Paul Offit is a pediatrician and infectious-disease specialized whose take on the Covid pandemic always seemed quite sensible. He works at the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania and is also, according to Wikipedia, “a member of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee and was a member of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.” He’s done a lot of work on vaccines, has written several books about them, has gone hard after anti-vaxers, and is highly respected. So when he weighs in on covid, we should listen.
The “conventional wisdom” now, promulgated by both the DEI and FBI, is that the virus came from an accidental release in a Chinese lab. But I’ve never been fully convinced by that—especially because they found the virus in the Wuhan wet market and the first cases occurred around that market. But now Offit musters the evidence for the wet-market hypothesis, and it seems pretty convincing.
I’ve never understood why it’s become such a big deal about where the virus came from—unless for some reason you want to blame the Chinese government, but knowing the original source is helpful in giving early warnings of pandemics and working out how to stem them. A wet-market origin would lead to a very different strategy from a lab-leak origin.
At any rate, Offit just started a new Substack site called “Beyond the Noise“, and I read the first post, “Lab leak confusion,” out of curiosity. (It’s expensive at $80 per year, so I probably won’t subscribe, but the first read is for free.) I just wanted to summarize why he thinks the virus came from the wet market, and then you can argue it out among yourselves.
Click to read:
I’ll just give his list of arguments for the lab leak hypothesis (these aren’t “theories” in the real sense, they’re just best guesses):
He first describes the popularity of the lab leak claim, and then dismantles it thusly:
If you believe Carl Sagan’s statement that “extraordinary claims should be backed by extraordinary evidence,” this was an extraordinary claim backed by no direct evidence.
On the other hand, SARS-CoV-2’s spillover from animals to people in a wet market in Wuhan is supported by an abundance of evidence:
• Photographs taken of the western section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market showed raccoon dogs and a red fox, both of which are known to be infected with SARS-CoV-2. A customer at the market, knowing it was illegal to sell certain wild animals, took these photos on December 3, 2019, and posted them on Weibo, a Chinese microblogging website. The photos were immediately deleted, but not before a CNN reporter was able to pass them on to scientists in the United States.
• In that same area of the market, SARS-CoV-2 virus was detected in carts, drains, a feather-and-hair remover, a metal cage, and machines that process animals after they’ve been slaughtered.
• The first known human case of COVID occurred on December 10, 2019, in a female vendor at the Huanan Market; two of the first three cases had direct contact with the western section of the market. Indeed, more than half of the early cases had direct or indirect exposure to the Huanan market. Wuhan is a city of 11 million people. There are probably 10,000 places where a new virus could have arisen. Nonetheless, the first cluster of cases were restricted to the western section of a market that was selling live animals susceptible to the virus, exactly where you would have expected a spillover event to occur. The estimated chance that this pattern had occurred randomly, and not as a direct result of animals infecting people, is about 1 in 10 million.
• The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market is located north of the Yangtze River, about 9 miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is south of the river. If the pandemic virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute, it would have had to have leapt across the river without infecting anyone in between.
• The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 virus bears a striking resemblance to SARS-1 spillover events from animals to humans that occurred in Foshan Guangdong province in China in 2002 and again in Guangzhou, Guangdong in 2003.
And then the new evidence, which is quite telling:
• Finally, on March 17, 2023, a discovery by three prominent researchers, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, Kristian Anderson, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in California, and Eddie Holmes, a biologist at the University of Sydney, should have ended the controversy. Examining samples from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market first taken in January 2020, the international research team found genetic evidence for SARS-CoV-2 virus in raccoon dogs that had been sold illegally, further proving the origin of the virus.
If you’re into medicine, vaccines, or the debunking of quackery, you might want to subscribe.
h/t: Bat
I found that Matt Ridley and Alina Chan made a propelling case for the “lab-leak” hypothesis in their book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.
I recommend reading Breathless, by David Quammen which considers the situation thoroughly and doesn’t support their conclusion.
The most balanced conclusion on any of this, is to say that we can’t know for sure about either scenario, and may never know. But what is their compelling case? I’ve never heard of any that comes close to the evidence that it was the wet market.
Matt Ridley wrote a recent article on the subject here.
Millet and Whittaker (2014) confirmed that MERS-CoV carries a furin cleavage site Given that Sars cov2 virus is so far removed from any other virus the fact that it does not publish a list of all the viruses it has is irrelevant. However the WIV database is available to certain scientists. it is my understanding that all BSL4 labs do not publish a complete list of viruses they hold. as for infected animals, the samples from the Hunan wet market released show differently. what you have to explain is how did the virus escape, how did it get to two separate areas of Wuhan? why were no lab staff infected. explain the logistics of this lab leak.especially given that all procedures were tightened after the Sengalese incident 2014 and tightened even more after the staff made suggestions.
For sure. Offit is best known for his research and writing on vaccines, but he is an outstanding writer with a range of biomedical interests. I can recommend any of his popular books, and I’d bet his Substack is going to hold your interest.
I’ve looked at most of the lab leak arguments. Far weaker than the zoonotic/market path. The problem, is there will never be direct evidence either.
Given how blatantly and shamelessly obstructive they were to the WHO delegation, its clear that the Chinese ruling class think that it is at least possible that it was a lab leak.
Did this blatant obstructiveness indicate that they knew that not being obstructive would have been even more embarrassing to them, i.e. evidence of a lab leak might have been found? Or were they just obstructive because they are the Chinese ruling class, and that’s what they do? (Not a rhetorical question).
It would also be embarrassing to the Chinese government to admit it came from the wet market, so they would have good reason to suppress evidence against that as well.
Whether it’s a lab leak or a wet market transmission it’s still a situation the Chinese government wants to suppress. Either should not have happened.
Their obstructionism is really more about how they generally obstruct any investigations from the west (a foreign adversary). It isn’t evidence of a lab leak. It is only evidence that their personality is consistent.
Raccoon dog’s revenge! I hope this teaches the Chinese to leave those cute critters alone.
A week or so ago the NY Times Science section was kind (fatuously made sure) to tell readers that the raccoon dog was “weird” and “squat,” and that it was an “invasive species” and considered a “pest” “by some” in parts of Europe. “Weird” compared to what? Do these writers ever get out of NYC? Whatever it takes to get in another dig at China. Were there raccoon dogs in Taiwan would they tell us?
I want to hear from the Times about “weird” invasive pests imported into Asia and other continents from North America.
… right after people in the “west” stop eating those cute little lambikins.
For anyone who has the patience and a decent understanding of elementary statistics, I recommend this:
http://www.scribd.com/document/492682888/SQuay-Bayesian-Analysis-of-SARS-CoV-2-FINAL-v-2#
“I’ve never understood why it’s become such a big deal about where the virus came from…”
If something this physically, economically, socially, and psychologically disastrous came from a lab leak, then we need to know because (1) we clearly need to better ensure that safety protocols are being followed and are air-tight, and (2) we need to question whether gain-of-function research is valuable enough to risk potential side effects like this.
In the end, I’ve seen compelling evidence from both sides. Since I’m not knowledgeable enough to parse which side’s evidence is slightly more plausible than the other’s, I’ll tell you why I slightly lean toward the lab leak theory: it was right-coded and smeared as racist propaganda for so long that the government releasing studies indicating its possible veracity and the media taking it seriously makes me think there’s something to it. Very rarely do we see something dismissed as a right-wing racist conspiracy by both media and government for two years, only for both to do a 180. I think that suggests enough overwhelming evidence that even these institutions could no longer keep a lid on the theory. But it is just a theory (in the colloquial sense!).
Without relevance to SARS-Cov-2 specifically. We know that labs leak. People make mistakes and this is not a problem unique to China. The last case of smallpox, for example, was from a lab leak in Birmingham, England in 1978 the year after the last case “in the wild”. Appropriate safeguards certainly need to be in place and protocols need to be followed. But getting people to behave sensibly with something they work on every day isn’t necessarily easy. Familiarity can indeed breed contempt. I’m skeptical that lab safety will ever be airtight. The value and danger of GOF research probably needs to be considered in that context.
Well said. (FWIW I’ve thought the wet market hypothesis for SARS-Cov-2 was better supported all along, so this post isn’t much of an update for me. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about lab leaks.)
Oh yes, I agree that safeguards ultimately are often defeated by human failure, and especially for people who have been doing the same protocols every day for years. However, there are fallback mechanisms that can sometimes be put in place to account for even that. You’re of course correct that nothing can ever be “air tight.”
Another reason I think it would be important to know if it came from the lab (and, hell, even if it didn’t!) is because we should have an early-warning system for all labs doing work that could potentially produce a pandemic anywhere close to this scale. If there is a known breach, there should be international rules regarding the protocols followed for the dissemination of information and how it is to be organized and examined, and for how governments will work together on the issue. If this was a lab leak and China knew about it, China has an enormous amount to answer for. They still do, considering how long they withheld crucial information.
Back in the days when the word “meme” hadn’t been applied to slogans, and they were put on “bumper stickers” instead, there was one that was going around to the effect that “If we knew what we were doing, we couldn’t call it research.” Which doesn’t bode well for this approach.
Firstly, the people who do know what they are doing can’t well predict the consequences of modifications (for good research reasons) to existing viruses (and bacteria, and other pathogens). So they’d tick the “Global pandemic possibility negligible?” tickbox.
Secondly, the natural experiments – mixing human flu viruses and avian flu viruses in wild waterfowl populations, for an example – would continue. Also in farmed pig and avian populations. That covers most of the last few zoonoses with significant human consequences. Then there are the “left field” ones like camels and racoon dogs.
In determining the origin of the virus, presumably there is a question of whether all the information from the Chinese authorities is accurate.
This podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/interview-with-worobey-andersen-holmes-the-lab-leak/id1531266667?i=1000603693959) with relevant experts at the forefront of the search for the origin of Covid is very much worth everyone’s time. They address every issue and every critique. Bottom line: the evidence that it came from the market and not the lab is quite solid.
The case has been made that China is just as culpable for allowing a wet market spill over event as they would be if it was a lab escape. They are not supposed to have live wild animals in proximity to crowds of people like that. It’s a bit like having crowds wade through pens of chickens or pigs to facilitate a swine flu or avian flu spill over.
In the evolutionary sense, natural selection occurring in a wild animal to human spill over is a very effective way to select for the mutations needed to make a virus able to infect humans. That’s why all the other human viral pathogens are zoonotic spill overs, and why it is likely that SARS-CoV-2 is as well.
And after it became a pandemic, Covid very quickly jumped from humans to a wide range of other animal vectors. So it is quite capable of transmitting across species lines on its own.
Yes. Indeed this is how we know that foxes and raccoons dogs can be infected with SARS-CoV-2: they were observed to acquire it from humans after the human pandemic got underway. The original virus (rather than delta or omicron etc.) has still not been discovered in a wild bat or a wild species that could have been the vector from bats to humans.
I still can’t get over the question: why *that* wet market? There are hundreds of such markets all over China, including many that are within the range of the horseshoe bat that is almost certainly the origin of SARS-CoV-2. But the virus didn’t successfully cross over into humans at any of those markets so far as we know. It’s an amazing coincidence it happened at the Huanan market that’s far outside the range of horseshoe bats but happens to be a few miles from the chocolate factory where they did gain-of-function experiments on a huge collection of bat coronaviruses.
But I admit that it could all be true and it might be a coincidence that the crossover [ha I wrote “leak” sorry!] and WIV were in the same city. Would be reassuring to have someone find an original SARS-CoV-2 strain in a wild bat or wild raccoon dog.
Where is the evidence of gain-of-function experiments in the lab? I’ve only ever heard of hear-say and rumors. Like this one just now.
I am no virologist, but I would bet a crispy creme doughnut that we are lucky to ever pin-point the origin of any significant virus.
Peter Daszak’s grant proposals that funded the collaboration with WIV, UNC Chapel Hill, and others, emphasize gain-of-function through engineered spike protein manipulation and experimental infection of engineered viruses into humanized mouse models. This is one example from the top of my google search (it wasn’t funded, but others were).
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal
But yes agreed there’s no direct evidence that such experiments were actually done on a bat coronavirus at WIV and that they produced SARS-CoV-2.
Can you cite an entry in the Chinese penal code (or whatever ACOP governs market trading, in China) that says “don;t do this”? Or are you projecting your social norms onto a different society? As Mike says a couple of messages down, why *that* wet market? There are hundreds of such markets all over China
You may not consider “wet markets” to be normal. In [wherever you live] ; but that doesn’t make them intrinsically wrong.
I remember reports of an advertising campaign a few years ago trying to promote French cheese (a deliberately microbiologically diverse product family) to Americans, which featured footage of customers in a French street food market, handling the various cheeses, sniffing them, feeling the texture, feeling how the (bacterial/ yeasty) rind separated from the inner curd in wheels of soft cheese – people really getting to know the cheese.
Apparently, the campaign bombed, utterly, at the “focus group” stage, because what the French considered good behaviour horrified the American target audience.
Does that make the French wrong, the Americans wrong, or both just plain different? I can’t remember tasting any cheese when I visited the States, but I’ve spent years tracking down a wonderful cheese I was introduced to (without a name) by a French chef working in Abu Dhabi. (Obviously, it was Cypriot.)
ACOPApproved [industry] Code of Practice</dt
Sam Harris recently interviewed Matt Ridley and Alina Chan about this. I found it to be a helpful and revealing interview:
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/311-did-sars-co-v-2-escape-from-a-lab
Unfortunately, only the first hour of the interview is free to non-subscribers
Does anyone know why other agencies have leaned toward a lab leak? I’ve read nothing that is more than innuendo about that.
They haven’t. There is no consensus among U.S. agencies. While the Department of Energy and FBI lean lab leak, 5 other intelligence agencies don’t; and none of the assessments, in either direction, have been rated as made with “high confidence”.
GCM
Ah, them. “DEI”.
And while we’re talking them as a significant source on microbiology, we’ll also be taking the CDC’s advice on coal policy (no, that’s been banned, hasn’t it? Too political.) and the geological survey’s ideas about aircraft safety (“mountains – don’t fly into them”).
Based on evidence still confidential, both FBI and DOE believe that an escape from the Wuhan lab involving a lab worker with Covid then visiting the market, has compelling evidence behind it. On the other hand, Christian Anderson has jumped ship once and now is boarding the original ship to support the wet market hypothesis. That a lab technician accidentally got infected and carried Covid to the wet market is possible and can’t be dismissed. As long as they cannot locate an interim animal vector, a lab leak cannot be dismissed. Too many reputations and jobs rest on the outcome because scientists doing this risky research could find new restrictions being placed on them (which are clearly needed anyway) or even losing funding for research where accidents can result in dire consequences. Reputations and jobs are on the line. Unfortunately the new evidence used by the DOE for its judgment that a lab leak was the cause is not being released to the public. Whether it is compelling enough for Anderson and NIH and the proponents of a zoonotic vector to agree with them is not known. But until a lab leak which ended up in the Wuhan wet market has been definitively dismissed based on hard evidence, we can’t take Anderson’s word for it. He has already changed his mind once. This is odiferous and doesn’t sound like his opinion was based on science or evidence.
Keeping key evidence classified only makes the lab leak hypothesis seem less credible to academics who live and breathe on transparency and credibility. But meanwhile releasing this conclusion to the public only fans political flames. So this is not being done at all well, imo.
This really reminds me of the evidence for weapons of mass destruction being Iraq. The evidence is compelling but it’s secret, trust us, why would such august institutions back a lie? Even if it wasn’t the case that the scientific consensus from relevant experts goes against the lab leak, this “we have the evidence, we just can’t tell you” stuff would make me very suspicious.
Amazing Randi would be amused.
Scientists want this to be a scientific investigation, and politicians want it to be a criminal investigation.
Dominic Dwyer
Director of Public Health Pathology, NSW Health Pathology, Westmead Hospital and University of Sydney, University of Sydney,
Member of the 2021 WHO Study of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2 group,
Wuhan 2021
https://theconversation.com/chinas-only-now-revealed-crucial-covid-19-origins-data-earlier-disclosure-may-have-saved-us-3-years-of-political-argy-bargy-202344
I have never heard of argy-bargy. And yet I know in my heart, what it means. This is one reason why I love Australians.
I will need to look this over, as it seems really good.
“argy-bargy” is Scots rhyming slang.
Australians do love to stick a “y” on the end of words though
There are a couple of questions I have with his reasoning. For one, it does not seem a particularly extraordinary claim that the virus might have been leaked from one of the bat virus labs in Wuhan.
I say “labs”, because Wuhan is a hub for such research. The Wuhan Jianghan Disease Prevention and Control Center lab is very close to the seafood market. There is the Hauzhong Agricultural University Animal Lab, The Hubei CDC Animal Lab, and the Wuhan University Animal lab. Most of those are BSL-3 labs.
“If the pandemic virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute, it would have had to have leapt across the river without infecting anyone in between.” is probably the main quote I have objections to. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the virus crept out through a loose vent, and walked to the source of first infection. To me, “lab leak” means that someone in the lab got infected, and went home to spread it there, or that a bat that was not supposed to be infected was moved to another, less secure lab.
The timeline is also an issue. The first confirmed human case is an important piece of data, but is not necessarily the same as the first human infected.
A report in Lancet https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext notes that the symptom onset for their first confirmed patient was 01 December. South China Morning Post has their first confirmed case dated 17 November.
It all matters because identifying the mechanism of release of the virus is a critical step in preventing the next one.
Denying the possibility of some sources is probably very important to those people who might have blame directed at them. For US officials, the labs as a source might be a problem if, as has been alleged, the US was outsourcing some research that would be prohibited in the US.
It seems suspicious that there was a long time where suggesting it might have been leaked from a lab was a position that one might be punished for taking, like Holocaust denial. It is one thing for the CDC to hold an official position so as to not antagonize China, but going after individuals in the US for their personal beliefs about the source is different. Suspicions about an exact source is unrelated to beliefs or behaviors related to disease and spread prevention and treatment.
I think the source should be identified and corrected, wherever it was.
It seems suspicious that there was a long time where suggesting it might have been leaked from a lab was a position that one might be punished for taking, like Holocaust denial.
I agree. Even if the virus is shown not to have come from a lab-leak, it needs to be determined whether Fauci and others insisted on the natural-origin theory partially out of motives of self-protection (because of their connection with the Wuhan Lab). If they did that it needs to be discouraged in the future.
I do find a lab leak for a novel virus causing a pandemic to be an extraordinary claim. The number of mutations that would need to line up well to get a virus that capable with no one else knowing about it during the years of development and no precursors being known from any lab. Just on the face of it the hypothesis seems very unlikely, not impossible but very unlikely.
The idea that a virus of pandemic potential developed via natural selection in area where mammals and people from all over the place are crowded together and moving through is clearly the null hypothesis. Think horses not zebras. The evidence bar for a lab leak to overcome is way higher.
Ok, but how is a sick bat at the market a reasonable vector, but some lab tech in the bat research lab getting bit and infected an extraordinary proposition?
I know we have moved on to racoon dogs, but bats were the species originally blamed. More precisely, we were required to believe that the virus came from a specimen of R. affinis at the market, even though it is not among the bat species regularly consumed in China. Additionally, the suspected R. affinis population lives 800 miles from Wuhan. I am not sure that it is super likely that someone would bother transporting bats that far, if more popular species were available locally.
We do know that R. affinis from South Yunnan were being studied at WIV. Even more specifically, it was not the bats themselves being studied, but their diseases. Sick bats were their focus. Healthy ones were kept only as a control, or to be infected and observed.
For me, it seems logical that if it is indeed a bat virus that crossed over to the human population, and that the origin was infected R. affinis, then one would reasonably suspect the one place in Wuhan were we know that sick R. affinis were being held and studied.
The topic of animals has changed to civets and racoon dogs primarily because they are among the animals that can carry Covid, and DNA swabs taken after the market was closed shows that those animals had been present in the marked, as had Covid.
At least the U of Arizona study proposed that the racoon dogs caught the disease from infected bats.
To me, that puts us back to wondering why they would import racoon dogs from South Yunnan where the bats are, even though there are plenty of them roaming Hubei province.
I would not exclude the market as the source, but it seems just as reasonable that it could have served as an incubator. I bet many regulars here have visited China. One thing that really creeped me out was the constant spitting I saw there. Like the whole country was a pro baseball dugout. That, combined with the general nature of the markets there, makes regular outbreaks of disease seem pretty likely. That is my personal opinion, at least.
Short answer, it’s a numbers game. Decades of close interactions in crowded conditions by dozens of species from many locations kept in unsanitary conditions alongside a stream of humans is a much much more likely place to look for the origin of a virus with all of the requisite changes to make it highly transmissible. This should remain the default hypothesis.
Labs are smaller and more limited. Frankly we don’t understand the epidemiological effect of any given change to the genome let alone multiple interacting changes. That’s why so called “gain of function” experiments exist. A bat virus is very unlikely to jump to humans and be transmissible straight from the wild.
The idea that someone could accidentally just happen to have a novel virus ready made to be a pandemic, in a lab is a very low probability event. Not zero but definitely a zebra for which we would require some extraordinary evidence.
Hi Tony. The WIV was specifically studying SARS-like viruses. They had viruses in their lab that were the closest to SARS-CoV-2 prior to the outbreak. The WIV were performing gain of function testing (in essence, making the viruses more infectious and/or more virulent) in the lab using genetic engineering. They were performing much of this at BSL-2 (pretty much like your dentist’s office). All labs leak infectious agents. It’s only a matter of rate. At BSL-2, leaks are expected at a pretty high rate.
Does this information shift your priors on the plausibility of a lab leak? (All labs leak.)
But none of the viruses that they are known to have worked on are close enough to SARS CoV2 to credibly suspect that any of them were the direct ancestor of the pandemic SARS CoV2. This is what I mean by getting some real evidence for the lab leak. Until there is such evidence that wet market will always be more probable a priori, ie it’s the null hypothesis.
> it would have had to have leapt across the river without infecting anyone in between.” is probably the main quote I have objections to.
Yes, I don’t know what anyone writing that is thinking. Obviously “lab leak” doesn’t mean some plume of green miasma spreading from a chimney. It means some lab worker going home and, a week, later falling ill. There are lots of metro lines crossing the river: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Metro#Lines If you’ve ever been to a city you may know that people happily go five stops to meet a friend for dinner! Or to go to a market…
> To me, “lab leak” means that someone in the lab got infected, and went home to spread it there, or that a bat that was not supposed to be infected was moved to another, less secure lab.
Very true, but that someone would most likely have to be a researcher or lab technician, which means that they would probably spend quite a lot of time in the lab and in the WIV itself, probably sharing a office with other colleagues or even the institute’s refectory. If that was true, I imagine that would also create the opportunity for a large number of initial infections close to the lab (as was found in the area around the wet market), but there are no evidences supporting this “spill”!?
(still too many ifs and coulds and woulds)
> To me, “lab leak” means that someone in the lab got infected, and went home to spread it there, or that a bat that was not supposed to be infected was moved to another, less secure lab.
Very true, but that someone would most likely have to be a researcher or lab technician, which means that they would probably spend quite a lot of time in the lab and in the WIV itself, probably sharing a office with other colleagues or even the institute’s refectory. If that was true, I imagine it would also be seen as a large number of initial infections close to the lab (as was found in the area around the wet market), but there are no evidences supporting this “spill”!?
(still too many ifs and coulds and woulds)
Everything is “if” and “possibly”. I guess there might be a group of people with a lot more specific data than is available to the public, who know with fair certainty what happened.
The rest of us have opinions, based on varying levels of knowledge. That the source is addressed to prevent recurrence is a lot more important to us than knowing exactly what the source was.
It interests me very much why our government felt it was a top priority that I believe the pandemic started from bats at that one market, to the point of having FBI agents scanning social media posts so that they could flag or ban other opinions.
For the skeptical viewpoint see Why ‘lab leak’ proponents are unconvinced by raccoon dog evidence for coronavirus origins, where this viewpoint is common:
Yes, as far as I know the study by Worobey, Anderson and Holmes still isn’t peer-reviewed and published as such and it wasn’t made available as a preprint until after it was first announced in the Atlantic. It took me a while to find it as most media outlets refer to the Atlantic article directly and the study has way more authors than just the three above. They aren’t even positioned as the first (usually designating doing the most work) or last (usually designating seniority) authors so not sure why Offit refers to it as they’re study.
The study can be found here:
https://zenodo.org/record/7754299#.ZCS-4RXMI-Q
I think the study in question is here
https://zenodo.org/record/7754299#.ZCTCMezML0r
I once read of a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in China in the 80s (or thereabouts) that was a bio-weapon gone wrong. But I don’t know how much is fact or fiction.
Matt Ridley, Alina Chan, and others state that despite 10s of thousands of animals being tested in China, none were shown to be carrying SARS-CoV-2. If it had turned up in the Wuhan market (in animals), that would have been the first data available.
Offit’s current claim conflicts directly with this. Is he right? Does he show where those data (that apparently no one else has) came from?
Ridley and Chan line up the evidence for the lab leak. I would like Offit to take on all of that, point by point, if he wants to make the case. (I will read the article — if it’s not paywalled.)
And he’s wrong that this presents much like SARS (1) (or MERS). In that case, the animal vectors were clear and rapidly found: Civets with SARS 1 and camels with MERS. Both originally got it from bats.
And both SARS 1 and MERS rapidly evolved to use the human host. This is markedly not the case with SARS-CoV-2.
He’s worried about the market being 9 miles from the WIV. The market is over a thousand miles from the only place any animals (horseshoe bats) have been found with similar (not the same) viruses as SARS-CoV-2.
1. The geographical argument is amazingly powerful. Thousands of kilometers to the site of the host organisms, but a few hundred meters to the WIV where they were studied.
2. Daszak et al had asked for gain-of-function research to be done there, and very quickly recruited the powers that be to deny that the lab could possibly have anything to do with it.
3. The Chinese authorities have behaved exactly as one would expect if they were trying to hide an issue with the lab.
4. Procedures at the lab were appalling. Pre-pandemic US and French visitors had warned that Level-2 precautions (gloves and surgical mask) were being used for Level-4 (SARS) organisms.
5. The use of codons that are not used in other coronaviruses to specify certain amino acids in the unusual furin cleavage site. Codons that are commonly used in labs that do gain of function experiments
None of these things is proof. Taken together I’d bet on the lab, myself. Now Offit is a respected man, and has been very good at combating vaccine denialism. He has worked closely with NIAID and this must colour his views and bring him more into the party line camp.
In the beginning days of the first outbreak there were 2 variants detected in humans. One of the variants quickly died out among humans and the other became the pandemic. Variants take time to emerge and typically require many infections of large numbers of people/animals/plants/etc, for evolution to produce a viable variant. A lab leak cannot plausibly account for these 2 variants because it is unlikely for a viable variant to arise in a tiny sample in a lab. The scenario of the virus circulating among animals for an extended period with 2 or more variants which jumped to humans in close temporal proximity is more plausible. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/origins-of-sars-cov-2
What’s confused me the most about this whole affair is why China has fought tooth and nail to try to obfuscate what happened. I’m not sure if there’s a general unease with the notion that it might take “blame” for it, or if it’s just an outgrowth of its domestic political considerations. Either way, it’s pretty baffling about the need for secrecy on this issue.
It also makes me wonder if the silence is related to the silence in India during the outback where catching COVID was seen as a sign of shame.
What’s confused me the most about this whole affair is why China has fought tooth and nail to try to obfuscate what happened.
China can’t have an open inquiry since they conducted military research at that lab and they would either have to open that up to public gaze or announce that the inquiry can’t go past a certain set of doors.
China also can’t have an open inquiry if they were conducting experiments with level 2 security when level 4 was called for. That alone would bring a chorus of condemnation on them.
China also can’t have an open inquiry if they were conducting experiments that added a furin cleavage site to bat viruses, even if it is not demonstrated that one of their viruses escaped.
Finally, if this virus escaped from their lab what is the compensation that would be demanded from them?
The reason China is obfuscating about the origin is the same reason the US agencies are putting out disinformation about the origin. Politics.
When did the FBI start having an input to “conventional wisdom” outside the field of crime investigation?
“DEI” – who that?
I’ve never understood why it’s become such a big deal about where the virus came from
As was once expressed to me by a member of the scientifically-illiterate, “If we find out how it was made, we’ll be able to figure out how to un-make it.”
Also, Paul Offit has appeared on the TWiV podcast several times and Peter Daszak has been on at least once. To find all of them, just search Offit TWiV or Daszak TWiV.