I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
I think perhaps there is a correlation with population density as well. Wuhan is fairly dense, and the wet market that is subject to speculation is located in the most densely populated district of wuhan.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
> there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist. Christians use similar arguments to try and disprove evolution.
> thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
so you think a single person in the lab was infected (with no evidence), and then right as they were contagious, went straight to the wet market and on the way, infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it? this is the case you are making?
> There were early cases outside of the wet market.
There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.
So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
My understanding is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only 2 BSL-4 labs in china in 2019, and the only one focused on emergent viruses. This is out of 684 major Chinese cities.
The good thing about free will is that one can just believe that something is true, regardless of how much people on the web hit oneself over the head for it.
Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
> But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
Another poster above has quoted that US intelligence report that you mention, and it concluded that there is no evidence that any earlier illness was related to COVID.
« Their source was a U.S. intelligence report. » — In other words, blowing smoke around some important government lies.
« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.
> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.
According to partisan online newsletter "public.news" that claims to have interviewed anonymous US government sources.
Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
That is all based on the claim that they had illnesses with symptoms consistent with COVID. But those are also consistent with the flu and with the common cold and with other seasonal viruses which were also active at the time, since November is in the respiratory illness season there.
yes of course they all denied ever being sick in November 2019. China even denied that the wet market was the original source of infection. China also disputed any claims that they practiced "gain of function" research at all at WIV, even though that was uncovered by the recent evidence presented in Congress against Anthony Fauci, who funded the whole thing in the first place.
Conspicuous absence of evidence in a place where there'd almost have to be evidence one way or another, may be evidence of a cover-up, yes.
Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.
Normally, I would count that as a strong signal that the origin was said lab. But with the current government, I don't think such a report in isolation should be considered as strong evidence. The US is not trustworthy at the moment.
It wasn't the current government. The statement was published at the tail end of the first Trump administration but the Biden administration continued to say they had serious questions about the lab leak hypothesis.
For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
> “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”
That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.
Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.
Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...
...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
The Wuhan institute was the world leader in bat coronavirus research. They were not studying random animals from their local wet market, they were studying bats with coronavirus which they shipped in from the only location in the world where they could be found, thousands of miles away. Then, coincidentally, coronavirus broke out in Wuhan.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
It is not in Beijng's interest to know. The truth that is convenient for the Chinese government is that it had nothing to do with Chinese government research. Therefore that is the truth and nobody is going to go digging much deeper, or if they do it's going to be buried in some report that never gets published.
In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
The NSF was funding Gain-of-function research in Wuhan at a lab overseen and managed by an international scientific consortium. All these institutions have incentives to modify the narrative. At the start of the outbreak I would have bet anyone ten bucks that we'd never get to the bottom of it.
this is one of the leaps of faith I allude to in my top level comment - just because a bad actor is involved and would be incentivized to cover something up, doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is correct. Those two ideas are not connected.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
I agree it's clear they knew something was up and tried to control information getting out.
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
For about two years the vitriol people received for daring to suggest the virus might have leaked from a poorly secured lab near the origination site was unbelievable. I would like to believe everyone involved would take a long, hard look at themselves but I highly doubt they will. My favourite bit from the time was from [Jon Stewart on Colbert.](https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?si=qypQLgxKq2IbagfN) I've never seen Colbert so uncomfortable.
To a certain extent I can understand why no country wanted to point fingers at China because they didn't want to piss off their biggest trading partner. Especially by Germany, given how much they relied on China to buy their cars back then.
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
I think the desire to protect trading relations was a component, but there were plenty of politicians willing to call for proper investigation in China. My perception was that the larger suppression was cultural. I myself was called racist on many occasions because I thought the risk was quite high that it came from a lab. For some reason it was less racist to suggest the virus came from a web market.
I agree with your comment re trust. I'm not sure institutional trust (at least in healthcare) will be regained in our lifetimes. I love vaccines, and I had all of them prior to and during the outbreak. Since then I have become profoundly wary of taking any medication without extensive longitudinal research.
I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations, like since when was it wrong to question the authority demanding truth and facts.
But then again 2020 was the start of woke culture and everything and everyone has to be politically correct even though whatever you said ended up offending some group.
The vaccines work, however there will always be side effects to significant portion of people when it’s administered to billions of people. Although I find it dumb that young healthy people still get covid booster shots like you have the immunity already and your immune system now knows how to handle the virus
We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
It wasn’t the exact strain, the mutations were nothing like you’d expect them to make, and good lord people on HN need better news and science sources if this is still the level of discussion on the topic.
> You can find reputable sources for either theory.
I get so tired of hearing this rationalization. It's anti-science. Not all evidence is equal and the preponderance of evidence is heavily skewed to it being zoonotic.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
Quite the opposite. We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin. They were lying and knew they were lying, and the entirety of academia went along with it because they didn't want to take the blame for COVID or risk the funding that Fauci controlled.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
do you realize that the entirety of the "evidence" you have presented is just hearsay? Slack messages and a diary? Seriously?
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
>"it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface. Arguing that hard scientific evidence is required for us to come to any conclusions is a de facto rejection of any scenario in which China, its provinces, or any individuals are culpable of anything. Ever. This is much closer to an ideological position than a logical or evidence-based position.
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
> I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface.
you aren't saying anything here. "well the evidence could have been destroyed because China doesn't want it exposed" is not an argument for or against a lab leak. In fact, you and most people in these threads arguing for lab leak theory aren't providing evidence at all - you are just doing the classic "well isn't this weird"
Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
>In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services
I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
>The National Intelligence Council and four other IC
agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was
caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close
progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2
> Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
They cannot evaluate evidence if all evidence has been destroyed.
> I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
To point, the US intelligence report “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses.” Its purpose was to declassify information concerning potential WIV connections and describe what US intelligence knew about WIV activities. You cited a report you didn't read or didn't understand.
I should also point out that the US agencies couldn't agree. In 2023, FBI favoured a lab incident, Department of Energy favoured a lab incident, CIA favoured lab incident, and NIC + four other (name withheld) intelligence agencies favoured natural spillover.
> I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not sure if you just aren't engaging with what is being said or are not reading the full post - he only shared that link IN RESPONSE TO you appealing to intelligence services. Read again:
"I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. >>>BUT if we go by who has the better data<<<"
He is saying "well IF we ARE going by intelligence services because YOU made that argument, then what about this?"
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".
This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.
>but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market
I literally had to check the date on this post.
Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I don't the formula: place + virus is racist. Racism is a serious issue and shouldn't be labelled on things that aren't making judgement using someone's race.
Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
People immediately started suggesting that the idea to close the border to Chinese travelers was racist. After it happened you even had the ever-politicized Lancet jump in claiming that such actions were "anchored in fear, misinformation, racism, and xenophobia." [1]
Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
That's a bit misleading: "The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain's health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected."
In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter (even within Spain!), even though it ultimately wasn't.
> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....
They were right, closing borders with China doesn't stop the virus from spreading, there's no scientific basis for that claim.
It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
> It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I think you are misremembering.
> The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
> The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
instead of like this:
Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
> Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
How on Earth is a conspiracy theory? It doesn't require any conspiracy for a lab working on virus gain-of-function research to accidentally leak a virus. This HN thread is literally about a disease leaking from a biolab!
It's a "conspiracy theory" because the Chinese and their funders like Fauci/NIH deny it, thus, it requires a conspiracy to cover up what really happened.
But it's more like conspiracy fact by now. We have written records of NIH funded scientists literally conspiring with each other, even debating how to throw journalists off the trail.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
So the suggestion is that it occurred naturally in China and then military games happened near Wuhan which spread the virus? Or did someone from Wuhan with ties/service in the Chinese military contract the virus locally and then spread it throughout China via travel to these military games?
Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
You're absolutely right! I was excited about this book, having heard Ms. Jacobsen discuss it on a podcast. She was a great guest, and her book is well researched, for sure. Unfortunately, I found the prose unbearable and gave up half-way through. To me, it reeks of LLM. If you can somehow set that aside, you might enjoy it.
I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence.
There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
You're claiming that everything is fine because Russians have procedures in place. Russians. You're appealing for calm based on the trust in Russian competence, after referencing Sverdlovsk incident. It's just too funny.
I am listening, please explain what else would show competence in the regard of biodefense, than that the people in charge of Russian biodefense can and will reliably identify and contain outbreaks of dangerous pathogens in time to prevent a national or even global outbreak reliably, since at least ’79?
If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.
There were multiple recorded incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil (Broken Arrow operations). Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.
But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.
Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.
There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.
It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission. Russia is no different from any other army in that regard.
But I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.
In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in charge if you do that.
Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.
[Maj Gen Carey] insists that we go to this place called La Cantina, I think it was... it was a Mexican place. And I was kind of surprised... I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go to in Russia but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there.
So we show up and it turns out that I guess he somehow found out that this place had a band that plays and
so he was really intent on singing with the band. He wanted to sing with the band. So we get in and it's extremely loud and the band is playing and he keeps asking the waitress
and the bartender if he can sing with the band and they want nothing to do with this. And so he kept having our translator go up with him and ask them well can I sing with the band.
[Maj Gen Carey] said, "go ask them if I could play the guitar." I said okay, I, I asked one of the band members and the guy said, no, I mean, you know, I can't do that.
He goes if you really want to play this guitar go ahead and talk to the restaurant owner or the administrator or the manager, the restaurant manager and I didn't feel like doing that because I didn't want to go find the manager so I, told the General that basically, uh, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars and then he said, well try again, so I asked him to get up and we both stood next to this rock band and watched them up close.
I was hoping to keep his interest in doing so and, uh, he, um, and then I said, listen if you really want to play the guitar maybe if you ask him, you know, um, maybe they'd listen to you more than would to me. And I'm not sure if he asked him or not because I, I, you know, I, I sat back down at the table, but he stood there for a while in front of this band and then he came back to the table a little later also, he came back later and sat down also,
and said well, no they won't let me play.
There's no need to bring US nuclear forces into this discussion, we're talking about Russian authorities and their competence here.
Sure, it's possible that this one specific force is more professional than the rest, but the bar is low. Soviet Union is the state that gave us Chernobyl after all. For more recent evidence, do check out the recent Russian track record with space technologies - the 2018 ISS air leak incident is particularly telling. Or, you know, the whole war thing that's been going on.
Let me be clear, I 1000% agree that large parts of the Russian government and military are blatantly incompetent. We are on the same side of history, I make fun of the three-day special operation often, and I have nothing but respect for the fight the Ukrainian people put up against a superpower as the aggressor.
Unfortunately, that competence thing counts for everyone else as well. So if you talk about Russian incompetence, we also need to make sure that people understand that this is by design and applied to every military force in existence, and put it into proper context.
This is not about bashing militaries or being American or Russian or European or Chinese, it’s a good example to showcase how the world really works.
If any army becomes extremely competent in executing the best possible outcomes for the people of their country, what keeps them from taking over and getting rid of the layer of decision-making that is causing the most problems?
So the people making their livelyhood from mostly talking about problems and solving them for domestic intesterest groups that don’t necessarily have the best interest of the average citizen in mind make sure they can not be overthrown by their military.
That’s why you see Hegseth dumbing down the force at record speed and Russia is sending the kids of farmers into war and not those of the oligarchs or duma politicians. No matter the color of the pin they wear or what language they speak, it’s all the same filth.
Anyway, a competent military full of competent specialists taking over is what we call military dictatorship, and we tried it often enough collectively that we can confidently say, sometimes the way to get somewhere is just as important as getting there, so democracy and convincing a majority of citizens is better than simply suppressing them.
Because it allows us to think and collectively learn, whereas military decision-making is always a bit backwards and pushes for results at neck-breaking speed.
You cannot apply military optimisation to a healthy civil society. It’s incompatible. Military is a necessary evil, it’s not how the main branch of civil society should work.
If the leaders of the mightiest nations on the planet were competent, we would all live in peace and happily ever after, but conflict is in human nature and incompetence fuels conflict and puts a lot of money into the pockets of everyone who profits from conflict and putting the most incompetent people into the most powerful positions.
Glad we can agree that Russia sucks and hopefully on that almost none of the people in charge of our fate are competent in what they do and we are always an inch away from catastrophic global events.
And that’s why I am now baking some cinnamon buns. Good talk.
So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).
I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.
Polymer coated glass is commonplace in chemistry labs for large containers of hazardous reagents held in storage. There's no chemical leaching concern because it's on the outside.
If anything, disposable plastic test tubes are the norm in microbiology labs at this point. No need to autoclave because they come sterile and you throw them away after a single use.
Plenty of plastic that's designed for it goes through the autoclave. For example micropipette tips. Nearly all of it is disposable single use so it only has to withstand a single cycle.
Disposing of and throwing away are two different things. Throwing away is a subclass of 'disposing of' and there are many other such subclasses including safe destruction, for instance by incineration.
I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
>The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
The article links to a telegram post [1] as source, which links to another telegram post [2], which now has an update:
>It is not known exactly how Darya Shipilova contracted the plague. Currently, the theory involving a broken test tube is the leading one, but there is no official confirmation or independent verification of this information.
That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.
This is a human thing, of course, but in different cultures the emphasis on following the rules and taking safety measures is different. In Russia, there isn't one.
Oh, so you're a kremlinologist by proxy? How does that work and how many degrees of separation until the kremlinology concentration loses predictive prowess?
According to aquaintances in a few different industries where some of their competition is Russian: They basically work for vodka, then their equipment breaks down, they can't fix it and the customer has to call a western company. They apparently have no consistent maintenance or service protocol whatsoever, and in some rather safety critical areas.
According to my third cousin twice removed who once spelled the word "industry" (mostly correctly) - Americans basically work for McDonalds burgers. That's why they had to outsource high-precision manufacturing to Taiwan; they tried to make GPUs and phone chipsets in the US, but the 'muricans just kept getting their greasy fingers all over everything.
Irregardless of the claim of correlation, between Russia and a lack of safety culture, it is currently a country in a war economy with populace shortages.
Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?
One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
There is far more knowhow and supply chain that goes into keeping labs working than just documentation. Also, research requires labs, and so it is kind of already there sort of thing.
Too bad you're not condemning the live animal / wet market trade because from that we've had SARS, H5N1, H7N9 and Covid19, so are you fairly confident the wet markets are doing a public good or just condemning research labs for some reason?
Do you think bird flu came from a lab?
Chinese authorities considered to crack down on these markets before Covid 19 but didn't...because the markets are a major source of income for the peasant class in China so it's politically dangerous to do it because it would put millions out of their businesses.
For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.
I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers
I wonder if people downvoting consider your question to be a thoughtcrime or something. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Research happens because somebody is interested and writes a grant request that is accepted. Governments and institutions where the research happens have rules as well. It’s possible that the researchers, the folks reviewing the grants, and the people making the rules haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis that adequately covers the tail risks. For some kinds of research, the answer can be: no, we shouldn’t do this. It’s reasonable to publicly discuss these concerns.
Plague exists naturally. It's not some kind of a movie-land bioweapon McGuffin. The US has half a dozen cases of plague each year.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
Of course, Russias pure animals have no stinky diseases, and we can trust their officials every word they say. Also, Russia doesn’t have any gays, because that is a “western disease”.
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
The Irkutsk governor, Igor Kobzev, seems to actually have experience in emergency management, and has served for many years in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. This makes the serious response a little bit less surprising (actually doing something instead of just covering it up is the thing that made me actually worried about this situation).
I've read this story before, in Russian, and, honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me.
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
On the other hand "Baikal People" post from today is more worrying, as it says they quarantined 4 hospitals for 3 weeks: https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651
Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.
> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction
I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.
"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
>Irkutsk region Governor Igor Kobzev urged the public to remain calm after meeting with Rospotrebnadzor chief Anna Popova to coordinate emergency containment measures.
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
As the pro-COVID-measures-crowd largely overlaps with the Putler-crowd it’s going to be interesting to see their agenda re-alignment.
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
> When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime
oh well then I guess if your personal contacts were 100% sure then case closed
Are you speculating? Or what are you basing this off of? Are you saying this is the next COVID and the government will use it to crack down on protests?
I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
> made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event" (rather than the earliest jump from some other animal to humans), but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.
It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
I think perhaps there is a correlation with population density as well. Wuhan is fairly dense, and the wet market that is subject to speculation is located in the most densely populated district of wuhan.
Is it possible that the animals at the wet market itself was the source? Sure. But it seems sort of coincidental to me it is also the most dense area of the city; could’ve already been spreading and this location just happened to be where a major outbreak occurred from density factors alone.
> The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover.
Zoonotic spillover is not a spontaneous 0->100 event, there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
> If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest
thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
> Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
It didnt. There were early cases outside of the wet market.
> unusual coincidence
A novel coronavirus appearing outside a coronavirus gain-of-function research lab is not a coincidence. Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
> there should be a trail of intermediate hosts and adjacent infections that there is zero evidence of.
just because we are missing a link does not mean it doesn't exist. Christians use similar arguments to try and disprove evolution.
> thats not representative of sarscov2. People in the same household could fail to spread infection.
so you think a single person in the lab was infected (with no evidence), and then right as they were contagious, went straight to the wet market and on the way, infected not a single person related to the lab or degrees of separation from it? this is the case you are making?
> There were early cases outside of the wet market.
no there aren't
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454?referrer...
> Id sooner believe it was a sleight of hand to cover for a terrorist attack.
that's because your way of thinking is conspiratorial and so you assume malintent with very little evidence
The first corona identified. The Wuhan workers got sick around a month before.
They also didn’t find any animal corona samples at the market. Also around 50% of people of the initial cluster had no connection to the market.
Also the hospital where the lab workers were treated was on the corner of this market.
Now, we just need a few sources for these claims.
There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
Update: apparently the US intelligence report was eventually declassified and published in 2023: https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Rep...
Quoting the report:
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
That article was written by the same journalist who co-wrote the aluminum tubes story for the NYT that was part of the justification for the Iraq War.
Scientists have narrowed it down to the area in the market where the corona virus was first detected, what are you on about?
SARS-CoV-2–positive environmental samples were spatially clustered around vendors selling live mammals.
Also don't forget other pandemics have some from wet markets too. Bird flu and SARS. Do you think they were also lab leaks?
Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.
So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
My understanding is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only 2 BSL-4 labs in china in 2019, and the only one focused on emergent viruses. This is out of 684 major Chinese cities.
The good thing about free will is that one can just believe that something is true, regardless of how much people on the web hit oneself over the head for it.
Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
You seem to deliberately mislead readers...
You supplied nothing but innuendo. Some counterargument or, even better, evidence, would be more convincing.
> But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
What do you know?
In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-a...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.chann...
The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
Another poster above has quoted that US intelligence report that you mention, and it concluded that there is no evidence that any earlier illness was related to COVID.
« Their source was a U.S. intelligence report. » — In other words, blowing smoke around some important government lies.
« lab leak theory » — Doesn't matter whether you adhere to the lab leak theory or the bat market theory. I'm sure there is a theory for some fringe group that points to “clear signs of extraterrestrian origin”, or “generated by AI”. Any crap will do. The only thing that matters in this business is that you believe there is some new-fangled and dangerous “CoVID” out there to get you.
> when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection
If the alternative hypothesis is that the events are independent, yes. But it is somewhat more common to have labs studying viruses in regions where there are virus reservoirs. So the events "lab studying viruses" and "virus outbreak in local area" are not independent, as both are more likely in regions with viral reservoirs, and in particular, in dense urban areas thereof. A coincidence is not as extraordinary as it may seem.
Thing is, it is not possible to know at this point, as long as the virus does not seem to be bioengineered, whether it was a lab accident while studying animal samples or an outbreak starting in the market.
Were they first patients?
Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.
[0] https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19
According to partisan online newsletter "public.news" that claims to have interviewed anonymous US government sources.
Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
That is all based on the claim that they had illnesses with symptoms consistent with COVID. But those are also consistent with the flu and with the common cold and with other seasonal viruses which were also active at the time, since November is in the respiratory illness season there.
Not according to them and this little-known publication called "Science." I've never heard of it, but seems legit:
https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chin...
yes of course they all denied ever being sick in November 2019. China even denied that the wet market was the original source of infection. China also disputed any claims that they practiced "gain of function" research at all at WIV, even though that was uncovered by the recent evidence presented in Congress against Anthony Fauci, who funded the whole thing in the first place.
Yes, of course, the absence of evidence is always evidence of a cover up.
Conspicuous absence of evidence in a place where there'd almost have to be evidence one way or another, may be evidence of a cover-up, yes.
Just based on the logic of institutions, I'd expect all the parties involved here to start covering up before they even know themselves what the truth is.
Normally, I would count that as a strong signal that the origin was said lab. But with the current government, I don't think such a report in isolation should be considered as strong evidence. The US is not trustworthy at the moment.
It wasn't the current government. The statement was published at the tail end of the first Trump administration but the Biden administration continued to say they had serious questions about the lab leak hypothesis.
Another poster above has quoted the declassified US intelligence report and the conclusion was that any connection with the lab was very unlikely.
> But it is awfully strange
Lazy, anti-science, conspiratorial way of going about it
I think we've overcorrected.
For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
Beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean impossible,any more than on the balance of probabilities means beyond reasonable doubt.
> “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”
That's how people start believing in supernatural explanations and conspiracy theories, though. Improbable events happen all the time; just because each event is improbable doesn't mean the set of improbable events that can occur isn't large.
Weird shit happens all the time, and we should expect it as a matter of random chance.
Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
>...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...
...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
> I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
I might not have been the best student, but I wouldn't call studying "extraordinarily improbable".
So it's not improbable research lab that was testing off runs from a wet market found the stuff they were searching for?
The Wuhan institute was the world leader in bat coronavirus research. They were not studying random animals from their local wet market, they were studying bats with coronavirus which they shipped in from the only location in the world where they could be found, thousands of miles away. Then, coincidentally, coronavirus broke out in Wuhan.
> Dumbest thing I've heard today.
Not really; "there is probably a connection" probably was supposed to mean "could be studied, maybe a correlation is found", rather than "surely there must be a causation", which is what some people seem to want to take it for.
It’s not even rumors. The MERS/SARS gain of function research started in UNC, US, then paused due to safety concerns, then moved to Wuhan.
The entire thing is very well documented by Nature and Science, among others.
Dr. Shi Zhengli of WIV was involved in the original UNC research prior to 2014 defunding.
In 2017 she had combined DNA of few different bat coronaviruses to “study their virulence”.
In 2019 she published a paper forecasting a new virus outbreak likely to originate in China.
You know the rest of the story.
I mean it’s definitely rumours if “the rest of the story” is “Covid then happened”
Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
It is not in Beijng's interest to know. The truth that is convenient for the Chinese government is that it had nothing to do with Chinese government research. Therefore that is the truth and nobody is going to go digging much deeper, or if they do it's going to be buried in some report that never gets published.
The local government could still fear retaliation for failure to regulate public health.
In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
The NSF was funding Gain-of-function research in Wuhan at a lab overseen and managed by an international scientific consortium. All these institutions have incentives to modify the narrative. At the start of the outbreak I would have bet anyone ten bucks that we'd never get to the bottom of it.
But isn't the wet market hypothesis equally bad looking for China?
Agree. Not sure about Internet commenters' fascination with pinpointing lab vs wet market. Both are bad looks for China.
this is one of the leaps of faith I allude to in my top level comment - just because a bad actor is involved and would be incentivized to cover something up, doesn't mean that the lab leak theory is correct. Those two ideas are not connected.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
Of course, it should point to China. They're the ones who didn't shut down the wet markets after SARS-CoV-1.
Source? Your account is no better hearsay.
It’s clear that they knew about the extent of the issue weeks earlier and tried to contain it, rather than letting the world know
I agree it's clear they knew something was up and tried to control information getting out.
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
ur username?
now do NIH / Doge / Twitter
Objection: relevance.
removal of evidence, there were British and US scientists involved also
The German secret service has assessed that 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper (https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...)
For about two years the vitriol people received for daring to suggest the virus might have leaked from a poorly secured lab near the origination site was unbelievable. I would like to believe everyone involved would take a long, hard look at themselves but I highly doubt they will. My favourite bit from the time was from [Jon Stewart on Colbert.](https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?si=qypQLgxKq2IbagfN) I've never seen Colbert so uncomfortable.
To a certain extent I can understand why no country wanted to point fingers at China because they didn't want to piss off their biggest trading partner. Especially by Germany, given how much they relied on China to buy their cars back then.
But the lack of transparency and the coverup to this day has immensely weaken the public trust in the scientific institution and government bodies for public health and safety.
I think the desire to protect trading relations was a component, but there were plenty of politicians willing to call for proper investigation in China. My perception was that the larger suppression was cultural. I myself was called racist on many occasions because I thought the risk was quite high that it came from a lab. For some reason it was less racist to suggest the virus came from a web market.
I agree with your comment re trust. I'm not sure institutional trust (at least in healthcare) will be regained in our lifetimes. I love vaccines, and I had all of them prior to and during the outbreak. Since then I have become profoundly wary of taking any medication without extensive longitudinal research.
I never understood the racist or xenophobic accusations, like since when was it wrong to question the authority demanding truth and facts.
But then again 2020 was the start of woke culture and everything and everyone has to be politically correct even though whatever you said ended up offending some group.
The vaccines work, however there will always be side effects to significant portion of people when it’s administered to billions of people. Although I find it dumb that young healthy people still get covid booster shots like you have the immunity already and your immune system now knows how to handle the virus
We knew it was from day one, but the nudge unit was just suppressing it so that people wouldn’t be mean to China.
It’s like when Russia bombed the olympics in Paris and the story got nudged to “mysterious explosions happen across France for no reason, move along citizen”
I don’t know why we keep doing it. People should be mad at these countries.
I believe it was zoonosis, not a lab leak: https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...
That was exactly the strain of Coronavirus that the lab was working with, and exactly the kinds of mutations you'd expect them to make.
But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
Pangolins actually - they carried a strain of the virus that had the ability to infect human cells via ACE2 receptor.
The bat variant did not have that - wet market - close proximity - a fortuitous gene swap and hey presto.
It wasn’t the exact strain, the mutations were nothing like you’d expect them to make, and good lord people on HN need better news and science sources if this is still the level of discussion on the topic.
There is still no conclusive explanation. You can find reputable sources for either theory.
> You can find reputable sources for either theory.
I get so tired of hearing this rationalization. It's anti-science. Not all evidence is equal and the preponderance of evidence is heavily skewed to it being zoonotic.
The english indie rock band that formed in liverpool in 2003 did covid-19?
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
If you enjoy diving deep on the topic I highly recommend watching the entire Rootclaim Covid Lab Leak debate https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r...
I expected that arguing for Lab Leak would be a huge uphill battle but it was surprisingly almost the exact opposite. Some of the biological arguments are above my head, but they decompose into timelines and other consequences that make it hard for a Lab Leak origin to be coherent.
Man, you started an off-topic subthread which, at the moment, contains 100 out of the 165 total comments.
Pretty much confirmed by western intelligence including the German BND
Source?
almost nobody who understands the science and how viruses spread gives more credence to the lab leak theory over a zoonotic source. There are huge leaps of faith required by the lab leak theory that don't hold up against slight scrutiny. People will get into the weeds about "furin cleavage sites" etc. when none of that argumentation is necessary to determine the most likely source.
Quite the opposite. We have the Slack chat logs where virologists themselves say things like "it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper claiming it was absolutely of natural origin. They were lying and knew they were lying, and the entirety of academia went along with it because they didn't want to take the blame for COVID or risk the funding that Fauci controlled.
Even Fauci himself kept a private diary where he wrote, "now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier" - while telling the public the opposite.
The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning. It's not just one line of evidence or inference, it's dozens. The only people I've met who still cling to the idea it wasn't a man-made pandemic tend to be people who work in public sector science themselves.
do you realize that the entirety of the "evidence" you have presented is just hearsay? Slack messages and a diary? Seriously?
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
the irony
>"it's so friggin likely it came from the lab", even after they published a paper
This particular was over a month before it was published, who's lying again? But this is discussions between colleagues as new evidence was coming in. If the investigation was tilted in the direction of the wet market we would have seen evidence of that, instead we see different people having different opinions on early and incomplete evidence and eventually coming to an agreement on what is more likely based on evidence they had at the end.
>"now we know the wet market was not the source, it was an amplifier"
Doesn't exclude that it was from natural origin. Amplifier meaning where it entered the human population and started spreading widely.
> The evidence it came from the Wuhan lab is overwhelmingly strong
There is a lot of conjecture for the lab leak theory, no real evidence. Meanwhile there's plenty of actual evidence that points to the wet market, such as the initial spread was clustered around the market.
>to the extent that anyone who believes otherwise should be suspected of motivated reasoning.
This sentence alone is rather telling...
I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface. Arguing that hard scientific evidence is required for us to come to any conclusions is a de facto rejection of any scenario in which China, its provinces, or any individuals are culpable of anything. Ever. This is much closer to an ideological position than a logical or evidence-based position.
In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services. For example, the German secret service has assessed an 80-95% probability that it was leaked from a lab in Wuhan and presented a report to then Chancellor Angela Merkel. [The assessment was later leaked and was published in a German Newspaper.](https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/corona-bnd-china-li.3217...) I think the German intelligence services are far better equipped, resourced, and have far wider access to sensitive and privileged data, than either of us.
> I am not the user you responded to, but you are making a fairly egregious logical error. China is an authoritarian, autocratic state. It will never permit any incriminating evidence to surface.
you aren't saying anything here. "well the evidence could have been destroyed because China doesn't want it exposed" is not an argument for or against a lab leak. In fact, you and most people in these threads arguing for lab leak theory aren't providing evidence at all - you are just doing the classic "well isn't this weird"
>China is an authoritarian, autocratic state.
As opposed to current America?
Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
>In these situations we rely heavily on intelligence services
I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Rep...
>The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARSCoV-2
> Scientists can still asses information and evidence with that in mind and still say which option is more likely to have happened. Or even say that China has faked evidence if they did so.
They cannot evaluate evidence if all evidence has been destroyed.
> I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. But if we go by who has the better data, better equipped and resource I would assume that America wins on that, so should we believe them more?
I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
To point, the US intelligence report “does not address the merits of the two most likely pandemic origins hypotheses.” Its purpose was to declassify information concerning potential WIV connections and describe what US intelligence knew about WIV activities. You cited a report you didn't read or didn't understand.
I should also point out that the US agencies couldn't agree. In 2023, FBI favoured a lab incident, Department of Energy favoured a lab incident, CIA favoured lab incident, and NIC + four other (name withheld) intelligence agencies favoured natural spillover.
> I find it odd that you would cite an American intelligence report right after implying that America is authoritarian and autocratic. You can't have it both ways.
I'm not sure if you just aren't engaging with what is being said or are not reading the full post - he only shared that link IN RESPONSE TO you appealing to intelligence services. Read again:
"I don't think intelligence services are equipped to do this. >>>BUT if we go by who has the better data<<<"
He is saying "well IF we ARE going by intelligence services because YOU made that argument, then what about this?"
Bill Gurley has a presentation about it, asking questions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765794
There was endless discussion about how unlikely or reasonable it was with furin cleavage sites and whatnot. I wouldn't trust authoritative summaries.
Last I saw, plausible, unconfirmed, nobody is willing/able to provide enough information to be able to confirm one way or another.
It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".
https://archive.ph/WTsga
This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.
>but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market
I literally had to check the date on this post.
Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
Wild times!
Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I don't the formula: place + virus is racist. Racism is a serious issue and shouldn't be labelled on things that aren't making judgement using someone's race.
Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
The Spanish Flu's first known case was in Kansas. French papers changed from calling it American Flu to Spanish Flu to avoid angering an ally (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#cite_note-fiction-...).
Maybe place + virus isn't inherently racist, but it's been politically charged & exploited; best to put the combination down.
People immediately started suggesting that the idea to close the border to Chinese travelers was racist. After it happened you even had the ever-politicized Lancet jump in claiming that such actions were "anchored in fear, misinformation, racism, and xenophobia." [1]
Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
[1] - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7133591/
> Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
> The earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States
Oh.
That's a bit misleading: "The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain's health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected."
In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter (even within Spain!), even though it ultimately wasn't.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid...
Okay, what about all the other examples?
> Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu,
Major outbreaks _were_ named like that, but as the other reply pointed out, the "Spanish Flu" did not actually originate in Spain at all.
It is for reasons like that, that WHO best practices now specifically say to not name diseases this way: https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-pra...
> Terms that should be avoided in disease names include geographic locations, people’s names, species of animal or food, cultural, population, industry or occupational references....
They were right, closing borders with China doesn't stop the virus from spreading, there's no scientific basis for that claim.
It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
> It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
I think you are misremembering.
> The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
https://theconversation.com/covid-19-why-lab-leak-theory-is-... (2021)
> New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli deleted a tweet Wednesday night that said the COVID-19 "lab leak theory" had "racist roots."
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-covid-reporter-... (2021)
> The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/politics/lab-leak-theor... (2022)
Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
instead of like this:
Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
> Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
it turns out it's possible to believe something out of racist and xenophobic furor that also ends up being true
We should not be eating animals period
They are so tasty though
> Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”
No. I remember it being called a conspiracy theory. And it still is.
Yeah, it is indeed a conspiracy theory, that is also shared by the CIA, FBI, BND and public health officials.
How on Earth is a conspiracy theory? It doesn't require any conspiracy for a lab working on virus gain-of-function research to accidentally leak a virus. This HN thread is literally about a disease leaking from a biolab!
It's a "conspiracy theory" because the Chinese and their funders like Fauci/NIH deny it, thus, it requires a conspiracy to cover up what really happened.
But it's more like conspiracy fact by now. We have written records of NIH funded scientists literally conspiring with each other, even debating how to throw journalists off the trail.
All the evidence was destroyed (probably just a coincidence, LOL), so it can't be proved either way.
Last thing I read on it, it was confirmed to originate from a wet market. The Wuhan lab theory has become a conspiracy theory lacking substance.
Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
> Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
> And I always felt like this.
Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
> I'm going to go with their majority opinion
It seems like which of these two is the majority opinion heavily depends on the language/country you read information in and also whether there are still in service or not.
Just read the wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
The summary does not mention lab leak of a natural virus at all but the body of the article says it's perfectly consistent with the best independent evidence / investigation:
> The leader of the WHO investigatory team, Peter Ben Embarek, said "An employee of the lab gets infected while working in a bat cave collecting samples. Such a scenario, while being a lab leak, would also fit our first hypothesis of direct transmission of the virus from bat to human."[114]
Seems a little dishonest, no? Pretending that lab leak == bioweapon conspiracy is just deliberate distraction.
There's simply no hard evidence one way or the other - it's a natural bat coronavirus, but we don't know how it got to Wuhan (a city with a world class coronavirus laboratory which just so happens to be the only institute on the planet which worked on isolating, sequencing, and culturing novel SARS-like bat coronaviruses from field samples - literally the only one.).
> cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
So a guy who disagreed with the official CIA stance has been barred from obtaining funding for research from the US.
I mean, that just makes them seem more trustworthy.
I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
Do you have any thoughts as to why the FBI disagrees with your perspective?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903
Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?
a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
The US can just declare extraterritorial jurisdiction. We do it for bioweapons. Uncle Sam doesn’t need an invite.
IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”
Anyone can declare anything.
You think China just lets US law enforcement do investigations on their territory without their consent??
I don’t but this guy in your article does
> A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
So the suggestion is that it occurred naturally in China and then military games happened near Wuhan which spread the virus? Or did someone from Wuhan with ties/service in the Chinese military contract the virus locally and then spread it throughout China via travel to these military games?
Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
Your link also says
>> And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.
They don’t disagree. They don’t know. They just said what’s most likely. They don’t even give a %
Well if you want something with percentages, the BND claims it is 85-90% likely that it comes out of a lab. https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/corona-das-corona...
you get (rightly) downvoted for just saying nonsense.
What are you reading next and what should we do to prepare?
How did you enjoy the book? I did like her nuclear war volume, but it could have used some editing.
You're absolutely right! I was excited about this book, having heard Ms. Jacobsen discuss it on a podcast. She was a great guest, and her book is well researched, for sure. Unfortunately, I found the prose unbearable and gave up half-way through. To me, it reeks of LLM. If you can somehow set that aside, you might enjoy it.
I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
How’d it turn out, are we boned?
No spoilers but Jacobsen's scenario books don't end with "and society came together, acted rationally, and solved the problem!"
Netflix ends up the series after Season 1, just after your are emotionally invested...
I was planning to read this book but, now not really
"The Siberian Incident", "Devil's Pass", Incident", Lake" also all deal with outbreaks of various sorts originating from Siberia. It's a trope.
I wouldn’t worry too much.
Containment in Russia is different from that in China.
They expect stuff like this to happen, and to be fair I think Russia never stopped their bio programmes, and the fact that we are not all dead yet seems to prove them right, that their containment protocols are overall working.
This is not 79' Sverdlosk.
https://meselsonarchive.hsites.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omn...
The lab in question in this incident has a documented Soviet Biodefense connection.
https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/cns-archive/...
But there is no public or otherwise evidence that this is a military pathogen-production plant comparable to Sverdlovsk-19.
The institute’s activities include surveillance of naturally occurring plague in the Russia–Mongolia border region and training Mongolian specialists in plague diagnosis and prevention.
So the handling of pneumonic plague in this facility is probably an everyday occurrence, and not related to a weapons programme.
This is an institute for biodefense, not offence. There was a single person messing up and she paid the price for that mistake.
I understand people are on edge since Covid, but this is not that, or a bio weapon. Just a 28-year-old that dropped a tube by accident and then probably panicked and didn’t follow containment protocol. Shit happens.
Let’s hope she stays the only victim of her mistake.
Sucks to die because of pneumonic plague because a 28-year-old sneezed in the same cafe you get your matcha latte fix.
You're claiming that everything is fine because Russians have procedures in place. Russians. You're appealing for calm based on the trust in Russian competence, after referencing Sverdlovsk incident. It's just too funny.
I am listening, please explain what else would show competence in the regard of biodefense, than that the people in charge of Russian biodefense can and will reliably identify and contain outbreaks of dangerous pathogens in time to prevent a national or even global outbreak reliably, since at least ’79?
If you want to go down the incompetence route with potential weapons of mass destruction, you could also ask why US Americans allow their army to have access to nuclear weapons.
There were multiple recorded incidents where American citizens almost got atomised on American soil (Broken Arrow operations). Not because of individual mistakes but institutional incompetence.
But you see no one fearmongering about that in public. Because they have proven they can lose a nuclear weapon and recover it, without harming the public.
Just like a single young Russian woman can fuck up and they contain the fuckup without harming the public.
There are about 1000 competent people in an army of the size of Russia, China or the US and that’s it.
It’s expected that most soldiers are incompetent, and just need to follow orders, and in ideal case be patriotic enough to believe they sacrifice themselves for the greater good if they get sent on a suicide mission. Russia is no different from any other army in that regard.
But I honestly consider the Russian forces tasked with biodefense and nuclear more competent than most of their other counterparts in other nations. They frequently train and you get hung by the neck if you leave a blast door open to let the pizza guy in.
In Wyoming you get promoted to three-star nuclear doofus in charge if you do that.
Feel free to read this if you want to know more about the people tasked with preventing nuclear incidents on American soil.
I would link the official page on the Air Force website (https://www.compliance.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-1312...), but the Trump administration is silently deleting all of these documents.
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/963093/afd-131219-045...
Just one of the highlights.
[Maj Gen Carey] insists that we go to this place called La Cantina, I think it was... it was a Mexican place. And I was kind of surprised... I wouldn't pick a Mexican place to go to in Russia but all right, if that's where he wants to go, we'll go there.
So we show up and it turns out that I guess he somehow found out that this place had a band that plays and so he was really intent on singing with the band. He wanted to sing with the band. So we get in and it's extremely loud and the band is playing and he keeps asking the waitress and the bartender if he can sing with the band and they want nothing to do with this. And so he kept having our translator go up with him and ask them well can I sing with the band.
[Maj Gen Carey] said, "go ask them if I could play the guitar." I said okay, I, I asked one of the band members and the guy said, no, I mean, you know, I can't do that.
He goes if you really want to play this guitar go ahead and talk to the restaurant owner or the administrator or the manager, the restaurant manager and I didn't feel like doing that because I didn't want to go find the manager so I, told the General that basically, uh, you know, that he can't, he can't play the guitars and then he said, well try again, so I asked him to get up and we both stood next to this rock band and watched them up close.
I was hoping to keep his interest in doing so and, uh, he, um, and then I said, listen if you really want to play the guitar maybe if you ask him, you know, um, maybe they'd listen to you more than would to me. And I'm not sure if he asked him or not because I, I, you know, I, I sat back down at the table, but he stood there for a while in front of this band and then he came back to the table a little later also, he came back later and sat down also, and said well, no they won't let me play.
That shit is indeed funny.
There's no need to bring US nuclear forces into this discussion, we're talking about Russian authorities and their competence here.
Sure, it's possible that this one specific force is more professional than the rest, but the bar is low. Soviet Union is the state that gave us Chernobyl after all. For more recent evidence, do check out the recent Russian track record with space technologies - the 2018 ISS air leak incident is particularly telling. Or, you know, the whole war thing that's been going on.
Let me be clear, I 1000% agree that large parts of the Russian government and military are blatantly incompetent. We are on the same side of history, I make fun of the three-day special operation often, and I have nothing but respect for the fight the Ukrainian people put up against a superpower as the aggressor.
Unfortunately, that competence thing counts for everyone else as well. So if you talk about Russian incompetence, we also need to make sure that people understand that this is by design and applied to every military force in existence, and put it into proper context.
This is not about bashing militaries or being American or Russian or European or Chinese, it’s a good example to showcase how the world really works.
If any army becomes extremely competent in executing the best possible outcomes for the people of their country, what keeps them from taking over and getting rid of the layer of decision-making that is causing the most problems?
So the people making their livelyhood from mostly talking about problems and solving them for domestic intesterest groups that don’t necessarily have the best interest of the average citizen in mind make sure they can not be overthrown by their military.
That’s why you see Hegseth dumbing down the force at record speed and Russia is sending the kids of farmers into war and not those of the oligarchs or duma politicians. No matter the color of the pin they wear or what language they speak, it’s all the same filth.
Anyway, a competent military full of competent specialists taking over is what we call military dictatorship, and we tried it often enough collectively that we can confidently say, sometimes the way to get somewhere is just as important as getting there, so democracy and convincing a majority of citizens is better than simply suppressing them.
Because it allows us to think and collectively learn, whereas military decision-making is always a bit backwards and pushes for results at neck-breaking speed.
You cannot apply military optimisation to a healthy civil society. It’s incompatible. Military is a necessary evil, it’s not how the main branch of civil society should work.
If the leaders of the mightiest nations on the planet were competent, we would all live in peace and happily ever after, but conflict is in human nature and incompetence fuels conflict and puts a lot of money into the pockets of everyone who profits from conflict and putting the most incompetent people into the most powerful positions.
Glad we can agree that Russia sucks and hopefully on that almost none of the people in charge of our fate are competent in what they do and we are always an inch away from catastrophic global events.
And that’s why I am now baking some cinnamon buns. Good talk.
So breaks a test tube of live bacteria at an “anti-plague institute”, possible infects 100 colleagues, then when she developed plague like symptoms is taken to hospital and possibly infects 100 patients.
I think they need to investigate their safety protocols
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
> At least 197 people who may have had contact with her were reportedly placed under medical isolation, including more than 100 in hospital wards.
Was this a glass test tube? I understand why glass is probably the best material for the inner lining of containers that hold biological material, but I'm surprised that there aren't better solutions for hazardous material (e.g. an unbreakable, transparent polymer outer coating).
I believe the biggest reason to use glass is that it doesn't react with much stuff, but I've yet to see an explanation for why your idea wouldn't work. I imagine there could be problems with autoclaves (i.e. degradation of the polymer) and fear of chemical leaching.
Polymer coated glass is commonplace in chemistry labs for large containers of hazardous reagents held in storage. There's no chemical leaching concern because it's on the outside.
If anything, disposable plastic test tubes are the norm in microbiology labs at this point. No need to autoclave because they come sterile and you throw them away after a single use.
Plenty of plastic that's designed for it goes through the autoclave. For example micropipette tips. Nearly all of it is disposable single use so it only has to withstand a single cycle.
Not sure that throwing away plastic tubes with samples of plague bacteria is a good idea
Disposing of and throwing away are two different things. Throwing away is a subclass of 'disposing of' and there are many other such subclasses including safe destruction, for instance by incineration.
That’s what the autoclave is for.
I'm pretty sure that it goes into a biohazard container that is then sterilized and probably incinerated.
Or a double wall - one glass one polymer
There is regular soda-lime glass and there is borosilicate glass.
Why on earth would she have contact with 197 people after she got exposed to bacteria? She should have immediately triggered safety protocols
I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube because she would have started on prophylactic antibiotic treatment immediately.
Luckily you need to be in close contact with someone already very sick to catch it. It's not silent transmission like COVID. But maybe there is something different about this outbreak?
> I don't think there is any actual evidence that it was a broken test tube
What does this mean? The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
>The article we’re discussing says the woman who died told colleagues she broke a test tube.
The article links to a telegram post [1] as source, which links to another telegram post [2], which now has an update:
>It is not known exactly how Darya Shipilova contracted the plague. Currently, the theory involving a broken test tube is the leading one, but there is no official confirmation or independent verification of this information.
(Google-translated)
[1] https://t.me/Govorit_NeMoskva/70406
[2] https://t.me/Baikal_People/16629
That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway. You can ask a ton of questions, like was she immunized before working with plague (Russia has pretty effective vaccines against all types) and if not why the heck not, why they use easily breakable test tubes to hold dangerous pathogens, how the incident with live biomaterial was not immediately reported and caused a lockdown, but they allowed waiting for symptoms and then going to a general hospital, etc., etc. - but the answer for all of that, I suspect, is: "it's Russia". For an American, it's hard to appreciate to what measure Russia is not a "safety culture" country.
> That's Russia we're talking about. You can have 1000 protocols and people will ignore them anyway.
Speaking as someone who has a part of their job convincing people to follow safety processes, this isn't a Russia thing, it's a human thing.
This is a human thing, of course, but in different cultures the emphasis on following the rules and taking safety measures is different. In Russia, there isn't one.
You sound like a proper Russia kremlinology expert. How many stints in Russia did you do?
I haven't been to Russia but Russia has been here, the result is utter shite. Russia is a shit country, deal with it.
You are right! Good country cannot be friends with North Korea, Iran and Eritrea.
Oh, so you're a kremlinologist by proxy? How does that work and how many degrees of separation until the kremlinology concentration loses predictive prowess?
Partitons and decades of PRL are enough
Imagine if someone said something like this of a brown country. They would be banned right away.
I say it all the time.
According to aquaintances in a few different industries where some of their competition is Russian: They basically work for vodka, then their equipment breaks down, they can't fix it and the customer has to call a western company. They apparently have no consistent maintenance or service protocol whatsoever, and in some rather safety critical areas.
According to my third cousin twice removed who once spelled the word "industry" (mostly correctly) - Americans basically work for McDonalds burgers. That's why they had to outsource high-precision manufacturing to Taiwan; they tried to make GPUs and phone chipsets in the US, but the 'muricans just kept getting their greasy fingers all over everything.
Irregardless of the claim of correlation, between Russia and a lack of safety culture, it is currently a country in a war economy with populace shortages.
“You know why Russians rarely go to the doctor?
Because they only have two diseases — clusterfuck and bullshit.
Clusterfuck is completely incurable, and bullshit just goes away on its own…”
Are we fairly confident that these labs do more good than the risk they present to the public? I’m not sure we should be keeping dangerous pathogens around just for giggles and PhD papers. What are examples of how the research done in these places improves public health?
One of the things which surprised me during covid was how e.g. Turkic central Asian states not only had clearly well-funded bio labs, but sometimes even their own vaccines (effective, too!) quickly in production.
The conclusion I drew from that is that people like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow have asked a lot of questions about bioweapons in secret for a long time. And if he did it, you bet all similar leaders, in a wide sense, did it too. And I wouldn't like to be the scientist who got approached by security state people with these questions.
I guess I'm not conveying this well. What I'm trying to say is that we're not at all confident about anything like that - none of us - because it's all so hush hush because it's WMD-adjacent. The secrecy cripples our ability to have an honest well-informed discussion about it.
knowledge. how to handle that and how it looks/works. if you forget it you will be reminded later.
You’re describing documentation though.
There is far more knowhow and supply chain that goes into keeping labs working than just documentation. Also, research requires labs, and so it is kind of already there sort of thing.
Too bad you're not condemning the live animal / wet market trade because from that we've had SARS, H5N1, H7N9 and Covid19, so are you fairly confident the wet markets are doing a public good or just condemning research labs for some reason?
Do you think bird flu came from a lab?
Chinese authorities considered to crack down on these markets before Covid 19 but didn't...because the markets are a major source of income for the peasant class in China so it's politically dangerous to do it because it would put millions out of their businesses.
Much like nukes game theory favours keeping them.
For all the hand wringing we're doing over AI, I'm surprised that post-covid, regardless of origin, there wasn't a more serious discussion on what sorts of biological research are worth the risk.
I think this is in part because more people have some amount of knowledge about software and can directly see the effect AI has on the job market around them than do about biological research. Biological research labs usually don't expose convenient chat interfaces, besides, you only hear and read about them in scientific papers as long as things go well.
But totally agreed that that conversation should be had, a kind of test ban treaty would be useful but frankly, the three groups most likely to conduct this kind of research would never agree to such a ban.
Because discussions of the idea that covid was the result of biological research was shut down hard, and suggesting it would quickly get you labeled as conspiracy theorist or put in a camp with the most extreme vaccine deniers
I wonder if people downvoting consider your question to be a thoughtcrime or something. It’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Research happens because somebody is interested and writes a grant request that is accepted. Governments and institutions where the research happens have rules as well. It’s possible that the researchers, the folks reviewing the grants, and the people making the rules haven’t done a cost-benefit analysis that adequately covers the tail risks. For some kinds of research, the answer can be: no, we shouldn’t do this. It’s reasonable to publicly discuss these concerns.
Plague exists naturally. It's not some kind of a movie-land bioweapon McGuffin. The US has half a dozen cases of plague each year.
Russia did a lot of work to control the plague with anti-plague vaccinations of cattle and pets, resulting in almost no human plague cases. This obviously requires research and development for vaccines.
BTW, same applies to anthrax. It also exists naturally, which surprises a lot of people.
This information that she "broke a tube" is tabloid bs.
Non-tabloid version is that she didn't catch it in the lab, she got ill "while being on a research trip to Buryatia region near the border where sources of the disease were found".
OP article claims the former. Is there a better source for the latter?
So far I have seen claims of her contracting it doing fieldwork in Buryatia only in telegram groups with no sources. The head of Buryatia Tsydenov released a statement saying she had not been there and that the republic doesn't have animals that carry it.
Of course, Russias pure animals have no stinky diseases, and we can trust their officials every word they say. Also, Russia doesn’t have any gays, because that is a “western disease”.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In absence of sources, the latter sounds like government cover-up bs to me.
https://web.archive.org/web/20261003051644/https://www.gazet...
the government does cover-ups. There was already an epidemic problem earlier this year when they seized and killed cattle in Siberia while keeping silence and pretending nothing happens. Then they have to admit that there is a disease after unrest cause them keeping silence was used for messages like "gov helps big corpos destroy local farmers' business". But they still named less dangerous one, which didn't match the harshness of the protocol they used. Cause if they named the real problem, other countries would've stopped buying meat.
for the cattle epidemic see: https://ru-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1...
Yersinia Pestis is normally treated with doxycycline, cipro, or streptomycin.
Is this a resistant strain?
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/235627-medication#1
Unfortunately, even prompt antibiotics don't always help with the pneumonic form.
Wonderful. I’m so glad they’ve decided to weaponise a disease that can’t be treated. Just what the world needs.
How often does this sort of thing happen? I'm guessing more than we think, either because we forget the news stories we read or because it isn't reported.
There was a COVID 19 lab leak in Taiwan about a year into the pandemic.
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/4374289
Six errors contributed to this leak.
A while ago a researcher at the Univ. of Chicago died of the plague. Although most labs use a mutated form that can't get iron needed to reproduce, he had a medical condition that caused an excess of iron in his blood that might have yet the bacteria grow.
However, every year there's a few deaths in the US from the plague because it's present in a variety of animals. If you look worldwide, there's probably on the order of a thousand deaths annually.
Wow 500$ for an NGS kit to detect it before working there would have been money well spent
In the US, chipmunks out west sometimes carry it. You go to a national park, you see a cute little chipmunk, you decide to feed it (which you're not supposed to do anyway), you get really close to it...
A few people get infected that way. Not a thousand a year, but some every few years.
Bubonic plague is known to be active in Colorado, I think there are a handful of cases each year
Endemic in Antananarivo (very many deaths per year), not sure about the rest of Madagascar.
If you live in the Rocky Mountains try to avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine. If you catch it, get to a hospital quickly and take the antibiotics and you'll probably be fine. If you delay treatment you should use that time to get your affairs in order.
> avoid close contact with prairie dogs or animal carcasses and you'll be fine
I thought at least fleas could transfer it between mammals?
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
Also ask how much is this failed route procedures because organisms or viri of this variety won't continue without human sustainment which is prone to human failures...
Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox and, yes, she caught it in a lab [1].
[1]: https://whyy.org/segments/the-tragic-case-of-smallpoxs-final...
>Oct. 2
Here's a newer CNN story from today:
>Researcher at Russian plague laboratory dies of ‘unknown’ infection
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/04/europe/russia-laboratory-...
This post from local Irkutsk region media (now in exile) is also interesting:
https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651 (in Russian)
The Irkutsk governor, Igor Kobzev, seems to actually have experience in emergency management, and has served for many years in the Ministry of Emergency Situations. This makes the serious response a little bit less surprising (actually doing something instead of just covering it up is the thing that made me actually worried about this situation).
I've read this story before, in Russian, and, honestly, it doesn't make any sense to me.
According to Wikipedia, plague responds to antibiotics very well, since it is a bacteria, not a virus and it hasn't been widespread since the development of antibiotics, so it didn't develop any resistance to antibiotics.
If she knew that she broke a flask with plague (and, as I understand, she did know that), why don't start a course of antibiotics immediately, before any symptoms? Wouldn't she be totally fine it this case?
Don't be fixated on the "tube" thing; it's at the rumour-level certainty at this point (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960955).
On the other hand "Baikal People" post from today is more worrying, as it says they quarantined 4 hospitals for 3 weeks: https://t.me/Baikal_People/16651
Of course we all agree that research on germs that can cause deadly epidemics is safe. Since after all, the Covid outbreak in Wuhan was also not caused by the research lab over there, despite the many reported accidents.
> The woman was identified as Daria Sh., a 27- or 28-year-old employee of the Irkutsk anti-plague institute, by the exiled news outlet Lyudi Baikala (People of Baikal) and pro-Kremlin broadcaster REN TV.
> She reportedly told medical staff that she had accidentally broken a test tube containing live bacteria while collecting samples for testing.
This is just weird. Plague is easily treated if antibiotics are given right away. I'm shocked that an anti-plague institute wouldn't have detailed and proactive plans in case of mishaps. Obviously I think it's likely that there is more to it than what's reported in the article, but I would find it truly baffling if within 60 seconds of her breaking that test tube that protocols weren't initiated to protect her, her colleagues and the community.
Of course, Russia...
It's not clear if she even died from plague. The Russian-language version of the article lists various "versions" of what happened, and her breaking a test tube is only listed as one of the versions. Sounds like random rumors but at the same time, you can't trust the government either (which says no one has tested for plague positively). What's clear is that an employee at an "anti-plague' institute suddenly died from pneumonia-like symptoms, which certainly sounds suspicious but interpreting it as evidence of a plague infection may also be an overreaction
I'm assuming if its a bio-lab that its a gain of function version that may be immune to conventional antibiotics.
Actually went to a scout camp as a teenager (in the 80s) and one of our scouts got the plauge. Took a long while for the hospital to identify it and get him on heavy antibiotics because no one had seen it in real life before.
Hopefully long while is under 24 hours like this plague is.
>the exiled news outlet
i wouldn't rely as a source of information on some very niche outlet whose stuff located thousands kms from the place where something happens
> REN TV.
these are guys whose bread and butter are paranormal activity and UFOs
She probably didn't tell anybody she broke the tube, because, you know, they might yell at her and it may cost her a bit of money if they discover she was clumsy. So she just went home and when she felt bad, went to the hospital. Where nobody knew shit about the plague, as expected - when a person with respiratory symptoms in the autumn shows up in a hospital, nobody thinks "let's test her for plague". When she died, and when they learned where she worked, probably some major "oh shit!" lightbulbs gone up, but by then it was a done deed.
Interesting theory.
"Don't worry, Mikhail. We have extensive containment measures in place. In case pathogen breaks containment, detachment of troops stands ready to terminate all remaining personnel and burn facility to ground."
"But sir, you are talking about—"
"I am talking about courageous scientists giving their lives to protect Mother Russia. Any further questions?"
>Irkutsk region Governor Igor Kobzev urged the public to remain calm after meeting with Rospotrebnadzor chief Anna Popova to coordinate emergency containment measures.
>“All identified contact persons have been placed under medical observation. As of today, the contacts show no signs of illness, and their laboratory test results are negative,”
Why is the knee jerk reaction of authority figures to say everything is fine? Be it epidemic risk, or cybersecurity incidents, the spokepeople always output noise in the form of "everything is fine", there's almost no signal
Because admitting there are problems causes the stock market to go down.
Because in at least some situations, panic can kill people, or at least make it more likely that they will die.
Thankfully I still have a decent supply of ivermectin from HNs guidance during COVID.
What a lousy summary of the lousiest years.
The antiscientific, ventral, paternalistic-in-democracy (an absurdity) attitude had been systemic.
Now back to the topic.
As the pro-COVID-measures-crowd largely overlaps with the Putler-crowd it’s going to be interesting to see their agenda re-alignment.
When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime, and even if it wasn’t, that the regime is going to milk it internally (vs dissent) and externally (vs the west). Especially given that this happened just a few months after the Hong Kong protest crackdowns.
The western center-left didn’t want to acknowledge any of this until it became politically feasible for their own gain and this alone cost us roughly the first three months of properly responding.
Let’s see if and how they’ll going to put their political shenanigans before their countrymen this time. I fear, with all the division they sewed it is almost certainly going lure them to double down on “Covidiots”.
> When the wuhan Lab leak happened in 2019 most of my direct and indirect mainland china contacts were more or less 100% sure that this was intentionally leaked by the regime
oh well then I guess if your personal contacts were 100% sure then case closed
Are you speculating? Or what are you basing this off of? Are you saying this is the next COVID and the government will use it to crack down on protests?
Sounds cartoon-like and unbelievable.
Oh, I see a lot of interest here.. Russia, plague, laboratory..
You know where they do really develop biological weapons, on a much greater scale?
..but of course you do, this is the whole thing about your hypocrisy.
And you know why you are being fed with this, right?
..but of course you do..