There's also very scant evidence that the WIV was doing anything along the lines of GoF. They worked a ton with Baric's group in NC and other "western" scientists who did all of the genetic engineering that I'm aware of. The purpose of this engineering is to develop vaccines and treatments for the most likely natural viruses before they exist in nature and have a chance to infect humans. Even if they were doing more pseudo-GoF than I'm aware, I'm a bit nonplussed.
The source I linked at the top with Markolin's analysis on why he thinks it was a zoonotic event is titled, "Nature’s neglected GoF laboratory" for a reason. Viruses are going to mix/match, they're going to produce chimeras, they are going to undergo directed evolution by the trillions, all completely naturally. As we encroach further into the urban/wildlife interface, zoonotic events are going to keep happening, and likely going to get worse. MERS and SARS1 were both "near miss" pandemics that we were fortunate to have avoided a SC2-like global nightmare. Wuhan was a 'control' for latent coronavirus sampling not because of the lack of bats or coronaviruses in Hubei, but because it was an urban environment. Millions of people in China live near bats and domesticated animals capable of acting as intermediate hosts. We can't just hope that every coronavirus they're naturally infected with is mild or burns out before the wrong person takes a fateful bus trip.
I'm not 100% certain GoF experiments are worth it, but they're highly mischaracterized by most of the people who are accusing scientists of all sorts of malfeasance. The vast majority of this work takes place in strains that couldn't possibly infect humans and with animal models that also have no potential for spillover. Skim this paper from 2018 and tell me it wouldn't be worth knowing more about in the lead-up to SC2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132729/
> and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology
This is absolutely crazy to me. So far most of the evidence for a lab leak is "we don't have any close relatives" and "we've never seen the RBD or FCS like this before".
Of course we haven't! We've barely sampled any viruses!
We know a ton about how viruses enter cells and we know a ton about how spillovers happen, but we don't know very much about the potential "problem space" due to very limited understanding of the diversity of viruses out there.
> You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms.
No offense to anyone I've 'shut down' but this is akin to me wading into a discussion on cryptography with very strong opinions about quantum computing based on having read some Neal Stephenson books. I'd love to spend more time enhancing public knowledge, but it's near impossible unless people have some baseline level of understanding of the underlying science and the ability to figure out when they're being mislead.
I think Alina Chan is mostly well-intentioned but leans into the 'controversy' a bit much in order to sell books -- but her coauthor is a complete hack who knows exactly what he's doing. Ridley has no background in virology whatsoever, his claim to fame before this was being a prominent climate change denier who owns and operates a literal coal mine.
So sure, I'll continue to hope to educate people about what they've been mislead about but there's British Aristocracy with millions of dollars in book sales on the line working to gaslight everyone so here we are.
GoF on pathogens that couldn't possibly cause a human pandemic (including viruses that don't infect humans, or anything replication-incompetent) seems much less risky to me, and I believe that was excluded from the 2014 restrictions. It may still present some risk, to the extent it would guide later practitioners working in replication-competent human pathogens, with or without malicious intent. I generally dislike the framing of the debate in terms of a "GoF ban", which is why I chose the phrase "high-risk research" and qualified GoF to potential pandemic pathogens. I'm aware that very few people are going to understand this nuance; but that's the reason why practitioners need to competently regulate themselves, instead of leaving this to an uninformed mob.
That said, there's zero question that DEFUSE proposed to collect and enhance replication-competent potential human pandemic pathogens. That proposal wasn't funded, and that proposal indeed anticipated that the GoF work would be done at UNC; but the WIV seems clearly capable of that work too. We don't know what happened next, and I believe we should do everything in our power to find out. If possible, that would occur with China's cooperation; but since that seems impossible for now, it should proceed without. For example, large amounts of raw sequencer reads exist on the servers of American and European research groups and their service providers. Those should be subpoenaed, and searched for evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 genomes as contamination, similar to that found in the Antarctic soil samples. Do you disagree?
I also dislike the framing in terms of "GoF ban" because I agree fully that nature may present a greater risk than anything we could make in a lab. It seems entirely plausible to me that right now, there are viruses deep inside some cave that could end human life as we know it, but that we've simply been lucky enough that the virus has never left the cave. But how could that possibly be a reason to send some grad student into the cave? From pictures and videos of WIV sampling trips, they were sending researchers in with no protection beyond a surgical mask and nitrile gloves. That seems insane to me. If humans will be entering an area regardless--for agriculture, or tourism, or whatever else--then I agree we should be sampling it. But why should we go looking for trouble in areas that no other human is likely to approach?
You keep saying that virology brings potential benefits, and that's obviously true. It also brings potential detriments though, including research-origin pandemics, and it's done so at least once in the past. I see no evidence that you're making anything like a cost/benefit tradeoff here; you're simply disregarding all the costs, somehow classifying deaths quite directly caused by research activities as "natural" and thus unimportant. That's not how anything else in life works--if I'm careless with my campsite, then the resulting wildfire may be indistinguishable from one set by lightning, but the ranger is still going to say it's my fault.
I have no special affection for Ridley, though I still prefer him to the author of the article you linked, who called Alina Chan a "moronic psychopath"[1]. In any case, the messenger shouldn't matter. As to the narrow question of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2, I believe Ridley is right and you're dangerously wrong. You've correctly shut down some genuine nonsense here (e.g., Moderna patents on the sequence). You've also posted at least two unequivocal falsehoods yourself though (WIV situated based on diversity of nearby relevant viruses, no prior unnatural pandemic), and presented other evidence in much stronger terms than any scientific consensus (e.g., the two lineages; George Gao[2] thinks they probably evolved in humans, and I presume you're not going to call him a lab leak conspiracist). I don't see how that enhances public knowledge.
Gao's work on the location of samples was greatly helpful - his other work...eh... in that paper you linked, he actually references papers speculating that Covid was in Brazil in 2019 and to a paper that takes seriously the idea that Covid was in Barcelona in March 2019 (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...). I don't think he's a lab leak conspiracist but I do think he's got as much of a motive to shift blame elsewhere -- namely outside of China -- as anyone in the world, and acknowledging that the animal trade caused yet another pandemic would be politically damaging.
WIV was established before the concept of of bat coronaviruses could exist - so technically they are in Wuhan because some cutting edge communist insect research was there -- but in the support for the lab post-SARS, they were repeatedly promoted (mainly by the Chinese government so take with a grain of salt) due to their expertise, familiarity and proximity to bat populations. Hubei is consistently listed in the lists of areas with needs for increased viral surveillance alongside Yunnan and Guangong -- the earliest post-SARS work all shows this. As recently as 2019, scientists from the WIV were researching Hubei bat populations... people are acting like it would be completely impossible for betacoronaviruses to show up in Wuhan but it's a misconception that dishonest people are happy to promote. There are tons of coronaviruses in China, and tons of them in Hubei/Henan/Shaanxi area, it's clearly more likely that a new strain comes out of the Laos/Yunnan area since that's where SARS1 came from and they seem better adapted to human crossover, but with migration patterns and the history of virus collection there, it's not that unlikely for a Hubei-centered virus to exist and it only takes a single strain to cause a pandemic.
The fire analogy is a good one -- of course it's your fault if your campsite causes a wildfire -- but now we're talking about the nuts and bolts of forest management to prevent any fire from turning into a wildfire. Loosely, much GoF work is akin to controlled burns, or maybe closer to studying fire dynamics by burning overgrown areas. Potentially dangerous but likely useful when "the real thing" happens.
In any case, this thread is a bit stale, but I'm sure it'll just be a few weeks before some new conspiracy theory has started and all of the same tired tropes get to be knocked down again.
Man, it's really strange that you're spending days late-replying to anyone that voices any idea outside your narrow and unsubstantiated narrative of the pandemic.
I'm not going to continue to argue (here or to your replies to my comments) about the science at this point, but I'll say this. There is no question whatsoever that there has been a conspiracy within the Chinese government and institutions to prevent public exposure of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 (whatever that may be). They've destroyed data, halted investigations, literally blocked roads to prevent it from being discovered. So slinging mud around calling hypotheses that involve no additional conspiracy beyond the one we know to exist "conspiracy theories" is completely ridiculous and out of touch with reality. If you actually want to have constructive conversations, start by throwing that garbage out of your replies.
> I don't think he's a lab leak conspiracist but I do think he's got as much of a motive to shift blame elsewhere -- namely outside of China -- as anyone in the world, [...]
George Gao is clearly beholden to the CCP's official story that SARS-CoV-2 originated outside China. I don't see why that would require him to disregard strong genomic evidence for two introductions into the market, though--he could simply propose two packages of frozen fish, or two of whatever other story they're claiming now.
In my own limited judgment, I don't see what in the genomic evidence excludes evolution of the two lineages in humans--it seems entirely possible to me that sampling of human cases simply wasn't thorough enough to pick up all intermediates (if they even exist). None of your responses address that question of sampling coverage. I also see many highly-credentialed experts who consider evolution in humans to be possible. This makes me believe that you, Worobey, and quite a lot of media headlines are greatly over-representing the significance of two lineages separated by two SNPs.
> As recently as 2019, scientists from the WIV were researching Hubei bat populations... people are acting like it would be completely impossible for betacoronaviruses to show up in Wuhan but it's a misconception that dishonest people are happy to promote.
Non-specialists often use sloppy language, but the important question is clearly one of probabilities, not of possibility vs. impossibility. The greatest diversity of SARS-like viruses lies in SW China and SE Asia, including BANAL-20-52 with its extremely close spike, closer than omicron is to the original Wuhan virus.
That SARS-CoV-2 spilled over in Wuhan certainly isn't dispositive evidence of unnatural origin, but it's not what anyone expected. It would be nice if you could make that clear when you correct people.
> Loosely, much GoF work is akin to controlled burns,
I used that analogy in another comment here--when a recent controlled burn in New Mexico got out of control and destroyed hundreds of homes, everyone involved realized they'd screwed up. They're forming committees to understand what went wrong, and to compensate the victims, and to change their practices so this doesn't happen again.
If a disastrous controlled burn somehow killed 700k people, then I'm not sure the practice would ever be re-attempted. And yet the 1977 flu pandemic did just that, and no one really noticed or cared. Don't you find that remarkable?
The source I linked at the top with Markolin's analysis on why he thinks it was a zoonotic event is titled, "Nature’s neglected GoF laboratory" for a reason. Viruses are going to mix/match, they're going to produce chimeras, they are going to undergo directed evolution by the trillions, all completely naturally. As we encroach further into the urban/wildlife interface, zoonotic events are going to keep happening, and likely going to get worse. MERS and SARS1 were both "near miss" pandemics that we were fortunate to have avoided a SC2-like global nightmare. Wuhan was a 'control' for latent coronavirus sampling not because of the lack of bats or coronaviruses in Hubei, but because it was an urban environment. Millions of people in China live near bats and domesticated animals capable of acting as intermediate hosts. We can't just hope that every coronavirus they're naturally infected with is mild or burns out before the wrong person takes a fateful bus trip.
I'm not 100% certain GoF experiments are worth it, but they're highly mischaracterized by most of the people who are accusing scientists of all sorts of malfeasance. The vast majority of this work takes place in strains that couldn't possibly infect humans and with animal models that also have no potential for spillover. Skim this paper from 2018 and tell me it wouldn't be worth knowing more about in the lead-up to SC2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132729/
> and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology
This is absolutely crazy to me. So far most of the evidence for a lab leak is "we don't have any close relatives" and "we've never seen the RBD or FCS like this before".
Of course we haven't! We've barely sampled any viruses!
We know a ton about how viruses enter cells and we know a ton about how spillovers happen, but we don't know very much about the potential "problem space" due to very limited understanding of the diversity of viruses out there.
> You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms.
No offense to anyone I've 'shut down' but this is akin to me wading into a discussion on cryptography with very strong opinions about quantum computing based on having read some Neal Stephenson books. I'd love to spend more time enhancing public knowledge, but it's near impossible unless people have some baseline level of understanding of the underlying science and the ability to figure out when they're being mislead.
I think Alina Chan is mostly well-intentioned but leans into the 'controversy' a bit much in order to sell books -- but her coauthor is a complete hack who knows exactly what he's doing. Ridley has no background in virology whatsoever, his claim to fame before this was being a prominent climate change denier who owns and operates a literal coal mine.
So sure, I'll continue to hope to educate people about what they've been mislead about but there's British Aristocracy with millions of dollars in book sales on the line working to gaslight everyone so here we are.