We know that patient 0 was not at the market, and that people at the market got infected.
So, perfectly valid scenario:
1. Scientists do controversial Gain-of-function research by collecting viruses from miles away and importing them to Wuhan.
2. Lab leak happens
3. First linked clusters pop up a few miles away in a rather unsanitary market, with plenty of reservoirs and infection possibilities.
4. Virus is found in environmental samples, including animal cages and pets and frozen foods, in Hunan market and else.
The only thing indirectly invoking a major conspiracy here, is the possibility: lab leak happens.
Or you know, you can account for a scenario, where Chinese authorities covered up a major conspiracy (Don't be afraid! It's only reason over authority!). I thought we were already at the point where this is common sense knowledge. Or else we would know what exactly is going on in those Uyghur concentration camps, but all we can do is estimate the extend of this inhumane conspiracy.
What's frustrating about this is I feel like it doesn't matter how much evidence there is for the emerging consensus that it emerged from an animal at the market.
The counter-argument is still always, "Yes, yes, but what if instead of that maybe it somehow came from a badly-run lab instead?"
- Ah.. It came from the meat market (official positions)
- Likely from live bats
- Who are not sold at that meat market
- Who are hybernating
- Who come from a cave 900 miles away
Yes, yes, but what if instead it maybe came from a badly-run lab studying that exact bat just a few miles away?
- We strongly condemn any theory that may lead to the suggestion that it came from the lab. You are directly insulting the work of our Chinese colleagues, threatening our relations in Gain-of-Function research and funding, and furthering harmful conspiracy theories accusing the Chinese authorities of a cover-up. I, Peter Daszak, will do a thorough investigation into the origins, which all responsible scientists have already concluded is natural in origin.
Scientists tracing the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic believe they’ve identified a possible transmission source: China’s thriving wildlife trade... The most plausible theory, say experts involved in the mission, concerns China’s wildlife trade for food, furs and traditional medicine, a business worth about 520 billion yuan ($80 billion) in 2016. Live animals susceptible to coronavirus infection were present at the Huanan food market in downtown Wuhan, the city where the first major Covid-19 outbreak was detected. It’s possible they acted as conduits for the virus, carrying it from bats -- likely the primary source, says a zoologist who was part of the joint research effort... "The main conclusion from this stage of the work -- and it’s not over yet of course -- is that the exact same pathway by which SARS emerged was alive and well for the emergence of Covid...."
Farmed and wild-caught civets, a small, nocturnal mammal consumed in China, were blamed for spreading the SARS virus in a market in the southern province of Guangdong in 2003. Scientists later found the infection originated in horseshoe bats, a natural reservoir of coronaviruses.
The two species likely collided in markets where live animals are caged in crowded conditions, potentially allowing the bat-borne virus to adapt and amplify before it spilled over to humans, initially among workers and those handling the animals. Scientists working on the origin hunt say a similar scenario may have played out with Covid-19. A study of the first 99 patients treated at an infectious diseases hospital in Wuhan found half were linked to the Huanan seafood market, which also reportedly sold live animals, some illegally captured in the wild and slaughtered in front of customers.
> If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already
Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.
> it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans
All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.
> there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering
Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.
> Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.
Which is exactly what they started doing back in February (2020). The two labs in Wuhan were ordered to destroy all samples they had. So even if the theory were to turn out to be the most likely origin, we'd have no way to find out for sure.
>Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.
The pandemic started months after first escape, and the WIV shares research findings internationally. By the time the pandemic was detected, it was way too late to destroy samples, months already went by. And that's assuming the escape happened as soon as the samples reached the WIV, which is very generous.
>All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.
It is now, but it wasn't at first zoonosis. It took months for the virus to ramp up to an epidemic, whereas clearly the current iteration of the virus can do so much faster especially in dirty environments. Besides, the virus is still, one year in, nowhere near maximum adaptivity, with significantly more infectious variants still appearing. It's not that it could have been more infectious, is that it now is significantly more infections. As far as "deliberately releasing a finished product", there is no reason for it to matter - the last iteration of a given strain will be subject to experimentation for a long time.
Moreso, SARS-CoV-2 clearly has an insanely high potential for zoonosis, as we've seen it infect an incredibly large cross section of animals. This is not what you would expect from a virus that previously was only ever in one species and that was engineered to be specifically adapted to humans only.
>Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.
You're stretching the definition of bioweapon way beyond any reasonable definition. Both SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 make really poor bioweapons, many naturally occuring viruses are far superior. If the lab leak was from a collected sample that accidentally escaped, you would again expect it to be of known origin - China could point to a specific source and say "Hey, we found it, it comes from here!", and likely collaborators would know about it. Additonally, if it came from GoF, you would expect it to find and expend single-base-pair mutations with a high impact on pathogenicity already, yet we still had many crop up.
> SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 make really poor bioweapons
Often heard this, including from experts in bioscience (I am not one, you sound more like it).
So early on I did a search on Google Scholar for things like: SARS bioweapon to see what I could come up with. Turns out there is a lot of biosecurity and biowarfare literature from before the outbreak, which have entire chapters for SARS coronavirus as a weapon.
I really think if you tried to give some reasons for coronavirus being a poor bioweapon, it would expose either an inflated sense of expertise, or those reasons are precisely the reason coronaviruses are seen as attractive (and relatively cheaply available) bioweapon.
In a: don't do what I say, do what I do-manner: US military is warned not to use DNA tests from companies that offer cheap tests due to Chinese government funding. It may leave them open to "identification" and "attack". How poor would a gene-targeted coronavirus actually be?
The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
I'm not an expert in bioscience, I simply spent a while studying it.
There is biosecurity and biowarfare literature on pretty much every single virus you can imagine - generally it's about how it might be modified to be used as a bioweapon. And really, coronaviruses are quite good platforms for making debilitating airborne weapons.
SARS-CoV itself as a bioweapon is simply not infectious enough, it was sucessfully contained dozens of times. It's also not that lethal to military-age men, for 20-29 year olds CFR is around 1% and for 30-39 year olds it's around 3% (taking data from infections in the PRC and in HK as there is the least low-detection bias). But it definitely has a lot of potential if you engineer it. For reference, the average age of a soldier in WW2 was 26.
SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon, an entire carrier was infected and no one died. Debilitation was minimal. It's infectious enough, but it's very bad at actually killing military aged people.
But certainly, they could be engineered to be suitable. That's not the claim I was replying to - the claim I was replying to was that in it's natural form it was a bioweapon.
>The rest of your posts seems to gather support for other hypothesis, not as much attacking the lab leak theory as highly unlikely.
Likelihoods are relative. Everyone agrees that likelihood for a lab escape is fairly low - those are relatively rare. The argument is that the normal process for viruses to reach humans - which was the case for literally every single other pandemic ever - is unlikely thus making lab escape more likely relatively.
I did, however, add a few points that go against the likelihood of an undetected lab escape - which is that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
SARS-CoV in its natural form is an interesting bioweapon.
No known treatment or vaccine. Targets the decision makers (presidents and ministers and military generals are older, and a virus is easier to reach them, than a bullet is). SARS-CoV has super-spreader events, and asymptomatic spread, making it very difficult to contain. It spreads incredibly easily (near-airborne), in confined spaces such as airplanes, but even the toilet plumbing, or shared airco. It offers plausible deniability, by pointing to a natural spill-over event or unsanitary meat markets. It causes enormous economic damage (the economy, not the cannon fodder, being the subject of modern warfare) and cultural damage (tracking and containment is costly and invasive as it damages trust in a free society). It is most readily available to small states and terrorist groups by extracting from live civet cats. Military-aged terrorists spreading SARS-CoV by simply boarding airplanes and visiting hot spots, and not even dying themselves, so they can do it all over again. SARS-CoV in first stages has vague symptoms, similar to other, more common viruses, which would give a pandemic a head start. Pandemics are good PR for fear-based terrorism. The strain on the hospitals is enormous, and military-aged men are too worried to reserve a bed for their elderly parents or their recovery.
More in the vast literature.
> SARS-CoV-2 is complete trash as a bioweapon.
If complete trash, I would not be afraid of Iran being able to press a button and release SARS-CoV-3 for a 2020 repeat. Even if looking at viral bioweapons from the comical anthrax perspective: SARS-CoV-2 killed over 2 million people.
> that the existence of the sample would almost certaintly be known.
Yes. It would make sense that it would be known. And if it would be known, that would probably sufficiently proof the lab leak hypothesis and end this quarrel. We wouldn't need to talk about probabilities much anymore. But that same argument kinda also works against the zoonotic origin hypothesis. It would make a lot of sense that after a year, we found the intermediate host, or patient 0. If there was a clear epidemiological explanation for a zoonotic origin, it would almost certainly be known. Maybe there really isn't.
>No known treatment or vaccine. Targets the decision makers (presidents and ministers and military generals are older, and a virus is easier to reach them, than a bullet is). SARS-CoV has super-spreader events, and asymptomatic spread, making it very difficult to contain. It spreads incredibly easily (near-airborne), in confined spaces such as airplanes, but even the toilet, or shared airco. It offers plausible deniability, by pointing to a natural spill-over event or unsanitary meat markets. It causes enormous economic damage (the economy, not the cannon fodder, being the subject of modern warfare) and cultural damage (tracking is costly and invasive as it damages trust). It is most readily available to small states and terrorist groups by extracting from live civet cats. Military-aged terrorists spreading SARS-CoV by simply boarding airplanes and visiting hot spots, and not even dying themselves, so they can do it all over again. SARS-CoV in first stages has vague symptoms, similar to other, more common viruses, which would give a pandemic a head start. Pandemics are good PR for fear-based terrorism. The strain on the hospitals is enormous, and military-aged men are too worried to reserve a bed for their elderly parents or their recovery.
Not true - there are basically known vaccines to SARS-CoV, they just never got to human efficacy trials because the disease went extinct. But, given their efficacy when repurposed as SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, they were probably quite effective.
As for super-spreading events, this is a double edged sword. It makes it very infectious when nothing is being done to try and stop it, but it means that if there are even cursory measures the chances of the infection stalling are much higher as you're relying on a low number of people actually spreading it.
SARS-CoV may have vague symptoms in the early stages - but it has symptoms. You want a virus that can spread asymptomatically for it to be a major burden, so that makes it less useful.
If your goal is to strain hospitals and create fear, by far the best tools would be humanized avian flu, or a vaccine resistant strain of measles.
>Yes. It would make sense that it would be known. And if it would be known, that would probably sufficiently proof the lab leak hypothesis and end this quarrel. We wouldn't need to talk about probabilities much anymore. But that same argument kinda also works against the zoonotic origin hypothesis. It would make a lot of sense that after a year, we found the intermediate host, or patient 0. If there was a clear epidemiological explanation for a zoonotic origin, it would almost certainly be known. Maybe there really isn't.
I think you're missing the point. If there was a lab escape, the likelihood for the sample to be known is very high. This means that given priors of no known samples, the likelihood for a lab escape is lower.
It's also completely unrealistic to expect to find the host or patient zero after a year for a zoonosis. It took 40 years to find the intermediate host for Ebola, and four years to find it for SARS. For some epidemics, we never found a solid intermediate host. Patient zeros are basically never found, either, unless the disease is incredibly pathogenic and virulent - which SARS-CoV-2 isn't. If you look towards past epidemics that originated from zoonosis with a similar disease profile, you will find that it takes years to decades to conclusively find an intermediate host, and that patient zero is basically never found with any degree of certainty, meaning that the current scenario is perfectly congruent with expectations.
I can think of only a few scenario's where China messed up and the West remains silent. One would be where personal interests or blackmail would cause the decision makers to change their tune. A plausible one is where the West does not want to step on any toes, to safeguard that little data coming from China, while it is silently gathering international support for when the pandemic is under control. Another where SARS-2 developed from SARS-1 when it recombined in Wuhan in a HIV-patient (perhaps after a failed vaccine trial). If you are interested in protecting the health of the population, it is more important to shield possible victims of panic and hate, than to have a million negative mentions of HIV, China, and vaccines in the news.
I suspect Peter Daszak will face accountability due to the Streisand effect of his PR campaign against "conspiracies". You can't write a paper condemning scientists for even suggesting it was a lab leak of a human-intervented virus, and then field an objective origins investigation. A lot happened in 2020, but I doubt we forget that blatant mess.
Even if this turns out zoonotic (I hope it does), Daszak will scream he was right suppressing any investigation into opposing hypothesis. No scientist should live that down.
> the fact that Amazon warehouse / delivery employees have to urinate in bottles to meet deadlines?
Amazon does not want its employees to piss into bottles. But sometimes employees (predominantly male I hope) do piss into bottles, because they did not plan correctly, or just had to go while on the road. If caught, these employees (and their managers) are then reprimanded. If they get a chance to defend themselves, of course they claim it was due to the deadline, not poor planning or bladder control or uncommon hygiene ethics.
Amazon factually states: Hey, if we required our employees to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, do you seriously think people would work for us, and not 100s of other low-paid jobs which don't have that medieval requirement?
Politicians: Hey, this you?! I have lots of pictures of bottles with piss! Where is your snotty reply now? You say that your employees do not have to piss into bottles, so how come I have those pictures?! Huh?!
It is embarrassing to both sides. Especially for official government employees (who also don't have to pee into bottles to meet deadlines, but I am sure you can turn up at least some pictures: if not, find any traces of cocaine use in the Capitol, then posit that the US congress have their senators use cocaine in the toilet to meet deadlines. Or, you know, bi-partisan plan to have low-skilled employees share in the American dream made possible by Amazon, but I guess that does not fit inside a tweet).
The warehouse/delivery worker abuse at amazon runs deep, and it goes far beyond employees peeing in bottles. Checkout the Frontline documentary, Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos [1]
No, but solid rhetorics. This is the part you give proof of the fact that Amazon have their workers pee in bottles to meet deadlines. Not point to something else entirely that goes far beyond the things you pose as facts, which are not. Don't look at that! Look at this documentary that goes far far beyond it. Well played! And solid one for PBS for exposing the worker abuse that Amazon is now in court for! We need the free press to save worker laws.
Deadlines are calculated from the average worker speeds. Perhaps some Amazon employees really are below average, or do not give it their best at all, so they are forced to piss in bottles and poop into the delivery car before returning it to station to meet these devilish average-worker deadlines.
I would agree that is a terrible problem. Perhaps Amazon should focus more attention on catching such employees early and letting them go (or offering them potty training with quarterly evaluations)? But then where does the average go? Deadlines get even tighter! Or you could make your wage relative to your worker speed: the fastest people earn the most. Only if you think you still earn enough for shitty work will you then be forced to keep doing that job. Or should Amazon be more kind to these employees who can't seem to manage their personal hygiene or fall way below average worker speeds? Treat and pay them the same as the 99% employees who don't shit and deliver? That would lead to an equal outcome for sure.
Could you give the support that it was the hormone treatment that drove Turing to suicide? It is a commonly accepted interpretation, but there is not much support for it these days (even the suicide is questioned now, pinning it as an accident or murder).
Turing died a full year after his hormone treatment was completed. No motive for the suicide was established. Turing was in good spirits and had, according to friends, underwent his cruel treatment with "amused fortitude".
Not defending Turing's struggles to be gay or his inhumane treatment. But if we are celebrating science, we can't just assume that the English government drove Turing to suicide, without looking at other possibilities, or finding support. Especially, when we all remember Turing's circumstance of death was far from clear.
> No motive for the suicide was established. Turing was in good spirits
These are common misunderstandings of suicidality. Suicide often doesn't have a clear motive. And people who end their lives are often described as being in good spirits before they die. Sometimes they're trying to protect their families from their feelings of despair. Sometimes they've felt trapped for some time and they see suicide as a route out of that despair.
Agreed. But if Turing left a letter with the motive, or was known depressed or irrational, then I would not question the hypothesis that Turing was driven to suicide. Right now I can not see it as the fact it is presented as. I'd like to see some support from those on stage (not for lack of trying).
If suicide, I doubt there even is a clear motive (of course, forced hormone treatment is going to play a role in suicidal thoughts). It will be multi-faceted and reduction to one thing (be that the treatment, or something else) will not do full justice to the complexity of suicide.
> Sometimes they're trying to protect their families from their feelings of despair.
I think the cyanide apple was there to provide the possibility of an accident, for Turing did not want to hurt his mother with a definitive suicide. Or maybe he took his lonely love for fairy tales way too far and expected to awake to a kiss from a beautiful prince. The latter is no less a speculative invasion of his private life, than taking his sexuality or treatment as defining of his scientific legacy or suicide.
Turing was a soldier. His mind was sharp as a blade. That's why the English government/military was involved with him. Infantry soldiers joke about the army owning you: giving you a fine for damaged government property, when you burn yourself for forgetting your issued sun block.
Turing's work caused death and saved lives of soldiers. Turing was a privileged scientist with clearance, interesting to foreign militaries, largely funded by his military, and with access to secret compute and information. Later in life, he was getting involved with very young, stray, men. He had his apartment broken into. He was beaten up.
Due to the common societal position on homosexuality at the time, and Russian agencies employing certain tactics, there was legit concern that one of the top UK soldiers was the target of sexpionage and blackmail. You could say Turing showed disgraceful behavior as a military servant with damaging information should it fall into the wrong hands (we would still not accept senior military people sleeping around with homeless Eastern-European teenagers and inviting them home, besides for maybe the commander in chief).
Next to the UK driving him to suicide, like you allude to, there is even the hypothesis that either Russia or the UK killed him and made it look like a suicide, to tie up loose ends, very similar to the death of Gareth Williams (supposedly suicided by crawling into a bag and closing the zipper), where BDSM and cross-dressing kinks, not homosexuality, was the angle. Some things never change, unless we remove all sexual taboos.
But let's celebrate the mind, for all of that does not even matter. He was also a great scientist (while a poor judge of Islam cults: His Turing test paper is supported by his outrageous invention that Islamists believe that women have no soul, but times were different back then, so I can forgive that).
For diversity and inclusion in AI papers, they bring up facts like "All of the top 10 most-cited AI researchers are men" and then posit this as bad, and in support of a 50%-50% gender representation in AI. Like in: The field still has a long way to go. Not: we judged these extremely rare geniuses on their gender, and when you do this, you get bad diversity-and-inclusion optics.
And how to solve that perceived problem? Judge other academics on their gender, place them in a victimized group, and then compose your reference list with that in mind? The top 10 starts doing exactly that, because the guilt they feel is real. So they say nothing when privileged researchers can use the LatinX-in-AI, Women-in-AI, Black-in-AI, Gay-in-AI, Jewish-in-AI backdoors to get in a prestigious AI conference publication.
> ROME (Reuters) - The new coronavirus was circulating in Italy in September 2019, a study by the National Cancer Institute (INT) of the Italian city of Milan shows, signaling that it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought.
It is plausible that the virus was spread before recognized and treated as a global pandemic. Few flights were banned for months. Chinese tourists were in Italy up until the lockdowns.
But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". Not: It came from Italy to China, and only became problematic in Wuhan. Every time China is reluctantly forced to move back the timeline on its patient 0, it starts pushing a narrative of COVID outside of China just a few months before their patient 0. It is a tiring use of an obvious and plausible bait-and-switch.
We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.
> We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019, while by January 2020, China did not consider it wise to inform the world of human-to-human transmission.
We now know about viral pneumonia in November 2019, but hindsight is a very comfortable position to judge from.
Going from that to establishing that by January 2020 China should know everything about the virus and disease is reaching quite a bit.
That whole argument reminds me way too much of that propaganda narrative by Fox citing a WHO tweet [0] about one preliminary Chinese investigation not finding evidence for H2H, in that particular investigation, to turn that around into: "WHO and China say there is no H2H!".
But a lack of evidence in one particular investigation is not the same as claiming there's no H2H.
H2H isn't just some binary thing, it's a spectrum of vectors that take time and effort to properly establish, that's why all the official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H.
It was not hindsight. Those expats were interviewed ("locked in Wuhan") and broke the "official" timeline.
In my mind, it can not be excused that China either: did not know about H2H, when the West, as an outsider, was well aware of the raging crisis. Or worse, it did know, but tried to stall. I am not giving China the benefit of incompetence, so in my mind, it is worse.
I did not say: China claimed there is no H2H. I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
It takes time to establish patient 0, and find epidemiological explanations. But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
> official recommendations from the WHO at the time was to treat this as very H2H
No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H. We had to trust that China could keep this internal, without outside help, but they completely botched one of the basic things to figure out. WHO official messaging was: Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
> It was not hindsight. Those expats were interviewed ("locked in Wuhan") and broke the "official" timeline.
Do you have anything concrete on that? Because right now I'm drawing a blank what you are even trying to allude to.
But for additional context I should point out that in November 2019 China also recorded an outbreak of the pneumonic plague [0], something that gets conflated a lot with the COVID-19 narrative.
> I said: China did not thought it was wise to inform of H2H. I agree that these are different, and that Fox pushed a narrative there.
How is it different when you are pretty much exactly pushing the Fox narrative there? You stipulate that China knew about H2H in January and allegedly had it well established but didn't share it with the rest of the world, where is your actual evidence for that?
Sounds a lot like that whole Taiwan e-mail to WHO mess where Taiwan claimed to have warned the WHO about H2H, when the actual e-mail didn't say anything like that.
> But they had doctors falling severely sick at start of December! That should ring a bell about H2H!
"Ringing bells" is not the same as having solid and established H2H vectors. Which, as I mentioned before, is not something that's binary. Something isn't just "H2H or not", there are different vectors and different gradients, establishing them is not easy, that's why even one year after the fact we still struggle to fully map out transmission routes and vectors.
You can't hand-wave such a complicated problem away when it persists to this day.
> No, WHO sat in China's lap, and tweeted out your quote tweet: No strong evidence for H2H.
This is 100% the Fox news interpretation. The WHO tweet was about that one particular Chinese investigation, all it said how that particular investigation didn't yield evidence.
Which is not the same as saying "there is no H2H", interpreting it like that is misinterpreting very concise language on purpose while ignoring literally every other release from the WHO at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO interim guidance for laboratory testing of human suspect cases of NCoV infection from 10 January 2020 [1].
Read trough them and you will realize that the WHO was and is very vocal about respiratory transmission and how to best prevent it. That's only one out of the many WHO releases at the time that warn about the very real, but yet having to be established with actual evidence, H2H nature of the virus.
> Do not wear masks, only wear one if you are ill, when China was already buying up protective equipment en masse.
This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks for at risk groups and HCWs due to the massive mask shortages at the time. Case in point: Here are the WHO's interim guidance on use of masks from 29 January 2020 [2]
It's astounding that over one year after the fact this kind of misinformation is still circulated, out of all the places here on HN.
The reality is that the WHO was a bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would. Which back then resulted in wide-spread criticism of the WHO for allegedly being "alarmist" when the multi-million death toll didn't actually materialize.
Trying to turn this into "WHO in pocket of China!" is just trying to tie this whole narrative into the current US foreign policy context of antagonizing China. That's also why US officials were among the first [3] to globally spread conspiracy theories about this being an engineered Chinese bio-weapon escaped from a lab.
> bit slow to react for one simple reason: They have become way more reluctant about "crying wolf" after the 2009 pandemic didn't turn into the deadly thing they feared it would.
That is not the simple reason you think it is. It is the WHO, who should prioritize world health above all, not worry about "crying wolf" when every graph with heavily underreported numbers showed that COVID was going to crash Swine Flu and leave it as nothing but a memory. But they were slow to react, due to politics.
When the CDC was confronted with an outbreak of Hantavirus in 1993, they found some relations to Indian tribes, and news media picked up on that. This lead to panic and fear of Indian tribes. They learned lessons there that they now implementing.
> This is 100% the Fox news interpretation
Just because US media is ugly, showtime, broken, and partisan, does not give you the right to beat down anything when it happens to align with one of your hated "news" channels. But perhaps CNBC is more to your liking: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/02/china-delayed-releasing-coro...
Yes, there is a logical difference between: "China knew masks would help. China communicated that masks would not help, but started hoarding protective equipment" and "China knew masks would help. China communicated nothing about that to the WHO or the world, but started hoarded protective equipment."
We saw that unwillingness to communicate with masks and H2H. (The doctors who treated the doctors who fell ill in start of December, treating pneumonia patients, started falling ill mid-end December, can you not hear the bell toll?). We saw blatant lying when China was fighting interdomestic flight of 5 million people from Wuhan, threatening to nail them on the pillars of shame for eternity, while actively instructing the WHO to say there was zero reason to ban flights from China. This was repeated every meeting, alongside the "decreasing window to act", up until having to call a pandemic (all technical qualifications were already there, this was not WHO acting rapidly and decisively). Mike Ryan was far from happy with the pressures applied on the WHO.
Not talking about the expats, as I realized there are some things too dangerous to speculate about. You can ignore that.
> > This is once again completely wrong, WHO messaging was to prioritize masks
> A tale of two billboards:
And? Many countries had the progression of "only health workers" to "only health workers and people with symptoms" to "everyone" according to the available supply, even though many others skipped the mid step.
> But very often this "appeared outside China" is deflection and falsely invoked. Mind you that Reuters write: "it might have spread beyond China earlier than thought". [...] We already knew that Western expats and their relations in Wuhan got viral pneumonia in November 2019
Let's backtrack a bit.
First patient in France confirmed to be in late December 2019[0].
Retrospective wastewater analysis in Brazil shows the virus was present from November 2019 onwards, 3 months before their first reported case.[1]
Further down the line we have SARS-CoV-2's RdRP specific antibodies found during retrospective testing of samples of 111 (of 959) healthy volunteers of a lung cancer study in Italy[1]; samples taken in October 2019, meaning they got infected at least at some point in September 2019, 4-5 months before the first detected case. These antibodies also target RaTG13's RdRP, given that this protein is identical in both.
Even further down the line, and widely interpretable, we have the Barcelona case:
> "Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows. The discovery of virus genome presence so early in Spain, if confirmed, would imply the disease may have appeared much earlier than the scientific community thought." [2]
The paper is here [3]. The fact that IP2/IP4 fragments of the RdRP gene are perfect match means that at least a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 (and RaTG13, its closest relative) was present in Spain back in March 2019.
It's not conclusive, as other markers tested negative, but it's also true that these other markers tend to degrade faster (for example, N1 marker wasn't detectable in May 25 2020, despite the pandemic ongoing). But this fact also rules out a case of sample contamination, because then N1 would have been detectable. It's also remarkable that the positive sample is from 2 weeks after the World Mobile Congress, leading to a self-contained outbreak hypothesis.
Now take all that information and combine it with the fact that no trace of SARS-CoV-2 has been found on any sample from Wuhan before December 1st, 2019.
While there's high probability that SARS-CoV-2 appeared within Chinese borders, mainly because the closest viral relatives have been known to live there (or Japan and South East Asia, if you ignore RaTG13), it's still highly speculative.
What is clear is that everything points in the direction of Wuhan, and the Huanan Seafood Market in particular, being just the first detected superspreading event, and the WIV was the reason why it was detected first, rather than the source of the virus itself.
Peter Daszak was also signatory to this weird paper "in support of Chinese scientists".
> We sign this statement in solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China who continue to save lives and protect global health during the challenge of the COVID-19 outbreak. We are all in this together, with our Chinese counterparts in the forefront, against this new viral threat. The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin. Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.
Scary piece of propaganda, considering it was China who started rumours and misinformation, and tying the lab leak hypothesis to not supporting health professionals. All-in-all, a grave conflict of interest for a supposed objective investigation into the origins.
"Did not see evidence of tampering" is too weak to trust for me.
Military-funded scientific biowarfare research should be different (use different, more advanced, tools) than run-of-the-mill bioinformatics research which US scientists work with. So if the scientist is not working on military research, their guess is as good as: "it was not engineered using common industry-standard known methods". It is misattributing authority, like quoting bio science experts saying "COVID can't be a weapon because the mortality is too low". No, you have zero idea about the military applications of biowarfare. If the scientist really was a military researcher, then they won't disclose signs of tampering to a news outlet or academic journal.
Another is that, for obvious reasons, military research would like to obfuscate its engineering. So it is unlikely they use easily detectable methods for that. It is perfectly possible to breed viruses in a lab, inside natural hosts. Then you won't see any biological markers of tampering, but the virus was still engineered by cross-breeding captured fruit bats or manually creating a zoonotic transmission chain to humans. So even without biological signs of tampering, the lab leak remains plausible.
So, perfectly valid scenario:
1. Scientists do controversial Gain-of-function research by collecting viruses from miles away and importing them to Wuhan.
2. Lab leak happens
3. First linked clusters pop up a few miles away in a rather unsanitary market, with plenty of reservoirs and infection possibilities.
4. Virus is found in environmental samples, including animal cages and pets and frozen foods, in Hunan market and else.
The only thing indirectly invoking a major conspiracy here, is the possibility: lab leak happens.
Or you know, you can account for a scenario, where Chinese authorities covered up a major conspiracy (Don't be afraid! It's only reason over authority!). I thought we were already at the point where this is common sense knowledge. Or else we would know what exactly is going on in those Uyghur concentration camps, but all we can do is estimate the extend of this inhumane conspiracy.