, the protein structure of the virion collapses, and it’s no longer capable of infecting a cell.
Anyway, yeah, it was an abundance of caution, which turned into hygiene theater.
Oh, I’m a little drunk, so I forgot the second point. Maybe I’m not devious enough to lead a bioweapons program, but I would think that research into potential bioweapons would primarily focus on a vaccine or a treatment. Nasty disease outbreaks occur naturally, and as we saw with COVID-19, they affect everybody. Why would any nation release a bioweapon that’s going to hammer itself just as much as the enemy? That would only make sense to me in maybe a Dead Hand-like scenario, in which your nation has already fallen, and you release it as vengeance from the grave.
But, that still doesn’t make sense to me, because we don’t have any reliable way to look at a virus and determine its potential for causing a pandemic. That might not even be possible, since there are/were lots of viruses that seem like they should cause a pandemic, but just haven’t.
It borders on a conspiracy. I will never stop repeating this:
Theory 1, a conspiracy: it was designed in a lab as a bio-weapon. this is the one the GOP usually pushes
Theory 2, plausible theory: accidental transmission to a human during a study
More importantly it was a racist dog whistle used to distract from the incompetence and greed of politicians handling a crisis. It directly led to violent hate crimes.
Theory 3, it was used in an attempt to distract from the war in Ukraine by the Russians and much like everything the Russians do, it blew the fuck up in their face and we were all caught in collateral damaged.
Think about it. who directly benefited the most from covid? wasn’t China, they lost trillions in trade. wasn’t the US, they lost in trade and world trust(which was accomplished by a now known Russian asset.).
that’s also a good point, who benefits by a weakened US? Russia. who was providing the most support against Russia at the time? US.
I have zero evidence of it, but I think it’s pretty clear at least who benefited the most from it.
Or…. It was just a pandemic and not planned
What’s weird about the mental gymnastics is that a respiratory virus pandemic is the risk factor of the century. It was a probability of 100% that this would end up happening, the only question was when and where.
But people will take the numerous calls to caution that were issued in the decades prior, and use them as proofs that something shady went on. What can you do …
pandemics don’t just happen like covid happened.
three months before covid spread to the US the Trump administration closed down the CDC attache in China that would have been the first response to an outbreak. three months.
covid was first identified as a mysterious flu about 30 days after the US offices were closed.
Yeah, they actually do. The Spanish Flu is a pretty great example. It just happens that the main form of transoceanic travel took long enough that people were easier to quarantine. And it still caused as much death as it did. Pandemics like Covid haven’t happened before but they’ve been predicted for decades. When you can cross the entire earth in less than 48hrs, all it’s going to take is the right virus to show up. Covid was particularly good at transmitting in that way, because it has a long asymptomatic infectious period both before and after the symptomatic phase. Especially if you compare it to the og SARS-CoV-1, which didn’t spread as readily across oceans and borders.
The trump administration closed a million things. They’ve closed a million more in the past 6 months. Did FEMA cutbacks CAUSE the flooding in Texas? No. Did it make it worse? Sure.
can any country in the world make it rain? no
can any country in the world release a deadly pathogen to cause chaos and confusion? yes.
my point isn’t the actual closure, it’s the visibility of risk mitigation.
what’s your point?
If you throw 2 million darts, eventually you get one bullseye. A coincidence is not evidence
Because, it seems less likely to think that China has the technology to build artificial virus, than to think that China hat built a research lab about Coronaviruses in a region where new strain of virus may happen due to biodiversity and climate.
Then we can add the 5 years of reports saying that it’s not the case
It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’d been fooled.
A lot of people have stuck their neck out by saying with certainty that the virus didn’t leak from a lab in China and anyone who thought otherwise is probably a racist and a republican.
It’s next to impossible for those people to take responsibility for being incorrect, so they just double and triple-down on being wrong. It’s ironic because they like to believe they’re the voice of reason.
What is the proof it’s a lab leak?
that’s how science works, if you want to change the discourse, then prove them wrong
It didn’t. This is just Trump’s blathering bullshit, yet again.
Really? I truly thought that’s where it came from. Years before the orange bafoon came along.
Now I have to go down a rabbit hole to find out more.
Trump is the one who started that rumor in the first place. Multiple investigations concluded that it did not originate from a lab in China. Now that Trump is back in office he’s rewriting history to be what he wants it to be instead of what it is.
How did you think it was from a lab years before we even knew about the virus?
Aaahhh you’re right. The twat was president then.
Theory 1, a conspiracy: it was designed in a lab as a bio-weapon
Theory 2, plausible but: accidental transmission to a human during a study
What?
That is prejudice nonsense politics.
Release the Epstein files now!
I think NBC “news” should be penalized for running this trash.
What if it came from Justin Bieber’s perfume?
Yes yes we have low confidence and no experts think it is likely but WHAT IF?
If we’re gonna put on tinfoil hats, I’m gonna call out the poop samples in Europe that had COVID detected in them one month prior to the outbreak in Wuhan
Yeah, and as a punishment I suggest we should require that for an entire year they exclusively eat US fa(s)t food and (because I’m that cruel) that they can only get their news sources from trending US social media. That will teach them… not much, as a matter of fact.
FFS…
every Nobel prize winning biologist says it did.
China needs global oversight.
every Nobel prize winning biologist says it did.
Even the dead ones? That makes it quite unquestionable, then.
ha no, but the guy who discovered HIV is still alive.
Honestly, the idea it came from eating bats, and not from scientists, is the much more racist theory.
Why would anyone eat scientists?
Because they’re much less hairy and they don’t poop everywhere. At least, some of them ;)
why not?
Biologists don’t study viruses. But I’m interested in this public released sign statement by “every Nobel prize winning biologist”.
If biologists don’t study viruses, who does?
Full disclosure: I’m a microbiologist, so I’m curious about where this will go.
Edit: it went to them ignoring my comment.
You’re wrong.
Lol, wrong about what and how?
Immunologist, virologist, or an epidemiologist? While I understand those are most likely offshoots of biology, I don’t think any biologist would be an expert in the study of disease. To add, I can’t find any evidence of the claim in the first comment of this thread.
