There is absolutely nothing about the biology of the virus that suggests laboratory anything. Anyone who says it does does not know what they are talking about. If anyone says something about furin being suspicious or indels being unlikely, or recombination patterns being odd, they can safely be ignored and their opinions discounted. Yes, this includes David Baltimore.
One cannot exclude the possibility that someone had a stock in a lab being studied somewhere and it got into a lab worker by sheer bad luck. That would look quite similar to the utterly normal zoonotic spillovers that happen all the time, especially for something like this that is a tenth as deadly as SARS classic such that the early thin transmission chains are effectively invisible to public health infrastructure.
SARS classic has infected lab workers before, but as something that caused a previous global issue it was being studied by many people in many places while in the scenario of a novel zoonotic transfer having occurred in a lab, you almost certainly just have one poorly characterized sample of something with no published sequence data someone happens to be growing for a quick one-off experiment spilling over such that the rate would presumably be much much lower.
I see no reason to think that this is particularly likely over and above utterly normal outside-world zoonotic spillover that happen all the freaking time (several percent of Chinese villagers tested for antibodies against SARS-like viruses that live near bat caves have them in previous literature), especially since the invisibility of early thin overdispersed transmission chains mean the first big outbreak could occur somewhere quite different than the location of the initial zoonotic event. Even SARS-classic had its first big internationally-noticeable explosion happen thousands of miles away from the initial site of zoonotic spillover, and if it were not as deadly as it was that initial spillover in southern China could potentially have gone unnoticed outside of local authorities and you could’ve been talking about SARS as originating in Hong Kong.
All this being said given the state of recombinant DNA technology and its power I do see the value in most virology work using reconstituted sequence in pseudovirus systems rather than infectious particles.
There are multiple hypotheses and insufficient evidence to settle on just one.
The ‘gain of function’ experimental design—where a chain of lab animals are used, with a slightly harder to cross barrier between each animal—would cause similar ‘natural mutation’ patterns. The difference is that it makes the actual creation of a novel pandemic causing virus many many times as likely, as this same infection chain has to occur by chance in nature.
What we have now is like looking at the residue of a nuclear meltdown but we can’t examine the actual reactor, and the owners of the territory the meltdown occurred in are actively suppressing evidence. Nature can produce a nuclear reactor and has at least once it just isn’t likely.
That… seems like almost precisely the opposite metaphor one would use to compare to reality? Instead we are looking at something that happens naturally ALL THE TIME and you need special effort to sometimes maybe replicate if you really wanted to?
Do we have a quantitative measurement for “all the time”? We have in living memory the emergence of HIV which presumably also came from an animal host initially. And the previous 2 variants of covid which were not very contagious.
Please note I am not “convinced” either way. I am just noting a gain of function experiment is a specific set of conditions that might take nature decades to centuries to replicate by chance. It is a plausible method for the virus evolving. The other way being that lab field workers are going to collect more exotic specimens than commercial meat sellers, going deeper into caves,etc. All it would have taken is a mistake or counterfeit equipment such as HEPA filters, a problem that appears to be more common with current Chinese industries than in equipment from more mature name brand western companies.
There is absolutely nothing about the biology of the virus that suggests laboratory anything. Anyone who says it does does not know what they are talking about. If anyone says something about furin being suspicious or indels being unlikely, or recombination patterns being odd, they can safely be ignored and their opinions discounted. Yes, this includes David Baltimore.
One cannot exclude the possibility that someone had a stock in a lab being studied somewhere and it got into a lab worker by sheer bad luck. That would look quite similar to the utterly normal zoonotic spillovers that happen all the time, especially for something like this that is a tenth as deadly as SARS classic such that the early thin transmission chains are effectively invisible to public health infrastructure.
SARS classic has infected lab workers before, but as something that caused a previous global issue it was being studied by many people in many places while in the scenario of a novel zoonotic transfer having occurred in a lab, you almost certainly just have one poorly characterized sample of something with no published sequence data someone happens to be growing for a quick one-off experiment spilling over such that the rate would presumably be much much lower.
I see no reason to think that this is particularly likely over and above utterly normal outside-world zoonotic spillover that happen all the freaking time (several percent of Chinese villagers tested for antibodies against SARS-like viruses that live near bat caves have them in previous literature), especially since the invisibility of early thin overdispersed transmission chains mean the first big outbreak could occur somewhere quite different than the location of the initial zoonotic event. Even SARS-classic had its first big internationally-noticeable explosion happen thousands of miles away from the initial site of zoonotic spillover, and if it were not as deadly as it was that initial spillover in southern China could potentially have gone unnoticed outside of local authorities and you could’ve been talking about SARS as originating in Hong Kong.
All this being said given the state of recombinant DNA technology and its power I do see the value in most virology work using reconstituted sequence in pseudovirus systems rather than infectious particles.
There are multiple hypotheses and insufficient evidence to settle on just one.
The ‘gain of function’ experimental design—where a chain of lab animals are used, with a slightly harder to cross barrier between each animal—would cause similar ‘natural mutation’ patterns. The difference is that it makes the actual creation of a novel pandemic causing virus many many times as likely, as this same infection chain has to occur by chance in nature.
What we have now is like looking at the residue of a nuclear meltdown but we can’t examine the actual reactor, and the owners of the territory the meltdown occurred in are actively suppressing evidence. Nature can produce a nuclear reactor and has at least once it just isn’t likely.
That… seems like almost precisely the opposite metaphor one would use to compare to reality? Instead we are looking at something that happens naturally ALL THE TIME and you need special effort to sometimes maybe replicate if you really wanted to?
Do we have a quantitative measurement for “all the time”? We have in living memory the emergence of HIV which presumably also came from an animal host initially. And the previous 2 variants of covid which were not very contagious.
Please note I am not “convinced” either way. I am just noting a gain of function experiment is a specific set of conditions that might take nature decades to centuries to replicate by chance. It is a plausible method for the virus evolving. The other way being that lab field workers are going to collect more exotic specimens than commercial meat sellers, going deeper into caves,etc. All it would have taken is a mistake or counterfeit equipment such as HEPA filters, a problem that appears to be more common with current Chinese industries than in equipment from more mature name brand western companies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoonosis#Lists_of_diseases