I personally think that the chance that covid-19 was created in a lab in Wuhan is exceptionally high, perhaps 93%, and there are various skeptical experts who think it is now beyond reasonable doubt that the Wuhan Lab created covid-19.
This might have already been covered somewhere, but I’m curious what makes you think COVID-19 was created in a lab and not a natural virus leaked while they were studying it.
I’m curious what makes you think COVID-19 was created in a lab and not a natural virus leaked while they were studying it.
Sorry, I misread this.
I don’t have a strong opinion. I think it’s plausible that it was a lab leak of a natural virus, though I will note that the more technical people are more skeptical of this, claiming that covid-19 was unusually good at spreading through humans even from the start, which is unlikely for a fully natural spillover.
If I knew more about the details of virology, I would have a stronger opinion.
I think you’re answering a different question from the one Brendan asked.
You’re answering “Why do you think COVID-19 escaped from a lab?”.
Brendan was asking “Conditional on COVID-19 having escaped from a lab, why do you think it was created there rather than being a natural virus they were studying in that lab?”.
Conditional on COVID-19 having escaped from a lab, why do you think it was created there rather than being a natural virus they were studying in that lab?
Aside from the fact that you’re answering a different question from Brendan’s, this argument seems like it involves some assumptions that are not known to be correct.
Isn’t the right version of your question “Create a virus in a natural spillover event; what is the chance that that spillover happens within a few miles of a lab that is studying similar viruses?”?
The answer to that might be “fairly large”, if e.g. it happens that there are virus labs and likely spots for natural zoonotic spillover located near to one another. Which is in fact the case in Wuhan, no?
(I don’t know how well the details of the case fit the “escape from the Wuhan virus lab” and “zoonosis at the Wuhan wet market” hypotheses. Maybe they’re a better fit for the former than for the latter. But that’s a very different sort of argument from “there’s a virus lab that was studying coronaviruses near to where COVID-19 was first seen in humans”.)
it happens that there are virus labs and likely spots for natural zoonotic spillover located near to one another. Which is in fact the case in Wuhan, no?
But WIV was the only lab in China studying this virus, whereas the Wuhan wet market is nothing special—they are all over the country.
So if spillovers happen at random in wet markets, the probability of getting the market closest to the lab in the whole of China which is HUGE, AND ALSO hitting the exact temporal window where they are doing this particular research is very small. There was nothing stopping a natural spillover happening in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, etc, and all of those would have missed this research as it was not technologically possible then.
You’re saying “this virus” again when what’s actually known is that WIV was studying coronaviruses, not specifically that it was studying SARS-COV-2.
(If it turns out that WIV was studying SARS-COV-2 specifically before it started infecting humans then yes, that would be very strong evidence in favour of lab leak theories.)
Anyway: yes, I do agree that the fact that SARS-COV-2 first got into humans somewhere rather near a lab that was studying similar viruses is substantial Bayesian evidence that it got into humans via that lab. But the exact same thing that makes it substantial evidence (there aren’t many such labs, whereas there are many opportunities for natural zoonosis which could happen in a wider variety of places) also means that the prior is low.
So the question is roughly “how dangerous do you think, on priors, a single WIV-like lab is, compared to a large wet market?”. (“Dangerous” meaning probability of releasing coronaviruses into the human population.) If, before hearing about SARS-COV-2, you would have thought WIV was about as likely to release coronaviruses into the human population as the Wuhan wet market, then after hearing about SARS-COV-2 you should think the probability it was a lab leak is about 50%. (And then potentially modify that substantially depending on all the details that we’re ignoring in this discussion, which might give more concrete evidence to distinguish the hypotheses.) Etc.
[EDITED to add:] I’ve now seen your post about this; I agree that the DEFUSE thing seems like highly relevant evidence (but haven’t looked into the DEFUSE proposal myself to check whether I agree with what you say about it). If it’s correct that WIV is known to have been working on something much more specifically matched to SARS-COV-2 then that dangerousness ratio looks quite different (because something so much more specific is correspondingly less likely to occur as a natural zoonosis).
But I concluded that covid-19 was a lab leak in early 2020 purely based on the geographical coincidence of a novel coronavirus appearing exactly on the doorstep of China’s first ever BSL-4 certified lab at WIV.
There are two one-off events—China getting its first BSL-4 certified lab, and China getting the largest pandemic of the past hundred years. And they happened within the same population blob of 7 million people, which is about 0.5% of the total population of China.
There were already some other special things about WIV that we knew in 2020, like the affiliations of coronavirus researchers, and WIV was the top one. WIV was THE place to study coronaviruses in China. See, e.g.
Now DEFUSE and the Ecohealth stuff is additional evidence. DEFUSE specifically links WIV to
the Yunnan caves
gain of function using a Furin Cleavage Site
uniformly spaced recognition sites and BsmBI (BsmBI is in the DEFUSE proposal)
All this stuff collecting at WIV which uniquely fits the virus adds further nails to the coffin, though of course there is always the danger of confirmation bias. However, the researchers who identified the uniformly spaced recognition sites did so before DEFUSE was unearthed so they didn’t know that BsmBI was waiting for them in there.
The DEFUSE proposal that you linked to doesn’t (so far as I can tell) say anything about where the furin cleavage site work would be done. OP here includes an image that seems to show a Word document or something with a comment about that, but it isn’t obvious to me where it’s from or how it’s known to be genuine or anything.
The “uniformly spaced recognition sites and BsmBI” thing (at least, the instance of it that I’ve found) looks rather sketchy and unconvincing to me, though I’m not really competent to evaluate it (are you?). It’s possible that what I’m looking at isn’t what you’re referring to; I’m talking about a post on Alex Washburne’s Substack where he draws attention to mention in the DEFUSE proposal of “reverse genetic systems” and “infectious clone technology” (though so far as I can see neither of these is actually mentioned in the proposal itself), claims (I do not know with what evidence) that using these methods would produce unusually regularly spaced instances of certain genome subsequences that are targeted by BsmBI or a similar enzyme, and claims that the SARS-CoV-2 shows such unusually regularly spaced instances.
But (1) unless there’s something I’m missing this “specifically links WIV to” those methods only in a very weak sense (e.g., the DEFUSE proposal doesn’t in fact say that they are going to use those methods, or that it would be done at the WIV), (2) Washburne doesn’t provide any support for his claim that researchers using this technique would in fact make the relevant segments unusually uniform in length, and (3) nor does he seem to give any details of the analysis that supposeedly shows that SARS-CoV-2 has such unusually uniform segments. He makes some claims about earlier drafts of the DEFUSE proposal supposedly obtained by FOIA requests, which if correct go some way to filling these gaps a bit, but if he actually shows those or gives evidence that they’re real then I haven’t seen it.
(Note: I find the style of Washburne’s writing very offputting; it pattern-matches to e.g. creationists crowing about their nonsensical statistical arguments. Lots of expressions of triumph, pointlessly flowery writing, that sort of thing. Of course that isn’t strong evidence that Washburne is wrong in the same sort of way as the creationists are, but I find it does strongly incline me to skepticism. It’s odd that, when arguing that something previously dismissed as a conspiracy theory is probably true, it doesn’t occur to him to try not writing like a conspiracy theorist.)
Daszak’s comments say that much of the work could be done at WIV which could include the FCS. The comment is genuine AFAIK but you’ll have to chase it up yourself.
The work on BsmBI is somewhat compelling because the people who suspected it published before DEFUSE was unearthed, and then DEFUSE was found to contain an order for BsmBI. So, they sort of predicted this. And there are reasons to make the virus out of relatively uniformly long segments—it’s convenient, the tools and techniques have maximum lengths they can handle, and you want to minimize the total amount of work. So you use roughly equal length segments. However this is a fairly complicated series of claims and I don’t see it as being the big win for lab-leak—the big win is DEFUSE itself.
But zoom out a bit: we can just notice that all of this stuff only collects around Wuhan, WIV and associated facilities like State Key Laboratory of Virology at Wuhan University.
There’s no equivalent of this in all the other cities in China and I am pretty sure that if you look through the top 20 cities by population you won’t find something like DEFUSE. I tried this a bit with chatGPT, Google Scholar, Google Search etc. There simply are not 50 other Daszaks out there doing GoF bat coronavirus research in every other city in China. Wuhan is THE PLACE where this happens.
But the exact same thing that makes it substantial evidence (there aren’t many such labs, whereas there are many opportunities for natural zoonosis which could happen in a wider variety of places) also means that the prior is low.
Why does that mean the prior is low?
I see no reason why I would assume that the prior for a lab to leak a virus with airborne transmission when they handle it under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent airborne transmission is low.
How many virus strains is the lab studying?
If the lab is studying 50-90% of flu virus strain it would not be strange for random flu virus that appeared in some area close to it to be studied there.
But we don’t care about random flu virus. We only track pandemic.
Furthermore random pandemic virus could happen in rural areas but more likely to turn into pandemic when they happen in crowded city. The more crowded the higher the pandemic chances.
How many lab similar to Wuhan in crowded cities vs how many crowded city without lab should be taken into account
None. Wuhan is the only BSL4 lab in China, and it is the only place that did bat coronavirus gain of function research. And Shi Zhengli’s group at WIV is the premier group in China that studies bat coronaviruses.
This might have already been covered somewhere, but I’m curious what makes you think COVID-19 was created in a lab and not a natural virus leaked while they were studying it.
Update: Roko wrote a whole post about this.
Sorry, I misread this.
I don’t have a strong opinion. I think it’s plausible that it was a lab leak of a natural virus, though I will note that the more technical people are more skeptical of this, claiming that covid-19 was unusually good at spreading through humans even from the start, which is unlikely for a fully natural spillover.
If I knew more about the details of virology, I would have a stronger opinion.
Well, be Bayesian about it.
Create a virus in a natural spillover event; what is the chance that that spillover happens within a few miles of the lab that is studying the virus?
I think you’re answering a different question from the one Brendan asked.
You’re answering “Why do you think COVID-19 escaped from a lab?”.
Brendan was asking “Conditional on COVID-19 having escaped from a lab, why do you think it was created there rather than being a natural virus they were studying in that lab?”.
I don’t have a strong opinion on that question.
Aside from the fact that you’re answering a different question from Brendan’s, this argument seems like it involves some assumptions that are not known to be correct.
Isn’t the right version of your question “Create a virus in a natural spillover event; what is the chance that that spillover happens within a few miles of a lab that is studying similar viruses?”?
The answer to that might be “fairly large”, if e.g. it happens that there are virus labs and likely spots for natural zoonotic spillover located near to one another. Which is in fact the case in Wuhan, no?
(I don’t know how well the details of the case fit the “escape from the Wuhan virus lab” and “zoonosis at the Wuhan wet market” hypotheses. Maybe they’re a better fit for the former than for the latter. But that’s a very different sort of argument from “there’s a virus lab that was studying coronaviruses near to where COVID-19 was first seen in humans”.)
But WIV was the only lab in China studying this virus, whereas the Wuhan wet market is nothing special—they are all over the country.
So if spillovers happen at random in wet markets, the probability of getting the market closest to the lab in the whole of China which is HUGE, AND ALSO hitting the exact temporal window where they are doing this particular research is very small. There was nothing stopping a natural spillover happening in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, etc, and all of those would have missed this research as it was not technologically possible then.
You’re saying “this virus” again when what’s actually known is that WIV was studying coronaviruses, not specifically that it was studying SARS-COV-2.
(If it turns out that WIV was studying SARS-COV-2 specifically before it started infecting humans then yes, that would be very strong evidence in favour of lab leak theories.)
Anyway: yes, I do agree that the fact that SARS-COV-2 first got into humans somewhere rather near a lab that was studying similar viruses is substantial Bayesian evidence that it got into humans via that lab. But the exact same thing that makes it substantial evidence (there aren’t many such labs, whereas there are many opportunities for natural zoonosis which could happen in a wider variety of places) also means that the prior is low.
So the question is roughly “how dangerous do you think, on priors, a single WIV-like lab is, compared to a large wet market?”. (“Dangerous” meaning probability of releasing coronaviruses into the human population.) If, before hearing about SARS-COV-2, you would have thought WIV was about as likely to release coronaviruses into the human population as the Wuhan wet market, then after hearing about SARS-COV-2 you should think the probability it was a lab leak is about 50%. (And then potentially modify that substantially depending on all the details that we’re ignoring in this discussion, which might give more concrete evidence to distinguish the hypotheses.) Etc.
[EDITED to add:] I’ve now seen your post about this; I agree that the DEFUSE thing seems like highly relevant evidence (but haven’t looked into the DEFUSE proposal myself to check whether I agree with what you say about it). If it’s correct that WIV is known to have been working on something much more specifically matched to SARS-COV-2 then that dangerousness ratio looks quite different (because something so much more specific is correspondingly less likely to occur as a natural zoonosis).
Well, yes, DEFUSE is helpful here.
But I concluded that covid-19 was a lab leak in early 2020 purely based on the geographical coincidence of a novel coronavirus appearing exactly on the doorstep of China’s first ever BSL-4 certified lab at WIV.
There are two one-off events—China getting its first BSL-4 certified lab, and China getting the largest pandemic of the past hundred years. And they happened within the same population blob of 7 million people, which is about 0.5% of the total population of China.
There were already some other special things about WIV that we knew in 2020, like the affiliations of coronavirus researchers, and WIV was the top one. WIV was THE place to study coronaviruses in China. See, e.g.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7148667/
and especially
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=coronavirus+china&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=2010&as_yhi=2019
Now DEFUSE and the Ecohealth stuff is additional evidence. DEFUSE specifically links WIV to
the Yunnan caves
gain of function using a Furin Cleavage Site
uniformly spaced recognition sites and BsmBI (BsmBI is in the DEFUSE proposal)
All this stuff collecting at WIV which uniquely fits the virus adds further nails to the coffin, though of course there is always the danger of confirmation bias. However, the researchers who identified the uniformly spaced recognition sites did so before DEFUSE was unearthed so they didn’t know that BsmBI was waiting for them in there.
It’s over. Daszak & co killed 27 million people.
The DEFUSE proposal that you linked to doesn’t (so far as I can tell) say anything about where the furin cleavage site work would be done. OP here includes an image that seems to show a Word document or something with a comment about that, but it isn’t obvious to me where it’s from or how it’s known to be genuine or anything.
The “uniformly spaced recognition sites and BsmBI” thing (at least, the instance of it that I’ve found) looks rather sketchy and unconvincing to me, though I’m not really competent to evaluate it (are you?). It’s possible that what I’m looking at isn’t what you’re referring to; I’m talking about a post on Alex Washburne’s Substack where he draws attention to mention in the DEFUSE proposal of “reverse genetic systems” and “infectious clone technology” (though so far as I can see neither of these is actually mentioned in the proposal itself), claims (I do not know with what evidence) that using these methods would produce unusually regularly spaced instances of certain genome subsequences that are targeted by BsmBI or a similar enzyme, and claims that the SARS-CoV-2 shows such unusually regularly spaced instances.
But (1) unless there’s something I’m missing this “specifically links WIV to” those methods only in a very weak sense (e.g., the DEFUSE proposal doesn’t in fact say that they are going to use those methods, or that it would be done at the WIV), (2) Washburne doesn’t provide any support for his claim that researchers using this technique would in fact make the relevant segments unusually uniform in length, and (3) nor does he seem to give any details of the analysis that supposeedly shows that SARS-CoV-2 has such unusually uniform segments. He makes some claims about earlier drafts of the DEFUSE proposal supposedly obtained by FOIA requests, which if correct go some way to filling these gaps a bit, but if he actually shows those or gives evidence that they’re real then I haven’t seen it.
(Note: I find the style of Washburne’s writing very offputting; it pattern-matches to e.g. creationists crowing about their nonsensical statistical arguments. Lots of expressions of triumph, pointlessly flowery writing, that sort of thing. Of course that isn’t strong evidence that Washburne is wrong in the same sort of way as the creationists are, but I find it does strongly incline me to skepticism. It’s odd that, when arguing that something previously dismissed as a conspiracy theory is probably true, it doesn’t occur to him to try not writing like a conspiracy theorist.)
Daszak’s comments say that much of the work could be done at WIV which could include the FCS. The comment is genuine AFAIK but you’ll have to chase it up yourself.
The work on BsmBI is somewhat compelling because the people who suspected it published before DEFUSE was unearthed, and then DEFUSE was found to contain an order for BsmBI. So, they sort of predicted this. And there are reasons to make the virus out of relatively uniformly long segments—it’s convenient, the tools and techniques have maximum lengths they can handle, and you want to minimize the total amount of work. So you use roughly equal length segments. However this is a fairly complicated series of claims and I don’t see it as being the big win for lab-leak—the big win is DEFUSE itself.
But zoom out a bit: we can just notice that all of this stuff only collects around Wuhan, WIV and associated facilities like State Key Laboratory of Virology at Wuhan University.
There’s no equivalent of this in all the other cities in China and I am pretty sure that if you look through the top 20 cities by population you won’t find something like DEFUSE. I tried this a bit with chatGPT, Google Scholar, Google Search etc. There simply are not 50 other Daszaks out there doing GoF bat coronavirus research in every other city in China. Wuhan is THE PLACE where this happens.
Why does that mean the prior is low?
I see no reason why I would assume that the prior for a lab to leak a virus with airborne transmission when they handle it under biosafety level II which is not designed to prevent airborne transmission is low.
The prior for any given newly-emerged virus being a natural zoonosis rather than a lab leak is higher when there are fewer labs to leak.
I agree that the prior for a leak happening from any given lab at any given time doesn’t depend on how many labs there are, of course.
How many virus strains is the lab studying? If the lab is studying 50-90% of flu virus strain it would not be strange for random flu virus that appeared in some area close to it to be studied there.
But this isn’t a random flu virus. It’s a once-in-a-century pandemic!
But we don’t care about random flu virus. We only track pandemic.
Furthermore random pandemic virus could happen in rural areas but more likely to turn into pandemic when they happen in crowded city. The more crowded the higher the pandemic chances.
How many lab similar to Wuhan in crowded cities vs how many crowded city without lab should be taken into account
None. Wuhan is the only BSL4 lab in China, and it is the only place that did bat coronavirus gain of function research. And Shi Zhengli’s group at WIV is the premier group in China that studies bat coronaviruses.
Wikipedia says there is another BSL-4 lab in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. (Source is an archived Chinese news site) Is that incorrect?
That is correct