Let me clarify: By “fully plausible” I did NOT intend to mean “most likely”. Sorry for the confusion.
Lab leak is far less likely but still fully plausible in the sense that it has not yet been ruled out.
Why? Aside from a few early leaked case reports (one whistle-blower was summoned by police and forced to recant) and a stage-managed lab visit in 2021, outside researchers have been entirely dependent on data filtered through Xi Jinping’s special COVID information task force.
Click the link above for details on how speech of doctors and researchers is controlled in China on all things related to this virus. If you don’t trust the AP, you can read about it in the Washington Post, Reuters, The Guardian, and so on.
To be clear, this censorship is not proof of a lab leak. It’s like pleading the 5th or declining to let a potentially crooked cop search your car. But it DOES mean we can’t confidently declare that we know what happened.
Certainty is not on the menu.
Nullius In Verba.
Except that Wuhan is not a region where bat colonies prone to zoonotic spillovers of SARS-related coronaviruses are common; those are found over 1,000 km away in southern China and Southeast Asia.
That seems to be using deceptive phrasing to make the lab leak explanation sound more likely than it is.
This has been tremendously helpful, and pretty close to being right on time. There was a recent Big Discussion about zoonotic vs lab leak origin over on Jerry Coynes’ page: Once again, Covid in humans: from a lab leak or a wet market? – Why Evolution Is True , and in the discussion there were a couple posts from very confident lab leak proponents citing papers about how Bayesian analyses strongly support the lab leak. So there. A Google search will turn up other such papers, and quite a few scathing conspiracy-leaning articles in the popular press.
But here I learn how key talking points that are central to those conclusions seem to fall apart with just a tiny bit more detail. To summarize:
- IF there were earlier samples of Sars-Cov-2 in the lab, they would most likely be tiny and quickly rendered inert since that is what happens to samples of the virus when collected from the field.
- Draft publication of all samples well ahead of any outbreak lacked inclusion of Sars-Cov-2
- Lab workers with unidentified illnesses ahead of the outbreak were reported to be negative for Sars antibodies.
- Yes, lab leaks happened before – only those were from live hi titer cultures, not from tiny (and generally inert) samples like fecal swabs from bat heinies and genomic samples.
One has twist and turn oneself into knots to preserve the conspiracy theory by believing in illuminati-level mendacity of independently working Chinese and American researchers and authorities, OR one simply remains unaware of these key details. It’s easy to keep a conspiracy theory alive with only low-res sound bites.
Anyway, the damage is done. The lab leak is woven into US policy, and a large % of Americans believe it and one can understand why, given the wall of disinformation out there. It is unfortunate that this status will not change for at least a generation, unless and until public communicators of science, working thru social media, are willing to shoulder the task.
Like the Eiffel Tower is over 1,000 km from Paris, in Spain.
From a press article published in 2018
A tall Ph.D. student with an easy smile, 26-year-old Luo is part of a team of researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Their one-day expedition to Taiyi Cave — a cavern 2,200 meters deep, located 100 kilometers south of Hubei’s provincial capital, Wuhan — is less about the bats themselves than the viruses they carry.
and the following paper has a map of bat collection caves, all within Hubei province.
From May 2018 to August 2020, bats were collected from caves in Xianning City and Wuhan City of Hubei Province in Central China
Neither has the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
That doesn’t mean their existence is a hypothesis that one must take seriously.
No, it means nothing of the sort. The evidence for a zoonotic origin with the epicentre being the Huanan seafood market is so strong that it can be confidently asserted as true.
A situation which @Jon-Perry has worked quite diligently, it seems, to help perpetuate.
Oh and welcome to the forum Jon, I’ve been a fan of your work for some time. I still am even though we might disagree on this topic.
When I look on Google Maps, the other Chinese BSL-4 labs are even father away. It was not an exhaustive search, and I invite you to improve upon it.
Well the problem is the word ‘plausible’ has multiple possible interpretations, one of which is believable. Is the idea of a lab-leak believable? Obviously.
I think this puts the burden very high. What have we really, trully, “ruled out” in science? Couldn’t everything we think we know, technically, be wrong?
Things are never really ruled out in science. They just become less and less probable given the evidence, and as that continues the amount of new evidence it would take to out-weigh the old evidence becomes so massive it seems perverse to expect the trend to reverse.
It means we can’t be certain about whether some people are telling the truth, but even if we can have low confidence in the statements by those scientsts, we can have other data (such as serological tests, molecular phylogenies of betacoronaviruses, the behavior of the virus in cell culture etc.) that raises our confidence in a zoonotic spillover. That data, entirely independently of assertions by chinese lab workers, can itself be strong enough to allow us to state with confidence that the pandemic was the result of a zoonotic spillover.
We don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
Welcome, I’ve enjoyed your video’s, and am glad to have you present in the forum.
I find Worobey’s argument that the Haunan Market, and not a lab leak, was the source of the covid outbreak, to be convincing. There is plenty of additional historical and genetic analysis to support that account. Nonetheless, the sliver of a possibility that the virus could have found its way to the market from the research lab or field work, perhaps months or years before, cannot be 100% ruled out.
The problem with that message is, as per the expression, when you mix science and politics, you get politics. Nothing kills nuance faster than politics, and nothing involving science is more political than covid. In the fervid paranoia of the political right in America, not 100% ruled out means the lab leak is proven, and if a lab leak is proven, then the virus was deliberately engineered and weaponized to destroy 'merica. People who have not the slightest idea as to how a virus works, let alone the biochemistry of cleavage sites, are cheering lab leak conspiracies in rallies in stadiums, and actual experts are being fired and losing funding. All that tends to make rational in depth discussion, and even the slightest degree of scientific tentativeness, pretty challenging.
So here is the solution. Yeah, as if I have one for this train wreck.
Here I’ve been accused of secrete doublespeak and working diligently to spread misinformation.
I hate to be “that guy” but here’s to those trying to slander me in this forum:
I’ve done far more than you to promote the natural origin hypothesis. My video on the topic has over 4 million views, my articles on it have been read by hundreds of teachers.
The truth is this:
An independent investigation to clear the lab never happened, therefore the lab has not been cleared.
It’s not my fault that this is true.
Given the very widespread conclusions out there that favors the lab leak, including claims from what look like academic and official investigatory sources, I am inclined to understand why most anyone can be swayed at least partially if not completely by arguments for a lab leak. It looks to me like the average person will encounter more articles and more social media claims out there for a lab leak than for zoonotic origin, since the former makes much better click-bait. I know of one well respected researcher who has more smarts in their little finger than I do in my whole body who got themselves half-way into that camp, or at least they were until recently. So I understand why the belief is common even among educated people.
Why do some people get captured by conspiracy theories? That subject is a rabbit-hole that I don’t want to take on, but it must be admitted that this particular one is exceptional in that there has been a virtual wall-to-wall campaign for it.
To my knowledge, we were never given data on serological tests of lab workers. Instead we were simply told it was done and everyone was cleared.
Molecular phylogenies are relevant to engineered weapon hypothesis but not to the lab spillover hypothesis. A spill from a lab collecting wild viruses and then trying to grow them in humanized mice would also show a natural genome.
On behavior in cells… I assume you’re talking about the fact that cleavage sites tend to degrade in serial passage? If so, that’s true, but we know from interviews with one of their US partners, Dr. Ralph Baric, that they weren’t just trying to grow viruses in cells. They were putting them in Ralph’s humanized mice which he sent them (according to his testimony) sometime between 2015 and 2017.
Ralph, like me and Francis Collins, believes this most likely from the wet market, but even after seeing all the really great work by Worobey, Ralph is still concerned it may have been the lab. His reason for concern in his testimony was mostly about the types of experiments they were doing and how low their biosecurity was. He warned them multiple times that they were taking unnecessary risks. (see his conversation on this, starting at line 457 in his testimony transcript)
All that said, you would think that the genome would have been published or at least held in their database before trying to infect expensive genetically modified mice. Normally, after collecting a sample from bats, you’d start either by taking that wild sample and trying to use it to inoculate cells directly, or (most likely) you’d sequence the sample, look for virus genomes, and try to construct them in cells from the sequence. I’ve never heard of someone just taking bat droppings and smearing them in in a mouse’s nose.
Dan tells me that we know every genome they had in their database up to 2018 (data, of course, was not being censored back then), meaning if they did have the new one, they likely had to have collected it in 2019.
I’m not looking for epistemological perfection. I’m judging this by the normal, low bar standards of ordinary forensic science.
It’s possible we were all create 5 minutes ago with pre-filled twitter profiles, so… sure? Nothing can be fully known or ruled out, but the covid situation is nothing like that.
Here, we were specifically stonewalled when trying to do a standard forensic investigation of the lab (the second phase investigation talked about here was not permitted by China).
We tried to clear the lab but we were not allowed. Therefore, even though a natural origin is more likely, the lab remains uncleared according to the normal standards of forensic science.
How many other of the labs in the world that have the capacity to perform this dangerous research have been cleared? What evidence or data led to these conclusions?
Pausing comment approval until I get a chance to catch up.
I think your work speaks for itself. Sorry that you have been put on the defensive here.
It seems to me that it is no longer possible to exonerate the Wuhan lab. Even if we were given “complete” access and data, sufficient time has passed that the data could have been scrubbed of anything that would identify the lab as the source. This is itself the stuff of conspiracy theories, and we don’t need to chase down that rabbit hole.
My point is, we are stuck with the situation until some new information become available.
Oh dear. I really hoped something like this wouldn’t happen.
Jon… to cite one clear example, I quoted you directly stating that the lab leak is ”fully plausible” (to Jackson Wheat on Twitter) and "very implausible” (to me during the live stream).
I said that this strikes as double speak to me. I did NOT say that this was an instance of intentional dishonesty on your part. If you think I was implying this, then I apologize. I should have been more clear. At the same time, I strongly advice you to not take such criticism as personal attacks or attempts of slander.
Would you please walk me through that “most likely” procedure for each of those three steps in more methodological detail? I may be missing something because my PhD in virology is 39 years old and my last publication in pure virology is 35 years old. TIA.
If you think I’m asking too much, please limit yourself to the first step.
Going further back to an earlier comment:
Well… I didn’t take you saying “fully plausible” to be synonymous with “most likely”. I was specifically confused by the fact that you also said “very implausible” in another instance. Alright, let’s move on from that.
In spite of the inexcusable behavior of the Chinese government, we do have substantial evidence for natural zoonosis which we gained over the years. In contrast, the lab leak has gained no new evidence. Proponents are still using the same arguments since the beginning. Furthermore, for a lab leak to be viable it requires additional assumptions. Specifically, (as discussed before) the fact that the scientists, while on one hand publishing their work like normal, had to keep ongoing experiments involving (pre)SARS2, and presumably other viruses as well, secret for years before the pandemic. But there is no evidence for all of this either.
So, with all the evidence for zoonosis and the lack of evidence for the lab leak, we can be very confident in concluding that SARS2 had a natural origin. Does this make the lab leak impossible? No, but that’s not the level of certainty we are dealing with here.
If we possessed very little or no data to support either case, then you would have a point. But that’s not the situation we find ourselves. So, repeating the point about a lack of transparency, while still a deserving criticism towards the Chinese government, this will not give more credibility or plausibility to the lab leak. Certainly not at this point. The existing evidence speaks for itself.
Yes, that’s what Dr. Zhengli has also said in a reply to Science. From what I understand, that is the very data that you get from serological tests. They are qualitative results: positive or negative.
Even if we ignore this, it would still be very peculiar that the early cases do not trace back to the lab. As I mentioned previously, early cases of real lab leaks were traceable to a lab, and very often the lab worker(s) themselves were the only/early cases. In order for this to work for SARS2 in 2019, it means that one lab worker got infected, yet somehow managed to not infect anyone else among the lab facility, nor anyone else their social circle, and then made a beeline to the wet market and only then did the lab worker infect other people. AND the fact that the lab worker got sick was just not noticed, nor detected, or it got covered up. Something like that had to occur to explain the pattern of the outbreak, but this is extremely unlikely. There also the issue of multiple lineages of early SARS2, which would mean that this unlikely journey had to have happened twice.
Phylogenetics is also relevant here, since they can be used to pin point a source, whether natural or unnatural. Ironically, the real lab leak of SARS2 in 2021 shows this. The lab worker contracted a variant of SARS2 that was only present in the lab, and not circulating outside in the community. It’s phylogenetic history pointed to the lab. Phylogenetics was also an argument that lab leak proponents were (and some still are) using after Zhengli’s lab published a nature article which mentioned that they previously sequenced a virus named RaTG13, which was (at the time) the closest relative to SARS2. Lab leak proponents claimed that this was proof that WIV had the precursor to SARS2 since RaTG13 was 96% similar, but that has been thoroughly debunked.
This also makes you wonder about the supposed motives of Zhengli and her colleagues, if one would adhere to the lab leak hypothesis. They would (be the first to) know the truth that they possessed SARS2 or a precursor, but if they were trying to hide all of this, why would they quickly publish a paper mentioning that they sequenced a close relative many years ago? Or maybe, this was like a 3D-chess move by Zhengli’s lab who used RaTG13 as bait to make leak proponents look like fools.
Additionally, more recent data has shown that (just like SARS1) SARS2 has close relatives that present in natural reservoirs located in Western China and Northern Laos, and the genetic tracing to the wet market specifically. All of this is very relevant .
Which is also a point against the lab leak. When SARS2 is serially passed through (humanized) mice, it also has to change in order to adapt to its new host. The changes are not as drastic as the loss of Furin cleavage sites when passed through cell cultures, but it is similarly true here. One specific example is the mutation N501Y in the spike protein, which has convergently occurred in multiple SARS2 variants while they were circulating among humans. Mutations such as N501Y are also needed for SARS2 to be used in mice as research models, yet the earliest variants lacked these adaptive signatures. This is also shows that SARS2 was not ‘pre-adapted’ to humans, contrary to the claims made by Alina Chan. For more, see discussions here and here.
I think that is was they do. Even in the 2018 DEFUSE proposal (which you brought up to me before), the project outlines exactly what you describe here. They planned to collect samples to sequence the spike proteins of SARS-related viruses, then using these sequences for reverse genetics and insert the spike protein into backbones (WIV1 and SHC014) before infecting humanized mice.
What on earth?? I mean… I am no virologist, so someone correct if I am wrong on this, but I am pretty sure that this is not how this would be done for many reasons. For one, you don’t know what’s even in those samples. They can contain anything, so you would be introducing many potential confounding variables which you don’t want, and they can very easily lack the things you actually want to study. I also suspect that these samples are not very efficient inoculants anyways. So, most mice won’t get infected and most of the few that do will be infected with things you don’t want. This sounds absurd that a virologist would do it like this, or am I wrong here?
Well, by that standard, we can “rule out” the lab leak in favor of zoonosis. We have a lot of ‘finger prints’ and all of them point to the latter.