Yes, I fell for a recent NYT article (June 3) by Alina Chan, a piece dismantled in the article below by infectious disease specialist Paul Offit. Chan’s piece was called “Why the pandemic probably started in a lab, in 5 key points,” and it was a long and animated op-ed. Being ignorant of the data, I took her bait and said that Chan’s article buttressed my own view that a lab-leak theory was becoming increasingly credible. (She’s a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute.)
But since I consider Offit the most credible source of information about Covid, I’ve now let go of the bait, and agree with his arguments, in the Substack article below, that a wet-market origin of the Covid virus is the best hypothesis by far.
I guess a lot of other people fell for Chan’s article, too, but I’m especially culpable because I already knew Offfit’s arguments, for last March I’d posted his defense of the “wet market theory” for the origin of Covid. I simply forgot!
From the new piece, here’s Offit dismissing the lab-leak theory once again:
On June 3, 2024, the New York Times published an op-ed titled, “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.” The article was written by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute in Boston. Chan had also written a book titled Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, which also supported the notion that SARS-CoV-2 virus was created in a Wuhan laboratory. Chan’s book has been roundly criticized by scientists who investigated the events in Wuhan. Nonetheless, two thirds of the American public, independent of political affiliation, believe that SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a Wuhan laboratory.
Chan’s book, by the way, was coauthored by Matt Ridley.
Click below if you want to see Offit defending the wet-market theory, and, along the way, making Chan and the NYT—which should have had an expert vet her assertions—look sloppy and ignorant.
First, Offit isn’t alone in his opinion; in fact, a wet-market origin seems to be the consensus of Those Who Know:
In her op-ed, Chan wrote, “Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.” Chan was wrong to claim the existence of a “growing body of evidence.” On the contrary, her op-ed contained only conspiracies, innuendos, and blatantly false claims. Although several scientists have stepped forward to counter Chan’s claims, the best single take-down was by Dr. Vincent Racaniello, a virologist who hosts a popular podcast called This Week in Virology (TWiV).
In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.
Chan’s arguments about a lab leak are already cast into doubt by Worobey et al.’s paper described in the second paragraph above (I haven’t heard the TWiV podcast, but readers say it’s very good.) The epidemiology alone is almost dispositive.
But Offit goes on to dismantle each of Chan’s five arguments. I’ll put them in bold and give a very brief summary of his refutation.
1.) “Bat corona spillover events in humans are rare.” Not true: many people who live near bats show antibodies indicating exposure to coronaviruses from bats. Further, the potential for spillover events is high given the frequency of contact between humans and carriers like civets.
2.) The Wuhan lab was researching how to make bat coronaviruses more infectious. Although the Wuhan lab studied coronaviruses, there’s not the slightest evidence that those viruses could be precursors to those causing covid.
3.) The Wuhan lab worked under insufficiently strict biohazard conditions. Offit says that the conditions were “Biosafety Laboratory-2”, which, even if the Chinese viriologists were working with SARS-CoV-2, are considered “adequate”. But they weren’t working with that virus!
4.) Chan says that there was “no way to distinguish between the market [origin] and a [human] superspreader.” Further, she said, “not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.” Here Offit destroys her, and I’ll have to quote him.
Re distinguishing origins:
It is at this point that Chan’s op-ed defies common sense. Two different lineages of SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected early in the outbreak. Chan would have us believe that two different SARS-CoV-2 viruses were created in the laboratory and then taken directly by human superspreaders to the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market exactly where you would have expected an animal-to-human spillover event to occur. Why didn’t one or both superspreaders go to any of the 10,000 other places in Wuhan to begin a pandemic.
And re the lack of infected animals:
Chan wrote, “Not a single infected animal has ever been shown to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.” When the outbreak began, Chinese authorities shut down the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market, disinfected the area, and killed the animals likely to have served as intermediates between bats and humans. In other words, no animals were available to test. This was in direct contrast to SARS-1, another animal-to-human spillover event that originated in a Foshan, China, wet market. In that case, the market continued to operate. For that reason, animals that were the likely source of SARS-1 were available for testing. This is perhaps Chan’s most disingenuous comment. You can’t go back in time and test animals that no longer exist.
This relates to Chan’s fifth point:
5.) “Chinese authorities have not done an intense search for animals infected with SARS-CoV-2.” Again I’ll quote Offit:
True. Mostly because all the animals in the southwestern section of the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market were immediately slaughtered. Researchers did, however, find genetic evidence of SARS-CoV-2 virus in carts, drains, a feather-and-hair remover, a metal cage, and machines that process animals after they’ve been slaughtered in wet market stalls that were at the epicenter of the outbreak. In the same specimens, they found mammalian DNA consistent with raccoon dogs, bamboo rats, and palm civets, all likely intermediate hosts as bat coronaviruses spilled into the human population.
Given Offit’s credentials and accomplishments, and his strong defense of the wet-market theory above, I agree with his conclusion that the evidence for a wet-market origin is “overwhelming.” And yes, given that he knows his onions, I’ll apologize for having been so credible with respect to Chan’s NYT article. The first thing to correct is Chan’s piece, but I don’t expect that the NYT, who could have had her piece looked at by people like Offit, went with it. And that despite the fact that in 2021 the paper had already reported controversies about Chan’s theories, which included the lab-leak hypothesis.
But let’s put aside the paper’s lack of due diligence, for it’s really important to pinpoint the origin of this virus. If we want to prevent future pandemics, we need to know whether wet markets can give rise to them, for in that case we can do something tangible to prevent them. On the other hand, if foreign scientists were manipulating coronaviruses and an infectious one escaped the lab, there’s not much we can do.
Fortunately, the first hypothesis seems to be the case, and Offit suggests several fixes: hold the Chinese government accountable for not supervising wet markets, including those that sell illegal animals prone to carrying bat-derived viruses (Offit says that 31 of 38 species in the market were animals protected under Chinese law). Further, he argues that once there’s evidence of a pandemic starting, the Chinese government must allow international teams of scientists into the country, which they didn’t at first dp in Wuhan. Offit ends by saying, “It’s time we put aside the fruitless, dead-end hypothesis of a lab leak and do the work that is necessary to prevent the next pandemic.”
I’ll keep an eye out for further developments, and again I’m sorry for being credulous about Chan’s paper. She may be craving the limelight, or may really passionately believe she’s right (or both), but given that the evidence against her theory was already known when she published her op-ed, she’s not acting like a good scientist. And in this case,sloppy science can put people in severe danger.
h/t: Frau Katze
Good luck with this. We’re still debating the origins and vectors of bubonic Plague (The Black Death 1346-53). Wikipedia says “Definitive (Ha! my note) confirmation of the role of Y. pestis arrived in 2010 with a publication in PLOS Pathogens by Haensch et al. They assessed the presence of DNA/RNA with polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques for Y. pestis from the tooth sockets in human skeletons from mass graves in northern, central and southern Europe that were associated archaeologically with the Black Death and subsequent resurgences.” With PCR?
I thought it’s been established pretty solidly that that strain of Plague started with marmots in Central Asia and was spread to Europe by Mongols?
(Anyway, it’s mindblowing that we can track the spread of pandemics from 700 years ago, when people didn’t even have a clue what hit them.)
But on to the broader point, it does not seem unusual to me that we never learn the exact origin of many significant viruses that have jumped to humans or to domesticated animals. Especially in this case, where there were many candidate jumping-off points.
Why not PCR? That’s a standard method to amplify ancient DNA signals. Was already used with in the first successful extraction of Neandertal mtDNA in 1997.
Hi Ruth. This is a link to a fact-check source that claims the inventor of the PCR test, the late Kary Mullis, said things about its diagnostic unreliability that are now ‘out of date’. The PCR test has been withdrawn by the CDC for diagnosing the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but not over any formal concerns as to its reliability for that purpose. Read the ‘fact-check’ though. There remains enough ambiguity there to justify my earlier ‘good luck with that’ comment, and that debate over the origins and vectors of the Black Death will continue long into the future. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/01/14/fact-check-kary-mullis-quote-pcr-tests-outdated-lacks-context/9198197002/
You’re conflating the “causative organism” (Yersinia pestis) and people’s more vernacular meaning of “origin” – viz rat’s jumping ship versus, raccoon dogs that caught a virus from bats in the wild then were illegally captured and taken to become human food versus escape from a lab that was conducting research into bat viruses versus corpses catapulted into (IIRC) Anatolian cities under Mongol siege.
That a strain of Yersinia pestis was the causative organism of disease in humans several years into the evolution/ selection event that is a pandemic does not do a huge amount to determine if the “origin” of the infection was a Central Asian shepherd making marmot soup, or a rat boarding a Tbilisi ship in Rostov-on-Don harbour. They’re two different meanings of “origin”.
And don’t forget – the reason that TWIV was working on bat coronaviruses was because they were thought to have been the origin of a previous coronavirus outbreak in humans – which only had a small body count.
Whether steppe marmots and harbour rats, uh, “harbour” the same range of viruses today as a millennium ago remans to be tested.
You’re my lawyer next tort. Great piece of writing explaining yet more in an endless discussion. Seriously tho’ what frustrates those who want to know ‘the’ truth as well as politicians who have to vote for a decision ‘based on the science’, is that no search for truth is ever arrived at until faith or current common sense takes over from an endless dialectic. That’s science isn’t it. I love ‘…Central Asian shepherd making marmot soup, or a rat boarding a Tbilisi ship in Rostov-on-Don…’ I note your reminder distinguishing ‘causative organism’ from ‘vernacular origin’. My faith is that something dodgy happened when it came to the origin – in both senses – of SARS-Cov-2 that no amount of science will fathom; hence our reliance on juries.
For those with too much time to spend on this topic, Scott Alexander has a long writeup of an even longer debate on “lab break vs. wet market”:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim
The funniest quote: “The southwest corner is where most of the wildlife was being sold. Rumor said that included a stall with raccoon-dogs, an animal which is generally teeming with weird coronaviruses, and is a plausible intermediate host between humans and bats. China said this rumor was false and refused to release any information. Scientists were finally able to confirm the existence of the raccoon-dog shop in the funniest possible way: a virologist had visited Wuhan in 2014, saw the awful conditions in the shop, and took a picture as an example of the kind of place that a future pandemic might start.”
TL’DR: the judges of the debate ended up convinced by the wet market hypothesis.
Edit: I have to contradict our host – I don’t think it’s that important whether this particular pandemic did arise from a wet market or a lab. The fact that long discussions were had, with no one giving a slam-dunk argument that a pandemic from a wet market is impossible or even implausible in principle, shows that we should take the problem very seriously.
Hear hear. Very good point.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim
www. astral codex ten.com
/p/practically-a-great-way-to-lower-your-credibilty-score-below-your-shoe-size-(US-not-european-sizes)
I have no idea how credible that site’s authors are. But life is too short to find out. Surely a credible author could find a host which doesn’t sound like a hang-out for New Age Woolly Thinkers.
Since that debate several peer-reviewed studies have undermined the arguments for Huanan Seafood Market origin. Alina Chan’s Op-Ed cited some of these but Dr Offit does not engage with them. All the market cases in December 2019 were were lineage B but new genomes published by Lv et al (2024) indicate lineage A came first. So market cases are not the primary cases. The environmental samples from the market actually show a negative correlation with susceptible animals and SARS-COV-2 genetic material (Bloom 2023). Other animal CoVS are linked to the animals but SARS-COV-2 isn’t one of them (Bloom 2024).
George Gao, the CDC head at the time, acknowledged to the BBC last year they may have focused too much on and around the market and may have missed cases elsewhere. Liu et al (2023) also acknowledge sampling bias towards the corner with the wildlife-stalls. Although again, as Bloom found, these don’t support wildlife origin.
Michael Weissman (2024) shows a model with ascertainment collider stratification bias fits early Covid case location data much better than the model that all cases ultimately stemmed from the market. In other words, exactly as Gao acknowledged.
Patrick Berche (2023) notes the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found ~1500km away in Yunnan and Laos. These are locations WIV sampled SrCoVs. Their findings from 2015 onwards are unknown. In 2022, the NIH terminated WIV’s subaward for refusal to share records of their SARS-related bat coronavirus research. So claims we know what they had are incorrect.
Ultimately, the Energy Dept scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos shifted to favor lab origin joining the FBI. They are the only agency to update from 2021 and their reasoning is unclear as the ODNI didn’t disclose it. WHO considers all hypotheses remain on the table and are calling for data on both the animal trade and Wuhan labs.
“Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, – that of alchemy, operational success.”
-George Soros
The Chinese authorities will control their wet markets or not. No one from the outside will dictate anything to them.
There was much conspiracy thinking early in the pandemic. I remember a very heated debate among commenters at the Sandwalk web site, where to some, any rumor from Twitter or Reddit was seen as credible evidence.
I have read Viral and David Quammen’s Breathless, a rejoinder to the first book.
So far, I come down clearly on the side that the lab leak is more likely than natural spillover from wild (or domesticated) mammals. I found Quammen’s arguments weak and he failed to address most of the important points Chan and Ridley make.
I will read this article and see if it changes my mind. (I did not read Chan’s recent OpEd.)
Interesting. My guess is that the consensus will emerge—probably for the wet market hypothesis—without completely ruling out the lab hypothesis. Maybe the consensus has already been decided.
Regardless of the truth about origin of the the virus (which may never be ascertained), what I find inexcusable was the suggestion among some prominent biologists/officials that even suggesting a possible lab leak was somehow racist. That attitude has aided in the deterioration of public trust in science.
“suggesting a possible lab leak was somehow racist” is wrong on two levels.
First, IMO, “an evil/ incompetent government agency botches an experiment and tries to cover up the fallout” has fewer racist connotations than “the people of that country love to eat wild animals that are kept under such unsanitary conditions that a zoonotic pandemic was only a matter of time”. People claim the former sort of thing about the FBI and CIA all the time, and they’re probably not racist anti-Americans.
Second, “this is racist” is a moral judgment. “The virus originated in a lab” is a statement about the world, and it’s either true or false. If it’s false, that’s reason enough to stop claiming it; if it’s true (or at the very least unproven but plausible), then it must be admissible to say it, even if it has corrolaries that you don’t like from a moral perspective. Maybe the world just happens to BE racist and sexist?
The “logic” goes like this: Trump said it was a lab leak; Trump is a racist; therefore the lab-leak idea is racist.
+1
One point that came up in the TWiV podcasts on the subject is that the animal trade is huge in China. There is big money involved, so even if the trade is technically illegal there is enough money to bribe people to look the other way. The quick shutdown of the market this time may be an attempt to prevent embarrassment.
The evidence from the market seems strong — two strains centered on the section of the market where the animals were sold.
I was mentioning BSE recently, and was prompted again to wonder how BSE prion proteins managed to get from British cattle into wild American deer. But the hunting industry is big in America, so there is a lot of money to fuel some very odd things. Maybe American deer breeders (for keeping the shootable population high) were using British methods for boosting the protein content of their deer food?
I have never heard of breeding (native) deer (aside from elk) for shooting. (There are exotic deer shooting and elk shooting private reserves; but they are all fenced.) I lived most of my life in the American Midwest, where deer hunting is a big deal.
I certainly have never heard of any sort of deer breeding and then releasing to the environment.
It’s possible I’ve missed this; but I doubt it. In most areas in the USA, deer hunting is needed to control herd sizes to prevent winter kill and environmental degradation. (The predators have mostly been eliminated from the environment, unfortunately.)
Which leaves entirely open the question of how the BSE prion got into wild American deer populations.
Deer populations in Scotland are maintained excessively high on the moors, though not by captive breeding and release – more by feeding in the lowlands in mid-winter, to get the pregnant hinds through the winter (mild side-effect of feeding stags. Some estates (farmers don’t do this – deer are pests) also provide calcium supplements, since most of the customers are coming to “bag” a rack as well as exercise their sex-murder fetishes. (I’m not a fan of hunters. Particularly those who don’t butcher and eat their kills.)
It’s getting on for 20 years now since the Cairngorms (Mar Estate, plus others) came into public ownership. The stocking levels of sheep and deer have been reduced something like 60 to 70%, and the Caledonian pine forest seems to be re-seeding well from the remnants in gullies and a few un-felled woodlands (Glen Derry, I’m looking at you!). It won’t be long before the grockels start complaining about the mountainsides being forested almost to the summits.
The disease in (US) deer is called Chronic Wasting Disease.
Is this the same disease (same prion) as BSE? I have not heard that.
This seems unlikely since BSE (and Scrapie) have been shown to cross to humans and CWD has not been shown to do so.
I lived in Michigan for many years and I observed that in winter, perhaps mainly in winters with heavy snowfall, hay was dropped in woodlands to help maintain the deer population. I suppose it is possible other substances were added to the feed, but I wouldn’t know about that.
Hello, Jerry! Long-time fan of your site and lurker here (and a junior mol. evol. colleague).
Just want to add that while I recognize that this [origin – lab vs market] is indeed a complex issue where a lot of critical data is absent, the way the discussion is led reminds me of the Soviet Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979. There the military lab did a boo-boo, but denied it (very on-brand for Soviets), and instead got prominent Western experts to agree (at least temporarily) that it was some sort of natural accident.
Eg, memo https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/101584906X18717 for this gem “My personal conclusion from that evidence, taking account of other evidence from VS sources, is that the present Soviet account of the epidemic is plausible on its face and internally consistent. The contrary testimony of the emigres is for the most part hearsay. While it may be given in good faith it can hardly be said to be grounded on a professional understanding of the different forms of anthrax. Wild rumors do spread around every epidemic: and this one conjoined with the widely held belief that the military contonment No. 19 is a BW development or production facility.”
NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-lab-anthrax.html
Yes, Mr./s Glass. The Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak of 1979 is analogous to this.
Note how the Soviets successfully covered it up for decades.
D.A.
NYC
+1
How could you use assessments like :
. to distinguish actual reports of [event] from lying narratives constructed by a competent liar with access to experts in the field?
Me, I’m championing the theory (which is mine) that on August 6th 1945, a secret Japanese nuclear lab in down-town Hiroshima experienced a “criticality crisis” similar to the one at Los Alamos a few months earlier, resulting in the destruction of the city. The presence of a US meteorological flight over the city at the time was a pure coincidence. I bet it could be made it stick. (I wouldn’t be astonished if some author in “counterfactual fiction” has already used the idea in the same way as Philip K Dick did in his “High Castle” story. Except that Dick is a better writer than I.)
I’m appalled that you folks fell so easily for this “lab leak” stuff. How could this happen? You really should bother to read the literature on this important topic. But, of course, these papers, and the references therein, are hard. There have been been a lot of concerns and a deep and wide literature on the origins of other coronavirus spillovers, and other viral diseases in general, and the wildlife “trade”.
And by the way, a lot of. — almost all of — “heterodox science” — is nonsense.
I have a copy of the Jakob Segal’s manuscript that sparked the conspiracy theory, still circulating, that HIV had its origin in a US bio lab (Ft Detick, I think). A distinguished journalist I know interviewed Segal and got a pre-publication version. (I doubt it go into a “real” journal). Do you all fall for that? It’s very sciencey and persuasive. (For the uniformed — and this ignorance is too common — the animal origins of HIV from SIV via the bushmeat practices, is now overwhelming. There is a deep and detailed literature.)
The argument mentioned above, that the wildlife trade is lucrative and influential in China is hardly mentioned. They’ll laugh themself silly while USA thaws virologists under the bus and our general knowledge and understanding of the importance issues continues to decline.
There will be another pandemic, and conspiracies theory will abound. Scientists will be blamed.
There are still people around touting Duesberg’s theory about AIDS. I was arguing online with one other day.
Worth adding that the clinical record of HIV goes back to IIRC 1957, and the diversity of SIV and early HIV viruses suggests an initial transfer event in the early 1920s.
Now, as a geologist, I take molecular clock arguments with a considerable pinch of powdered halite (but suitably seasoned, I do accept them. ±10%), and that “origin date” seems suspiciously similar to the social disruptions caused by Leopold’s “Belgian Congo” genocidal exploitation.
Hmmm. Maybe “boring” isn’t the worst thing that can be laid at the door of the Belgians.
As night follows day, with the confidence that scientists have in the conservation of angular momentum. Which Noether’s theorem takes straight down into the heart of mathematics.
Jerry, after reading Alina Chan’s article did you believe that all the students, postdocs, technicians, and scientists at WIV were lying in order to cover up the fact that they were secretly working with SARS-CoV-2 before the pandemic and that they allowed it to escape and infect the general public?
Equally plausible would be – for example – one of your groups thinking they’re working on BATVIRUS-934a and accidentally bringing a SARS-CoV-2 precursor along for the ride into the “make it easier to do lab work on” pipeline. Then … [Survivors 1974, opening credits] joy and happiness, unbounded.
Under the natural-origin wet-market hypothesis, is it just a giant coincidence that Covid happen to originate in a city that had a bat coronavirus research facility? Or was the facility placed there because of its proximity to naturally-occurring coronaviruses?
(I’m asking this question from a place of ignorance, not trying to score points.)
Yes, it is normal to place a research facility close to where the virus of interest exists in nature. Makes acquiring samples easier.
I recommend the Astral Codex Ten debate to anyone with remaining questions regarding a lab origin. The 6 AA furin cleavage site (instead of the standard 5 AA version commonly used by labs) in COViD that had never been seen previously and required a super computer to determine how it worked was the most compelling argument to me (though there were many).
A friend married a girl from Wuhan and she said that lab was rumored to sell lab animals to the market when done with them. I have not seen that addressed anywhere but is a minor word of mouth rumor I feel guilty even mentioning.
You should, Tom. Wuhan girl’s theory sounds bonkers. They’re not that short of protein in a rich city like Wuhan. Surely. Imagine it: “Viral lab mice… one plague infection only, discounts this weekend only in the wet market!”
But your geography point is a good one.
The CDC is in Atlanta because it was “the hot zone” (hehe) of malaria in the 1940s, it is believable that the Wuhan Institute was built near their local diseases.
Opposed to this is the idiot theory, always good in explaining communism: Maybe Mao’s nephew was a doctor and was from Wuhan so that’s where they put it. as I write below…. can’t trust a commie.
D.A.
NYC
Hubei province is not the hot zone for bat-borne coronaviruses, I think. Not tropical.
That’s not the case here though. Wuhan was even used as a control for a serological study on SARS-like CoV infections in 2015 due to its urban location. As Chan, and previously Patrick Berche, have observed the nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found ~1500km away in Yunnan and Laos where the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been sampling sarbecoviruses. Their records from 2015 onwards are unknown so it’s illogical to claim we know they didn’t have a close enough precursor. The NIH terminated their subaward for refusal to share their records in 2022.
let’s quote from Scientific American https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/
They quote what Zhengli Shi said,
Start quote
“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
End quote
The closest bat coronaviruses (to SARS-CoV-2) that people outside of China know of are found ~1000 miles away from Wuhan.
Wuhan has over 20,000 bat samples in their freezers but they took their database offline after Covid. We don’t know what’s in them, we don’t know what they studied so it’s rich when people say the WIV wasn’t working on anything like SARS-CoV-2.
It is question begging. If we assume that they weren’t working on anything like SARS-CoV-2 then we know that it couldn’t have leaked from the lab.
[edited to add that I’m basically asking a long form of Lionel’s question @ 12, I’m just a windbag with bad timing; thanks Lionel!]
I’m willing to be convinced that the pandemic spread from a zoonotic spillover of two viral strains from horseshoe bats to humans via an intermediate host in the market. But my prior on a spillover from the WIV is still pretty high. Arguments like “Why didn’t one or both superspreaders go to any of the 10,000 other places in Wuhan to begin a pandemic” are part of the problem: the same argument applies to the market itself. There are lots of wet markets and hundreds of km between Wuhan (where the spread began) and southwestern China (where the bats harbouring SARS-CoV-like viruses were collected). Why did the spillover occur in *that* market, a few km from WIV? Again it’s hard to dispel the expectation that, as Jon Stewart said, “Maybe it’s the fucking chocolate factory.” But I concede that’s not evidence, it’s a prior that I’m still applying to evidence. Jerry’s post includes good reasons to think that prior might be wrong. I’m still waiting to be convinced, but I also concede that maybe I’m still waiting because Jon Stewart is pretty funny.
See above
Exactly, the location of the outbreak in Wuhan is in itself significant circumstantial evidence. Professor Michael Weissman who earlier this year published a paper showing ascertainment bias towards the market in the early case counting, has a Bayesian analysis which attempts to set out the odds of lab origin against zoonotic spillover. He discusses the papers that Offit cites in support of market origin including more recent studies that challenge those arguments.
https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57?r=2byn6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Most of the conclusions made in this debate rely on data provided by the CCP. They are perfectly capable of concealing information that shows them in a bad light.
It is very difficult to do normal science under such conditions.
A larger issue to me is the question of what motivated US authorities to go so far as to try to punish Americans who opined that the lab might be the source. It was very important to them that the spotlight turn away from the Labs in question.
Until we know exactly why they did so, we will never have the whole story, and be able to understand what entanglements the people here had with people over there.
Also, from the information given, the samples taken at the market were taken some time after the disease had started to spread. Samples from before the epidemic started would be more reliable.
I suppose many people on this site have spent time in China. When I was there, I was really bothered by everyone spitting all the time. Added to the unsanitary conditions in those markets, one would reasonably expect they would be a vector for disease propagation, even if the initial source was the lab.
I’ve not been to China but I worked in what was considered a very “upscale” ma and pa grocery store in downtown Carmel, California (early 80’s) that was attached to a separately owned butcher shop. The Chinese man who owned the butcher shop (“Lyle, the butcher”) constantly spit on the floor of the shop. There was no “back room” there, he did this right behind the glass case in front of all the customers. I could never understand why people lined up for meats and sandwiches day after day while he stood there spitting all over the place.
I am aware that most if not all virologists prefer the wet market theory, and there can be little doubt that it was the epicenter of the first outbreak, and the one person who I seem to remember had no contact to the market could have accidentally sat beside someone infected in a restaurant or whatever.
But there is the coincidence that the closest relatives of SARS-COV-2 ever found in wild animals were all from far, far southwest of Wuhan (like Yunnan province or Laos), and one of these viruses with 96,1 % similarity was still kept in the Wuhan lab in 2020 in environmental samples collected in 2013 from a bat cave in Yunnan. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13). I don’t think a lab leak can be ruled out categorically.
One thing is certain: bats may be fascinating animals, but humans should keep the hell away from them, they are chock full of viruses potentially dangerous for primates like us.
Evidence required that bats are more “chock full of viruses” than, say, primates. Both having long lineages, I see no a priori reason to point fingers at one over the other. How many primate viruses infect bats?
I heard recently that the closest “wild” virus to Ebola had been found in fish (though since I don’t work in those regions any more, I’ve not followed up on it) making the alleged bat link just another short mammal-mammal hop, after the big fish-mammal leap. Bats, and primates being cousins, metabolically, to something that has spent 200± million years living in fish.
Is anyone running a book on where the next pandemic virus comes from? I’ll put a pint-worth of beer-vouchers on an avian virus (for distribution) via some nice “organic wild-living” pigs-4-fork. Because, given the choice between industrial meat-growers and artisan pig-huggers for missing a virus in their profit-margins, it’ll be the pig-huggers.
Pigs are, metabolically, cousins to humans. The anatomy is pretty close too – hence the continuing efforts to make pigs-4-transplant.
I actually enjoy following debates so above my pay grade I can’t begin to form a final opinion about – though I love the science that gets us there.
I’ll say this, my two cents: I’m utterly cynical about ANY and ALL numbers and figures coming out of any communist/dictatorship source. Things like “wet market virology/animal sample tests” for eg.
Non-democracies have no corrective mechanism for bad info. And total incentives to lie like rugs.
This goes for MANY fields of inquiry: economics/finance being a fine example:
Unemployment in China? Inflation? School scores? Who knows?
Xi knows, but he’s going to lie about all of them. And there’s no mechanism to prove him wrong. I groan when I hear: “Gvt spokesman from (insert any non-democracy) say….”
Trying to untangle truth from systems that have no corrective mechanisms is a dangerous business. Like listening to Hamas “Health Ministry” numbers.
D.A.
NYC
It’s not only commies and dictatorships whose data can frequently not be trusted. Capitalist pharmacological enterprises often have big drawers where they can put research findings they don’t like, or they may have buddies at federal agencies that enable them to sweep stuff under the rug (thinking of “Empire of pain” here, a truly fantastic book, thanks for the recommendation, PCC(E)).
Peter Daszak, the chief of the group tasked with finding the origin of COVID, wasn’t particularly transparent when he kept to himself that his organization had written a grant proposal for just the kind of gain of function research that might have produced something like SARS-COV-2. It needed a whistleblower to get that information out.
Regarding Chinese schools, I think we can be pretty sure they their PISA results aren’t faked. China won the Math Olympiad (1st among a 100 nations) five times in a row, to cite just one tiny piece of evidence.
Read Dali Yang’s “Wuhan: How the Covid-19 outbreak in china spiraled out of control.”
Mmm hmm..
Lestrade is satisfied with the concise, neat, plausible* coverage of the evidence.
Sherlock and Watson by contrast account for human nature with piercing insight and solve cases, usually with less obvious interpretations of the exact same evidence.
Just sayin’
(Also happen to be reviewing some of The Adventures …)
*quotation Easter egg
Because no mid-level apparatchik ever has had a motive to climb the greasy (corporate/ political, same difference) pole by exposing the fsck-up of a similar-level apparatchik.
How effective are those “whistle-blower protection” laws? And … if democratic societies don’t cover things up, why do those laws exist?
While we fight about whether this virus came from a wet market or a lab, I think we risk losing sight of the bigger picture: to what degree do we want to authorize and fund gain of function research?
Regardless of whether SARS-COV-2 originated from a lab or wet market, was the original response by those “in the know” one of “Oh, shit, did we do this?” or was it “We need to find the animal vector?” There was a concerted push at very high levels to squelch any talk about lab origins. Credible people who even suggested that it needed to be one of the hypotheses considered were smeared ruthlessly. All of this unfolded far too early in the process for anyone to have been convinced one way or the other.
Am I saying that there was a conspiracy to cover up a lab origin of SARS-COV-2? No, we haven’t the evidence to prove that. But I am saying that it appears that people within the biodefense complex were worried that it MIGHT have been a lab origin, and they were worried about the ramifications—both at the outbreak and in the future. Culpability aside, do they fear that this would hinder ongoing and future work?
I mention the following with full awareness of how it will sound: some of the strongest circumstantial evidence that government officials feared that they MIGHT be dealing with research gone bad was the unhinged nature of our public health response. Lockdowns (martial law by another name), school closures, universal masking, quarantines for the symptomless, and on and on until we get a vaccine, which was then pushed with universal prescriptions in the US regardless of age, preexisting conditions, individual risk, and in many cases, without regard to individual autonomy—even when we knew that the vaccine prevented neither infection nor transmission.
None of these were part of our pandemic planning. Much of it was outright panic, a condition not prevented by one’s intelligence. (Political tribalism and outright fearmongering then took over and locked people in their camps.) None of those who panicked want to revisit the past and have an honest assessment of our successes and failures, of what we knew and when we knew it. I get that part; it’s human nature. But we need an independent COVID commission to dispassionately assess our response so that we can better prepare for the future. And part of that assessment needs to consider whether the US government is doing or sponsoring biological research that, if leaked, COULD cause a pandemic of the type that would have government officials across the Five Eyes countries thrown into a panic. If we are doing such work, regardless of whether it was the source of the recent pandemic, then we need to have a serious discussion about whether to continue.
Until Omicron, the vaccines did prevent infection and reduce the risk of transmission, at least no worse than the old vaccines against polio or smallpox did. People nowadays tend to think these vaccines worked 100 percent, they don’t/didn’t; also oral Polio vaccine has the symptomless transmission problem pretty strongly, and the smallpox vaccine also had the waning problem.
It was unclear at first how extremely adaptable the virus was.
Actually there was a large outbreak of Delta in summer 2021 in a highly vaccinated population partying cheek by jowl during a festival in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There were no deaths, as could be predicted from the young-ish age of the partygoers, although many, owing to the nature of the event, were obese.
https://ptowntourism.com/events/bear-week/
Ha! I was just going to ask Leslie if he was intimating that there were dancing bears with COVID there!
That was probably waning. But regardless, if vaccine efficiency was 50 % or 60 % by then (still higher than most influenza vaccines or a single oral Polio vaccine!), there would have been a large outbreak despite a working vaccine. Israel had successfully controlled COVID for several months with vaccines, except in the populations with low takeup, until waning and new variants took their toll.
Ruth,
Let me know if I mixed this up but I think you meant the IM polio vaccine allows silent transmission as it induces internal antibodies only.
The oral polio version induces antibody production from mucosal surfaces of the gastrointestinal tract (which get regularly passed along with stool) and so helps with stopping spread via shared sewage systems.
The oral polio vaccine is used in India and asymptomatic transmission via stool was found there in an outbreak, as well as in several other places where I am not sure from memory which vaccine was used.
https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/201/10/1535/993085
The article supports that gut mucosal immunity is imperfect and wanes with time. But still much better than unimmunized populations (or those only receiving the IM vaccine which produces no gut mucosal immunity).
None of this is new so I think I am missing your point. If it is that triggering mucosal immunity is difficult, I agree. I would only point out that inducing mucosal immunity (and preventing silent transmission) is hard even with mucosal vaccines (intranasal flu vaccine, OPV) but vastly more so with IM vaccines (so I found the “no transmission” claims for COVID vaccine a bit suspect from the start).
Quick reality check – what is the cost per vaccination of oral vaccine versus “IM” (IntraMuscular?) ?
If IM has 50% higher success than oral (90% vs 60%) which would you use for a half-billion dose order?
This is a spin off of the continuing efforts at polio eradication? For which the main continuing obstacle still seems to be a toxic mixture of religion (a branch of monotheism, I believe) fed by anti-vaxxer rhetoric.
(This is an answer to Tom B. and Gravelinspector Aiden)
You seem to have misunderstood me? My point was that a vaccine not being perfect is no reason to be against it, as vaccines tend not to be perfect. I am totally pro Polio vaccines, both the oral and the IM, and pro all the other vaccines I mentioned.
If you look at the context of the thread, you’ll see I was replying to Doug who said the state pushed us to vaccinate against Corona despite it being known that the vaccine was not protective against infection or transmission. I countered that the Covid vaccine was highly effective against infection and transmission before Omicron. Then Leslie objected to my statement with a Delta outbreak despite vaccination. I brought up the universally praised Polio and Smallpox vaccines, who we know eradicated the diseases in many countries/completely, to make the point that for a long time, the Coronavirus vaccines were as good as they were.
This Bayesian analysis by SC Quay at:
zenodo.org/records/4477081
is by far the most detailed and rigorous analysis of the issue that I have seen, including Offit’s. Starting with a prior two standard deviations below the estimates by three people who objected to the lab leak hypothesis (0.012), its final probability was 0.998 in favour. Until I see an equally comprehensive treatment by objectors, I shall accept Quay’s conclusion.
Also, I wonder to what extent virologists with an interest in virus research have a vested interest in denigrating criticism of virus laboratories.
Had a look at the link. I couldn’t find any source for his major claim that an artificial Adenovirus “p-shuttle” was found in one of the early patients. It’s not in the paper by Zhengli Shi. In the “final version” of the text, the claim apparently no longer appears, which strangely doesn’t change his conclusions (even though in the earlier version he said that this was the most important piece of evidence).
Ruth, just “a look” is not enough. One might quibble about one of the probability estimates, as you have done, but the point of a Bayesian analysis is the cumulative effect of the sequential revision of priors. Most of Quay’s probability estimates were conservative. Even if one was badly wrong, it would do very little to offset all of the others.
I know that it is a very long paper, but I repeat that I would still like to see a comprehensive rebuttal, if one exists. Offit’s effort is typical of that side of the discussion. He might have attached probability estimates to his five points and performed his own Bayesian analysis. Without either that or a single killing proof, his argument is mere handwaving.
Having re-looked, I find my objection about the Adenovirus pShuttle (which made me distrust the rest) doesn’t hold up: Comparing the two versions of the article again, the one you linked and the final paper, I see that he says in the first: “The remaining analysis is being conducted without the adenovirus vaccine evidence unless and until it is corroborated.” Apparently it couldn’t be corroborated, but his Bayesian estimate didn’t have to be adjusted, as he hadn’t used this uncertain evidence in the first place. So I have now regained my trust that the author is an honest player, and will read the rest. Thanks for linking!
Your response is admirable. It is a long paper: it took me hours to read it, so I am delighted that you are prepared to do so. I would be very interested if you find any discrepancies that I failed to spot.
Have you read this? https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/USGS-DEFUSE-2021-006245-Combined-Records_Redacted.pdf
It is several drafts of the Defuse proposal that Peter Daszak wrote in collaboration with Zhengli Shi and Ralph Baric.
I find it hard to summarize what the proposal is about because it includes a smorgasbord, of many different ideas: an app for displaying coronavirus hotspots, a proposal to use aerosols to spray bat caves with vaccines and/or things to strengthen bat immune systems to lower viral loads, genetically engineering chimeric coronaviruses, playing around with RBDs, adding furin cleavage sites, the usual GoF potpourri.
Page 524 is practically a recipe for making SARS-CoV2.
This was a proposal to Darpa for use whenever American warfighters wanted to do some warfighting in countries bordering southern China.
Darpa turned it down but what other superpower might be even more concerned about having to do some warfighting inside of or south of the southern border of China? No, it’s not Russia 🙂
As to whether BSL2 is sufficient… check out Peter writing about the cheapness of working at BSL2, and Ralph’s response in the margins. He was less than impressed. It’s on page 171.
At the top of the same page, you can get an inkling of why Peter and EcoHealth alliance wont be getting any more contracts from the American taxpayer. Essentially, what the people who fund us don’t know, wont hurt them 🙂
For me there is a lot of humor on that page. I suspect that Peter had a private chat with Zhengli, saying: what Ralph doesn’t know, wont harm him (just do it at BSL2). Well, it tickles my funny bone.
I am roughly a third of the way through Dali Yang’s excellent book, “Wuhan: How the Covid-19 outbreak in china spiraled out of control.” From this, it would appear that the Wuhan and Hubei (parent province) health ministries (and in turn the hospitals) made critical errors that fed rumors. First, rather than going on Pneumonia of Unexplained Etiology (ie symptoms) alone for the identification of cases, they required that there be a connection to the Seafood Market. A number of patients including a family with no known connection to the Market were thus excluded from the cohort studied. This bad science undermined trust in the ministries’ and hospitals’ competence and also delayed the recognition of human-to-human transmission.
The Chinese government added to their misdeeds by punishing open discussion by the doc’s treating the early pts in December and early January, having them questioned by the police and officially reprimanded. They had to correct their statements in full Nineteen eighty-four fashion.
Bottom line is that sloppy science plus censorship did a lot to lay a groundwork of mistrust upon which the lab-leak idea could flourish rather than being tested (as it warranted – we did not know initially) and rapidly discounted.
It just sounds better and for lack f a better term, more awesome.
In preparing for a legal argument ( I’m not a lawyer:0) I came across Brandolini’s Law……
“also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer, that emphasizes the effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place.”
Preach.
The proximal origins paper still hasn’t been retracted even though we know that they didn’t believe what they were writing.
Lying for Jesus is now countered by lying for science. What a sad day.
The paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Explaining their deceit, and the attempts to reframe their behavior:
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/visual-timeline-proximal-origin/
The paper’s authors’ emails so you can read them yourself:
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Proximal_Origin_Emails_OCRd.pdf
Their slack messages:
https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Proximal_Origin_Slack_OCRd.pdf
What do you call it when a paper says the opposite of what the authors thought?
I’ve heard the paper described as just an opinion piece, but, given their actual opinions… that description isn’t accurate.
Much easier to create a mess (entropy) than it is to clean it up.
Always been true. In social media, it becomes amplified.
Back at the very beginning of COVID, Paul Offit gave a short interview in which he said that (probably paraphrased in my part) “I’d be very surprised if the cases of this coronavirus is more than a small fraction of the cases of the seasonal flu”.
I’d post it, but I can’t find it.
Later when called on his mistake he said: “Well, if you’re going to be wrong, be very very wrong!”
I actually like Paul Offit.
I don’t agree with him on this particular subject but I like him.
Watch him talking to Zubin Damania.
NOT the thumbnail that I would have liked…
Jerry,
I admire your work but here you have been badly misled.
Offit’s response to Chan was offensive in tone and substance. It was also inaccurate in many ways. Here are five:
– It says our book claims the virus was definitely man made. This is untrue. He either failed to check or lied.
– It says we claim the furin cleavage site is not found in nature. This is untrue. He either failed to check or lied.
– It says papers prove two spillovers in the market. This claim has been demolished by Lv et al, Bloom and other papers showing ancestral strains to both A and B strains were not present in the market. He either failed to read these papers or chose to ignore them.
– It says the WIV certainly did not have the progenitor strain when all informed sources agree that we do not know what viruses they had.
– it accuses Chan of “blatantly false claims”, and provides zero evidence for this vile slur.
Please note that your remark about me and climate change is false and defamatory. I have never “opposed the idea of anthropogenic climate change”. To rely on wikipedia for this charge is absurd and wrong. Please correct this lie. I criticise exaggerated claims abut climate change which is very different indeed.
This is what I stated in 2016 in a lecture at the Royal Society, and I stand by it:
“I am not claiming that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas; it is.
I am not saying that its concentration in the atmosphere is not increasing; it is.
I am not saying the main cause of that increase is not the burning of fossil fuels; it is.
I am not saying the climate does not change; it does.
I am not saying that the atmosphere is not warmer today than it was 50 or 100 years ago; it is.
And I am not saying that carbon dioxide emissions are not likely to have caused some (probably more than half) of the warming since 1950.
I agree with the consensus on all these points.
I am not in any sense a “denier”, that unpleasant, modern term of abuse for blasphemers against the climate dogma, though the Guardian and New Scientist never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices on such matters. I am a lukewarmer.”
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/global-greening-versus-global-warming/
Good to see you respond here, Matt – I hope Jerry replies, and addresses the points you’ve made.
I’d like to also add one further observation in Jerry’s article. In point 4 he states “Here Offit destroys her”. Really, Jerry? You’re resorting to that type of language, destroy?
Glad to see you commenting Mr. Ridley. I agree with your conclusions.
Well said Matt. Offit’s article was terribly researched (or he deliberately lied) on his points about what Chan wrote. So I don’t trust his unequivocal certainty that the wet market is the source of Covid-19.
I appreciate your response here, Matt. Based on the many documents I’ve read, it seemed like a fair chance for a lab leak. The controversy is still confusing to me, but now I know it’s reasonable for me to reserve judgement till there’s even more information.
Ever since Enron there has been a presumption that destruction of evidence is evidence of guilt. The presumption is not scientific, but it is reasonable.
It’s not just suspicious; it’s a crime.
What’s also suspicious is the nearly hysterical attempt to promote the wet market theory without evidence. Particularly the sudden switch from the bat/pangolin scenario to raccoon dogs, after it became clear there were no bats or pangolins at the market.
There is no raccoon dog scenario for the origin of the virus. Just hand waving.
This is my review of Breathless by David Quammen that I posted to Amazon on 5-Feb-2024, after reading Viral and Breathless: