Recently, I had a very unsettling experience: I found myself agreeing with some of the worst people on planet earth. Donald Trump. Tucker Carlson. Scott Adams. The editors of the Daily Caller and (shudder) the Gateway Pundit.
While most of what these people say and do is just plain terrible, they seem to have gotten one very big and important issue right: they’ve challenged the until-recently-ubiquitous belief that the COVID-19 virus is of “natural” origin, which is to say that, like so many terrible diseases of the past, COVID (allegedly) originated with animals and migrated over to humans. Indeed, for a brief time, this little animal, called a Pangolin, was thought to be the Typhoid Mary of COVID.
But now it seems more plausible that the real villain of the piece wears a lab coat and works in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a repository of extremely dangerous viruses very conveniently located exactly where the pandemic began, in Wuhan, China — after some sort of lab accident brought one of the viruses the lab had been studying out of the lab and into the human bloodstream. Even worse, the virus that was inadvertently released to the world could have been a sort of supercharged superspreader, genetically modified to be more dangerous than the original virus found in bats. They do that sort of thing at the lab, despite the obvious risks.
Naturally, the WIV has denied that their lab played any part in spreading the virus to the human population. But so far the “natural” animal-to-human explanation of COVID’s origins isn’t holding up all that well. Scientists have tested some 80,000 animals of taken from Wuhan’s wet markets only to find no trace of the virus in any of them.
Right now there’s precious little real evidence to back either theory here, the “natural” animal-to-human explanation or the “lab leak.”
Both are plausible enough theories, but until very recently the mainstream media seemed to be interested only in the “natural” explanation, dismissing the “lab leak” theories as “conspiracy theories” or just plain bunk.
Why is that? Well, to an embarrassing degree it seems to have been a least in part a result of the distaste they felt for the most vocal supporters of the “lab leak” hypothesis — whom, to be fair, tended to be right-wing ideologues eager to blame China for accidentally or (in some versions of the story, purposefully) spreading the deadly virus which has now killed more than 3.5 million people around the world.
Proponents of the natural hypothesis have continually dismissed the idea of a lab leak as just so much nonsense, a “debunked” theory pushed by China-hating ideologues and conspiracy theorists.
In some ways they are acting like Bizarro World versions of MAGAheads who devote their political energy to “owning the libs.” On both sides of this issue, we find activists and academics and journalists who seem less interested in getting it right than they are in scoring points against their political adversaries. It’s a politics built on spite, in which one’s political virtue is defined by the difference between, say, Trump’s beliefs on COVID and your own. Some, as Jonathan Chait noted in New York magazine,
simply took Donald Trump’s bait, answering the former president’s dissembling with false certainty of their own.
It is not too early to grapple with the failures of the media, which reflect the wider struggles of trying to fairly convey the truth in an atmosphere deformed by misinformation. Rather than meet lies with truth, the media often met it with other lies. …
It is true that most of these outlets were more faithful to the truth than Trump, whose gusher of lies vastly exceeded whatever false claims trickled out of the liberal media. But Trump is not the right standard for journalists. And those who chose to follow the ethos of moral clarity, at the expense of objectivity, misled their audiences.
One of the most striking and discomfiting excuses for erthe media’s failure comes from the NY Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who, in an interview on CNN ,put the blame not on the journalists themselves but on Trump and secretary of state Mike Pompeo:
[B]oth suggested they had seen evidence this was formed in a lab, and they also suggested it was not released on purpose, but they refused to release the evidence showing what it was. And so because of that, that made this instantly political. It was example 1000 when the Trump administration learned, when you burn your own credibility over and over again, people are not going to believe you, especially in an election year.
But the issue isn’t whether Trump’s a liar; of course he is. But you can’t just dismiss what he’s saying because of his penchant for untruth; the job of the journalist is to independently assess whether there is any truth to his assertions. Trump’s dishonesty cannot be an excuse for media failures.
On his substack, Matthew Yglesias deconstructs what he calls, variously, “the media’s lab leak fiasco” and a “genuinely catastrophic media fuckup,” concluding that “this is a case of a smallish group of reporters and fact-checkers proclaiming a scientific consensus where none ever really existed.”
In the past several weeks, the once-largely dismissed lab leak theory has become more palatable to those in the press, in part due to several detailed and carefully argued pieces setting forth convincing arguments for, at the very least, looking more carefully at the case for the lab leak. (The piece that won me over was this one by former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade; there is also a smart piece by novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker in New York magazine.)
Some pieces — including “fact check” pieces devoted to trashing the lab leak theory — have been taken down or quietly revised as a result of this broader reconsideration. Looking back through much of the nonsense written over the last year or so in order to put down the lab leak theory, it’s hard not to cringe; the authors sound so certain about things we’re still nowhere near certain about.
Science is ever-changing; it’s contentious; it’s open to change when there’s new evidence or a new theory that explains the old evidence better. Scientific arguments, like political arguments, are rarely settled for good, and they’re definitely not settled by ignoring half the scientists out there because you’re not a fan of Donald Trump.
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So if this ends up being proven to be true, then what happens? I doubt that the Chinese will just admit that they made a colossal fuck-up, and I doubt even more that the international community will forgive them for allowing a massive pandemic to occur through sheer incompetence.
I also have to wonder why they would want to genetically modify a virus to be more deadly in the first place; my first assumption would be that it would be as a bioweapon, but given that such a weapon would likely be modified to kill its hosts faster than it can spread as a failsafe to ensure that it can’t become totally uncontrollable that doesn’t make much sense either.
But if it turns out to be right…well, we might be seeing the beginning of World War III here.
I thought the genome sequencing showed this wasn’t the case? Now I’m going to have to try and find those articles again
Found one of the articles about the likelihood of it being lab-created https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/03/28/where-did-sars-cov-2-come-from/
As kupo notes, it is completely impossible that this could be the case without the researchers around the world who’ve been studying COVID-19 having noticed long since. It’s not impossible that the proximal transmission occurred in a research lab, it wouldn’t be the first time or even the tenth that something like that has happened, but the virus itself isn’t a lab creation.
I think this is a case of being right for the wrong reasons. The world’s worst people may have been right that this was from a lab leak. However it appears their reason for thinking that was xenophobia and anti-Chinese sentiment. Not actually a reading of the scientific writing on the subject.
This is disturbing. I see a push by US elites to foment a war with China, and this attempt to whitewash the lab leak “hypothesis” of the Trump taint is likely a part of the pre-war propaganda torrent.
The actual facts, as far as I was ever able to determine them: SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in a bat population in a copper mine in Yunnan province, China, and infected some miners there in 2012. Sometime over the succeeding 7 years, occasional infections of rural people living in the vicinity gave the virus chances to become better adapted to spread among humans. Eventually, some infected person unwittingly brought the virus with them when they went to the big city to bring things to market — and there was a superspreader event at the notorious market in Wuhan. The animal species at the market that spread the virus was Homo sapiens, hence why they didn’t find it in any of the others.
Absent any concrete evidence of a “lab leak”, both Occam’s Razor and the principle “don’t accuse people of shit without evidence if it might literally start World War III” would seem to indicate one should favor the above hypothesis.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7606707/
I was suspicious of this report from the WHO because it seemed to say, Shut up. It’s not from a lab.
At the time I wondered whether the WHO was saying that because it wanted the hate crimes against Chinese people to stop. That’s laudable — but on the other hand, we really do need to find out all we can about this virus.
This situation reminds me of the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The United States claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. All kinds of politicians, pundits, and experts were saying, Go! But a few experts, including UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, said Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that Blix was so, so right.
One of the problems here is that people are guilty of an equivocation fallacy, where the “lab leak” is of a virus found in nature and sampled & studied by the WIV, there’s actually not much difference between carelessness in a lab and a jump from animal to human outside the lab. If it was capable of infecting a careless human in the lab, then it was already capable of infecting people outside the lab who came into contact with the animal population which provided the original sample.
Here “lab leak” and “jump to human from an animal” are worthless distinctions since, again, if it can jump from animal to petri dish to human it can also jump from animal to human. In fact, it would be essentially impossible to determine the difference between an employee getting infected in the course of gathering samples from an animal population and an employee gathering those samples then catching COVID from the petri dish.
But there’s another “lab leak” hypothesis: that the Novel Coronavirus is an artificial creation of genetic engineering by bioweapon fabricators. And here there is information: Bioweapon specialists say that there are signs when humans artificially tamper with the structure of a virus and those signs are absent from the Novel Coronavirus.
In the latter case, there is actual evidence and expert opinion weighing strongly against that possibility. In the former case, it doesn’t matter since the virus already existed and even if patient 0 worked in a lab, someone else was going to come into contact with that animal population eventually anyway: the pandemic was inevitable before the lab got involved. Indeed, the predictability of viruses jumping from animal to human in that are of China has been observed for years and is the reason there’s a Wuhan Institute of Virology in the first place.
Listen to what the right wing dipshits are saying. It it’s, “You can’t know it didn’t escape from a lab!” that’s fine, but it doesn’t matter. But keep your ears open a little longer and you’ll hear them call this an “attack”. And that’s just straight up bullshit, or at least the people who are actual experts say that to their reasonable level of scientific certainty it’s bullshit.
So maybe the press didn’t thoroughly investigate the “lab carelessness” hypothesis. But I really don’t give a fuck. Even if it were true, it wouldn’t matter a damn, and the fact that these guys are trying to use that hypothesis to attack an entire country means I’m not playing. They can come back when they have actual evidence and a reason why their hypothesis matters.
I mean…I can maybe buy that its spread was facilitated by one or more escaped lab samples. But the evidence pretty clearly shows that it didn’t originate in a lab.
I have had my suspicions about this because my brother works closely with research bats. While they are not his main subject of study by any means and simply one of the factors “he study pollinators” he has been around man bat experts. my brother and the scientist that he worked with have talked about how odd it is how quickly covid spread and the holes in the story about how it started. I am not scientist by any means and this isn’t my field of study but I’ve been around bats my whole life and around other bat people before. The biggest thing that has come from it was rabies. Everything about how covid acts and spreads seemed a little perfect and a little to deadly to be something that comes from nature.
@Crip Dyke
oh agree, not an attack. if one country wanted to attack another with a diseases they could do a lot better then something like covid. If i had to place my money on something I said someone was careless with lab samples of lab specimens and something spread. It be an giant sign for “intent isn’t magic” Because of all the damage covid has done but I don’t think it was an “attack” that’s a stretch as big as grand canyon
@Elaine the witch
It is absolutely possible COVID-19 evolved naturally. In fact if the lab leak hypothesis turns out to be correct, the most likely way it arose would still be the proximity of several species mingling varying strains of coronavirus together in unnatural proximity. It just would have happened in a virology lab rather than amongst animals caught for market. The most extreme while still plausible theory is that the scientists facilitated the combination to study a feature better. There is no individual feature of this disease that hasn’t been found as a result of natural evolution in other viruses. It’s not a designed bioweapon.
I still haven’t seen any evidence beyond circumstantial and conjecture. It could have happened through poor lab procedures – but there’s also better evidence to show the last swine flu epidemic was a result of an American (Smithfield) company’s terrible animal hygiene standards. There’s a reason the EU bans US meat; US industrial farming is a disease incubator, they won’t even vaccinate their animals against known illnesses that result in huge levels of food poisoning in the us, and they keep animals packed together and stressed.
What I’m trying to say is – yes, this could have been a man-made disaster through a lab. But we have to start admitting plagues are all man-made disasters. Habitat destruction, bad animal husbandry, poverty related mass transmission. I wish as much scrutiny was being applied everywhere.
Okay I haven’t posted here in a while but something I want to say right off the bat is that Nicholas Wade is not a trustworthy person.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-origin-of-white-power/
He’s a guy with a history of lying about genetics and misrepresenting the work of scientists to advance racist ideas.
Being wrong about one thing doesn’t prove you are wrong about something else but this is a pretty big red flag, and if he starts making claims that just happen to support other far right types, DON’T TAKE HIS WORD FOR IT!
I can’t find a lot of stuff on his claims yet, but what I have seen does have scientists claiming he is at best overstanting his case and that a bunch of the things he says about the coronavirus aren’t true, and that no the coronavirus problably is natural, and I’m inclined to believe it because again, THIS GUY IS A RACIST LIAR, and liars usually don’t only lie once.
Lab leak definitely. Accident or not, don’t know.
To be clear I am not saying the lab leak theory is definitely wrong, there is some stuff there that is worth investigating, but Wade specifically is not someone to put your faith in. Take what he says with some huge bags of salt.
First, a declaration of conflicts of interest. I’m a Covid 19 consultant intensive care MD in my day job, and I am also a member of Doctors for Xtinction rebellion UK. We are abouf to launch a protest at the G7 in Carbis Bay.
We are going to use the protest to amplify knowledge about the origins of pandemics and the connection between Covid, pandemics, the industrial food system and climate change.
Now that that is out of the way, I have read the article be Wade and I have to admit that it made me pause. However, now that I have had time to think it through I would like to say a few things.
The first is that it is possible for viruses to be manipulated. That’s true. It’s also true that enhancement of function experiments have been carried out. However, Wade has not provided any new evidence that corraborates his claims, which he needs to provide if he is to claim that it is a leak from the WIV. That he hasn’t been able to provide, so his theory remains just that, a theory.
Secondly, and what is shamefully unreported in the media, is that there is already an enormous body of research into the origins of pandemics, that stretched back decades, that there is conclusive proof that most, if not all, of the significant pandemics in the 20th and 21st century habe been spillover events from industrial farming and the wildlife trade. This was summarised in the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: The Era of Pandemics. Put bluntly, the risk of devastating pandemics are escalating year on year because of unsustainable human consumption, in particular our industrial food systems and not because of lab leaks.
Just a number from the report. There currently exist an estimate of over 3 million virus species in the wild. Over 670000 can cross over and infect humans. And, because the point of contact between humans, wild life and industrially farmed animals is expanding exponentially, so that now an average of 5 spillover events occur every year. Any of which can become pandemic.
Scary? Yes. But not as sexy for the media as a good old drama involving lab leaks. Which, like a good scientist, I won’t discount, yet.
One last thing. Wade has provided a theory, but no evidence. He has also been disingenous in saying thst animal hosts are identified quicklu. They’re not. He conveniently falied to memtion that it took 14 yeats to conclusively identify the intermediate host in SARS 1. On the other hand, there’s already a huge body of evidence identifying the source of pandemics as zoonoses. If I was to go for a theory based on avtual evidence, I know which I would choose
The lab leak hypothesis is still improbable and seems to have virtually no positive evidence.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/05/27/the-ny-times-doing-what-it-does-best-waffling/
Sure it is possible but that isn’t the same as equally plausible.
Crip Dyke wrote:
Well said. I’d say there’s also a third possibility, intermediate between those two.
Lay people seem to often associate “virus lab” specifically with bioweapon engineering – probably especially when the lab is run by scary asian communists. Indeed, viruses as a whole are commonly seen as just something that makes people sick. Especially now, public awareness of viruses is extremely heavily centered on just one troublesome human pathogen. In reality, however, viruses are staggeringly diverse, mostly harmless and simply a major part of the great fabric of life.
I’m not terribly familiar with the general field of virology myself, but I gather that virus research has many kinds of possible goals and applications. Most notably, massive amount of virus research is needed for understanding pathogens and developing vaccines and other healthcare solutions. Not just for human pathogenic viruses either, but ones that infect our domestic animals and plants. Plant viruses are hugely relevant in plant pathology and plant biotechnology, and remarkably safe for humans. Modern biotechnology is blurring the line between viruses vs. artificially constructed genomes and protein-lipid nanoparticles.
I haven’t seen much anyone reporting on what research exactly is done in that one Wuhan institute. Notably, I haven’t seen anyone credible explicitly say it’s a bioweapon research lab. There’s just vague insinuation and assumption. If you can confuse (American) people and give them impression that SARS-CoV-2 is a “Chinese bioweapon”, they might very well jump into assuming it was deliberately developed and deployed to kill Americans specifically. That’s exactly how conspiracy theorists work.
Could there be some reason to tweak and engineer viable human pathogenic viruses for a research purpose that isn’t directly related to bioweapons? I don’t know, but it sounds very plausible. It could be something rather innocuous. Then again, as noted above, there’s no credible sign of engineering in SARS-CoV-2 at all. And even if it did “originate” in a “bioweapon lab”, it clearly wasn’t a practically functional bioweapon, at most it was something researchers had been tinkering with.
I feel pretty confident this is a case where Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies.
People upthread have set out, with their usual expertise and clarity, all the reasons why; so I won’t reiterate them here. I’ll just add this:
Expert witnesses are often asked whether something is possible.
When you’re trying to raise a ‘reasonable doubt’ or otherwise persuade a judge, then a ‘Yes’ gives you something to work with.
And of course any competent expert won’t give a categorical ‘no’ when it’s a ‘can’t prove a negative’ situation.
But a standard answer in that situation is “Possible, but not probable.”; and I think that’s just what’s going on here.
Beware of believing theses hack too much David.
What is possible is that the lab have spreaded the original virus, and not a pangolin, which mutated naturally into COVID-19
What isn’t possible is that it’s a biological weapon gone rogue, for a number of reason including that genome sequencing don’t show trace of tampering.
I’m just hoping they stop poaching pangolins 🙁
Another notable thing is how the blame game is making everyone less secure.
Because the chinese governement is very proud and because we like to blame it to everything (quite often rightly so !), we will never be sure of what happened (at least, not until 10-20 years at least, possibly never). The chinese governement will obstruct the search for truth in the origine of the COVID, and even in the event they would not do that, we will assume they did so.
And because we will never see the bottom of that, it’s very unlikely that lessons from the incident will be learned. Depending on the exact origin, maybe wet markets need to be shutdown or have more powerful backup diesel generators ; or maybe biological labs can be retrofit to not have carbon tips on the control rods.
(if the above sentence make no sense to you, it’s a riff on Tchernobyl, with improvements that made the soviet reactor safer after the fact. Both events seem remarkably similar if the wuhan lab hypothesis turn out to be right)
Whether SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab or not, it’s clear that bad things happen when humans mess around with wild animals and encroach on their natural habitats.
Agree with Crip Dyke. Reports are conflating the possibility it escaped from a lab that was doing experiments on natural viruses and a man-made virus (bioweapon). I remember lots of reports in early days saying that the Wuhan lab did have some shady/negligent protocols. Also possible was the idea that a lab tech collecting samples from bats might have been contaminated (again, neglecting protocols for field work) and that was the origin.
I do also remember reporting that was careful in wording, that there was no evidence to support these hypotheses, that China is secretive, that what we know is that the gene sequencing points to a natural virus.
But it’s tough when you have a leader who waffles on about whatever occurs to him with no support at all (China was doing great – China is the enemy – China has it under control – China bioengineered the virus and unleashed it) and a compliant press willing to peddle conspiracy theories.
Yeah, I can feel the political and media elite getting hungry for a new war. The recent spate of editorials on how no one could have possible known Iraq didn’t have WMDs and we’re all lying when we recall robust opposition to the war really raised some red flags for me that an effort to manufacture consent for a new war would be coming soon. This sudden emergence of the “maybe the conspiracy theories about China making Covid in a lab were right” narrative is unsettling.