CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

It’s also important to weight dramatic changes in the White House this week, too, right? There’s the intel itself, but then there’s also the guy trying to control the news cycle.

> Real military planning works more like: "Intel says the enemy is at A or B, most likely at A. How much resources should we devote to A vs B, or hold in reserve until we find out by encountering the enemy? What's our plan if we guess wrong?"

Not quite, and you can't possibly capture all of that paper in that sentiment. For instance, there's this excerpt:

> People’s judgments and willingness to accept analytic findings are framed by multiple factors, including backgrounds, experiences, and beliefs. Every decisionmaker has cognitive biases, including theories that guide them (e.g., the liberal international order), beliefs about how the world works (e.g., the arc of history bends in a particular direction), or sacred beliefs (e.g., all things happen for a reason). Thus it is essential for the analyst to understand as much as possible about the decisionmakers and the environment in which they operate.

Military intelligence will happily give you high confidence leads that are entirely wrong because, by all appearances, the information came from a source in the right place with the seemingly right motivations when in reality they can be playing 4D chess better than the analyst.

The confidence level can only be expressed in finite ways but it can be analyzed in almost infinite, one of them being that the information needed to develop "high confidence" has disappeared and the window of opportunity to gain insight has long passed. Personally speaking, I do not think we will ever find out the origins because a whole gaggle of people with various interests had a vested interest in a particular answer at the time. This is the byproduct of a democracy and bureaucratic system which has not been functioning nominally for quite some time - doubly so now.

I would go so far as to describe the events at the time as parallel construction.

Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive.

The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument.

The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It corresponds to something like 20 years (?) of evolution.

Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

> Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/

I will have to have a discussion with the editors of that page.

Tangentially, risks like that are why I'm really frustrated-with/exasperated-by certain mRNA-vaccine scaremongers: Ones who act as if older techniques were already fine and sufficient.

Ex: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/vaccine-derived-p...

You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true.

“Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the statement is ambiguous; that it could be completely true, or completely false. The only lower confidence would be direct evidence that it is outright false. Given, as you said, how nearly impossible it would be to prove true, wouldn’t you think it equally nearly impossible to prove false?

Believe what you want, but even the CIA doesn’t lean on the side of you being right.

there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.

any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)

If SARS-Cov-2 was from a lab, what about the original SARS?

Generally though, China is somewhat better suited to producing pandemics, because they have a larger and more dense population within which a disease can spread.

If I said I had cousins that were bankers, I am not sure that it would make me more credible to talk about finance. I mean - to the people who care about expertise.

>That was before anyone in the news was saying that.

May be in the west? It was certainly well publicised in other regions.

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

If it were a lab leak then the people especially fearful and distrustful of gain of function research would feel vindicated and try to use that to shut down existing research programs. I don't think that group of people is meaningfully divided along partisan lines, and outside the professional class probably includes everybody.

Conversely, if it were a natural outbreak then that bolsters the case for continuing gain of function research as before. Such research is precisely why we were able to identify the threat and within weeks assemble a vaccine, at least on paper. (Granted, the arc began long before 2019 with a through-line of research going back to the 2002 SARS outbreak.) And it's why we've many other advancements. Creation of CRISPR and related technology emerged in part out of gain of function research with viruses. Gain of function is a critical tool in testing hypotheses about how foundational molecular machinery works, and viruses are a convenient research model for exploring and testing ideas in that space.

But I'm not sure the origin should matter to that debate. And I'm even more sure it probably won't matter, even if we agreed on a definitive answer.

Whenever you have an institutional failure, you need to do a root cause analysis to fix the problem. That includes Chinese labs. That also includes health organizations who may have put aside their objectivity and tried to discredit a theory merely because they disagreed with the politics of those supporting it.

The wet markets were a super spreader event... Doesn't really tell you much about where it started (even if it has animal origin).

People just assumed that the wet markets were the cause of the problem, because they found them digusting (and wanted an excuse to blame it on the Chinese being evil).

In a less dense population, without many people going to the same hospital... You would just not have noticed Covid much.

Wow do we live in the same "actual world?" If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3.

I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.

In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.

Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.

> they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days

CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chance of holding China accountable on it. Parlour talk.

They say that there is no new data. That they are just altering their choice for what assumption is more likely.

Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...

But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.

Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.

Sure they could, they seem to be using chatgpt for executive orders so why not this.

This assumes operatives haven’t been working on this plan long before the regime took office.

Sources?

That’s certainly motivation for releasing it, but he’s been in office for five days so the analysis being released was done under the prior administration.

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There is nothing wrong with that. You should worry about those, who do such experiments secretly. (Russians)

I think people are missing one very sympathizable effect of this joint research, that it prevents either country from gaining an offensive edge from dual-use research that could be used for bio-weapons. You could argue that this has the benefit of preventing a bio-weapons arms race.

Vertiginous to think about the layers of unknowns.

Sources for this? Deserves it's own post if data are there to back it up

You have some interesting thoughts. But:

> 0. COVID-19 was mostly harmless. Even more so than Douglas Adam's books.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I found out that my father and his partner had COVID. He lived, at the time, about 12 hours drive from me. Where he lived, his support network was thin (to say the least) - the little family he had nearby needed to keep away because they were responsible for caring for my cousin with a severely weakened immune system. His friends, sadly, also contracted COVID around the same time.

I called him twice a day, and each call he was worse than the last. I decided to rent an AirBnB nearby. My partner and I packed up the dog and everything we needed and drove overnight to get there.

We masked up, and got supplies at Walmart. We brought them to my Dad’s house and left them on the patio - retreated a safe distance - and my Dad came to retrieve them. He was in an awful condition, and his partner was worse.

For the next week I came to their porch every few hours, and called my dad, and we spoke with what little breath he had. He dictated his last will and testament to me. I delivered pedialyte, meal replacement shakes, pulse oximeters, anything to help them make it through. I forced them to get up and move around a little from time to time, and took notes on their condition. They wouldn’t let me in the house.

One day, before I arrived with supplies, my Dad told me they had called an ambulance for his partner. They took his partner to the local hospital… and the hospital turned him away because they had no beds. They essentially sent my Dad’s partner home to die.

By some miraculous turn of events, they survived. They have issues walking and breathing to this day, but they survived.

It’s one of the more agonizing, awful things I’ve ever had to watch. COVID-19 wasn’t harmless; it killed millions. I saw it up close. Especially early on, it was virulent and deadly, and very nearly took my parents from me. It did end up taking a lot of people in my extended social network. They died agonizing deaths.

How dare you paint it as “mostly harmless.”

> if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused,

Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries because they kept borders open.

Placing rhetoric in context like you did has a way of cutting through the bs and really getting to the core of what current politicians want covid to be. A minor cold when it was running rampant, and now suddenly a plague. Why could that be? Could it be because during the pandemic it was in their best interest to downplay it while hundreds of thousands died, and now that we've passed it and the USA is facing the rise of a successful nation with a different political system, we need to paint them as the enemy? For what it's worth, the current administration is showing signs of cozying up to nations with weak or non-existent democracies. Just look at the proposed tariffs - they are NOT targeting China but rather Mexico and Canada. Why could that be?

Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.

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The real problem is, trying to cover that, they said masks were useless and other elucubrations for which they didn’t have proof, like “Stay inside”. “But they didn’t know it was false” Well, if so, don’t speak.

> It's not a gotcha to say "They just want to hold China accountable".

Sure, it’s not a gotcha if we divorce such a statement from all of its surrounding context.

But context in communication is incredibly important, and it’s unwise to analyze these kinds of statements in a context-free manner. I find it occurs on this site fairly often; it seems endemic to engineers. I try hard to avoid it myself, but frequently fail.

The relevant context here, of course, is the rabid anti-China sentiment expressed by folks like Sen. Cotton for years, dating back to well before the COVID pandemic. I take no position on whether or not his views are accurate or fair - but a context-informed analysis of the situation suggests that Sen. Cotton (and others) are not simply seeking truth and accountability: rather, they seek pretext to justify their views.

I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem anti-correlated. Perhaps we'll do better next time around?

> It's so strange to demand so much more proof of lab origin than one does of non-lab origin.

It's not, zoonotic transmission has happened many times, lab leak is the extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence

The blame game is kind of like a variation of a bikeshed discussion, except it might lead to war.

War happens to be my least favourite colour for a bikeshed...

I think the parent is arguing that lab leak is plausible, even if it wasn’t certainly the cause. GoF is foolish if you think the lab leak was remotely plausible.

Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.

We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.

I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.

Nobody in this thread seems to know what gain of function means. It's a very broad term covering a large percentage of all virology research. If you ban it, you might as well say that we don't want to do any research into understanding viruses from now on.

When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.

The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

I’ve seen no compelling evidence gain of function has benefited us in any pandemic — or even a theoretical justification.

How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?

Edit:

Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.

Gain of function research in a lab you can't (and more damningly won't) prove had adequate precautions is bad regardless of the source of Covid or the utility of the research. We should be taking it as a wake up call to make sure standards are appropriate and the institutions to make sure those standards are met are strong.

At the very least, we hopefully learned not to subsidize and encourage gain of function research at labs that were already known pre-Covid to have poor hygiene and containment practices.

The question of whether we should do gain-of-function research is a fairly complex cost/benefit analysis. The precise cause of the 2019 pandemic is only a very minor variable in that analysis, because that specific outcome doesn't change the underlying probability of a lab leak. More to the point, do we realistically believe that everyone will stop doing it, even if there's a credible international moratorium? If not, then we need to plan accordingly.

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The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market.

The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.

Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.

Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.

A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.

Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained?

I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?

How many times do we need to repeat "lab leak != intentionally lab engineered"? Your most relevant parts are all about the latter. You know this, yet muddy the waters.

You are conflating two things - a lab leak and a virus being engineered. These are two separate things.

Likely, the virus was not engineered but was stored in the laboratory.

Very good summary, but the problem is, like most things, it is impossible to 100% rule out the lab theory. It is always possible to look at one of these evidences and say "yeah, but ...". And given how politicized this question is, people are just going to believe what they want to believe. I am quite pessimistic about this, that people will remain rational.

There have been cases of irresponsible employees of other labs in China making a quick buck by selling "used" lab animals to wet markets.

> Officials are saying that, true.

I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.

I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.

> That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.

The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.

The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.

> ... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation.

That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):

https://www.politico.eu/article/fear-and-loathing-in-davos-e...

"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."

"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."

"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."

Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.

"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis."

this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.

You can, in fact, imagine other things.

For example, maybe the people shutting down the investigation had no idea what it would find and just didn't want to take the chance.

Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.

DOE has its own massive farm of experts: https://www.energy.gov/intelligence/office-intelligence-and-...

There’s 17 intelligence agencies that all staff knowledgeable experts on all sorts of topics. Our government is Leviathan.

The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.

> President Obama had banned it through an executive order.

Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.

The practical difference is that many of the arguments against lab-leak theories in general are actually arguments against the gain-of-function theory in particular. Things like lack of markers that would indicate engineering, or the presence of markers that would indicate animal origins. So distinguishing the two candidate theories becomes important for discerning whether the evidence is for or against a lab leak: you can't use animal-origins evidence as evidence against a lab leak, only evidence against an engineered virus.

One way to look at the difference is that a "natural Ebola" almost certainly would have spread at some point anyways, and so it wouldn't affect the total number of world deaths in the end, just make them happen some number of years sooner.

Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. They're new.

I think the natural-virus-leaked-by-lab theory hinges on the argument that, (assuming it was true, then) had the lab leak not have happened, SARS-CoV-2 wouldn't have made to jump to human by itself. And this is where the Ebola analogy breaks down. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a higher basic reproduction number than Ebola, meaning it's more transmissible. And it's also much less deadly than Ebola, meaning it has much more opportunities to spread.

Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.

It guides policy. If it was engineered, it means this is research we really shouldn't be doing. If it was a wild virus being researched, it means we need to take the threat of spillover more seriously.

the "practical difference" is that zoonotic spillover and lab leak may not be mutually exclusive theories.

Lets play cluedo. How about a cremation janitor without any formal education trying to sell exotic meat as a side hustle ?

You've made great points throughout this entire post. This is yet another that I've just upvoted (from having been downvoted). But in each you've been needlessly aggressive and hostile. Everyone here knows how frustrating COVID-19 can be to discuss—as is the case with most topics worth discussing. But it's less frustrating when we all implicitly agree to stick to our thoughtful great points.

A hypothetical lab worker which only spread it to the market and nowhere else seems implausible.

I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.

There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.

That is possible, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. E.g. if I am reading the paper correctly, they say that there is evidence of two distinct spillover lineages, which wouldn't be consistent with a simple visit from a lab worker.

Or the selling of "used" animals by some irresponsible night-shift employee at the lab in charge of said animals.

They really are mutually exclusive theories.

The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements.

If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ever more implausible theory: two different scientists got infected in the lab with different variants (of a virus we have good evidence never existed at the lab in the first place), then both of them went to the market (where the same types of wild animals that caused the original SARS outbreak in 2002 just happened to be sold) and infected people, but somehow they didn't infect anyone else at the lab. It's just one implausibility stacked on top of the next, all with the goal of avoiding what the data is obviously saying: the outbreak began at the market.

> It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019.

What's public record is that ABC News reported[1] that two anonymous officials claimed there was an internal intelligence report in late November discussing an outbreak in China, and that it was briefed up the chain. All other news outlets then picked it up, with attribution (ABC News says someone else says...) buried deep in the text per usual. The report was immediately denied publicly by various officials and in over 4 years has never been corroborated, not even with other anonymous sources.

Plus, even if it were true, what's the relevance? It originally made headlines because it implied the Trump administration was slow to react; in particular, that they possibly had as many as 4 additional weeks in which to begin preparations. But it doesn't speak to origin. Most advocates for both the natural and lab-leak arguments all agree that the COVID-19 outbreak began sometime in Fall 2019. It's not a point of contention except possibly when comparing one overspecified theory against another overspecified, straw man theory. There are so many degrees of freedom to either theory (or rather, group of theories) that an early or late start doesn't significantly weigh in favor of one or the other.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...

They could as well say "We aren't sharing our real sources, but we have high confidence."

But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything.

They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe.

But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.

There will be no major discrediting of China since the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan labs was funded by the National Institute of Health. This was firmly and unequivocally established by the hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Refer to “Overseeing the Overseers: A Hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak”.

Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China through a grant to EcoHealth.

Of-course this was in "direct contradiction" of the earlier testimony given by Dr Fauci under sworn oath. But hey - he has already been pardoned for it.

The only thing that can be laid at China's feet is ignorance of what was going on in their labs and the useless attempt at media suppression once the virus got out. However, anyone who has studied the facts in detail would easily form the judgement that a subsection of the U.S. government had the majority share of culpability.

> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.

Just like the “Spanish Flu” didn’t originate in Spain. And information about it was suppressed in the US.

> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

Right, but in 2020 and 2021, the US was doing everything it could to discredit those who were trying to possibly discredit China. And the WHO was doing whatever China wanted. No scrutiny was to be tolerated. That in and of itself is very fishy.

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It's not obvious that international bodies are the answer. Health agencies the world over lied through their teeth to manipulate the public to take specific actions.

So if you believe that your lauded international bodies are immune to politics and the abuse of authority, then maybe it will work. The rest of us prefer international bodies to be forums and coordination points for the real authorities.

You think China, in the 1950s, was opening research labs at the behest of the CIA?

> The lab was founded by the CIA

What evidence do you have for this claim?

you're really going to make us watch a 45 minute youtube video?

Yes and I’m saying that was bad.

Hopefully this helps people realize how meaningless it is to be labeled a conspiracy theorist.

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The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.

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Were they? Or were those who claimed it was the only possible answer, without the evidence to back that up?

I think you're confusing genetic engineering with the bioweapons research. The WIV did collect natural coronaviruses and genetically engineer them.

The fact that there's a biolab doing gain-of-function research a few blocks away from ground zero is much stronger bayesian evidence than "but maybe it's true".

(And then the fact that ground zero is a wet market is strong evidence against. It's so weird that we have two plausible origins for this virus and they're almost right next to each other.)

> was rightly rejected by people who care more about evidence than spreading hatred.

The French CNRS, well know to be a right-wing US actor wanting to spread hate

https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/la-question-de-lorigine-d...

That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

No it wouldn't imply that at all. The same animals ending up in wet markets could have ended up in labs. Nothing to imply it was engineered, which is a whole other level of culpability. Sucks that so many people are itching to make this leap.

Right. It fits well with the Anglosphere’s concept of compensible negligence.

China had a duty to run the lab safely, it breached that duty, and so China is responsible for the harms and losses caused by its negligence.

Missouri actually filed suit against China, and it is set to go to trial next week. It will be interesting to watch. If Missouri were to get a judgement for all the costs created by the virus, it could theoretically collect Chinese-owned assets in the US.

And, the news has been full of stories about one particular Chinese asset the US would like to have held in the US: TikTok.

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

If it could be blamed on "China", it could as well be blamed on "the US" for having also funded that lab, and likely having been responsible for what security measures it would have.

And more realistically, if it was a lab leak, it was likely some lab technician being careless, or some thing breaking and whoever was responsible, not fixing it quickly enough.

> lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...

Or less nefarious: that they mishandled an extracted virus /someone got bitten by a bat in the lab and was allowed to leave without quarantine.

There are two campuses in Wuhan. One has BSL-3 facilities, the other BSL-4. Not all work is done at the highest BSL available for cost and practicality reasons though. American rules were that research on agents in the same classification as COVID is BSL-3, but routine diagnostic work is only BSL-2. Chinese researchers classified both at BSL-2.

It may be true that other states don't want to antagonize them, and that may also be why we don't see enough emphasis placed on how absurd it is that China has allowed these wet markets to exist so long. Imposing a basic set of health codes is a very fundamental task of any government, and their inability or unwillingness to do so does not reflect well on them.

If anything, one reason why the China hawks may prefer the lab leak theory is because it makes China look more threatening than the alternative: the we-couldn't-enforce-basic-health-codes version of the story doesn't mesh well with the image we have in the West of the CCP as an all-powerful Big Brother that has complete control over every aspect of their citizens' lives. It instead projects a CCP that can barely perform the minimum functions of a state, which is harder to be afraid of.

Yeah, I think this hits closer to home: the zoonotic origins story makes the Chinese government look incompetent. They actually are much less competent than Western popular culture likes to paint them, but emphasizing that doesn't provide a very effective external threat to rally the masses against.

A lab leak plays into the stereotypical German or Russian mad scientist trope of the 20th century: the incredibly powerful supervillain who in their hubris (nearly) destroys the world.

Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?

There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.

Edit: name checks out.

>It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.

>Just think about it

This always proceeds a cogent point.

>what's the difference between negligence and malice?

Wrong, these are both theories of Chinese negligence. Did you mean the difference in culpability for positive and negative action? The lab leak is negative action by the Chinese government, and positive action by some subset of the Chinese citizenry. Zoonosis is positive action by the Chinese government. China (government U citizenry) are 100% culpable either way.

Malice only appears in fringe theories about intentional release, which isn't a lab leak by definition.

Why don't you just answer the question? A lab leak makes China look incompetent.

It means sick animals infecting lab staff. It doesn't make it look malicious, it doesn't mean engineered bioweaponry, actively playing with fire or any other unsupported conspiracy nonsense.

There’s an asymmetry of potential evidence for each of the theories as well.

• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.

• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.

It would be trivial for the Chinese to determine if covid 19 matches with what they were investigating in the lab, and if the people in the lab were among the first infected.

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> I'm just going to assume it was an accidental biosecurity breach of a natural specimen.

Why bother assuming? Why isn’t “I don’t know” good enough?

If I ask "what happened?" whatever you answer will be disagreed with by about half the observers of the question.

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The head of a underpants subscription telemarketing firm is probably trusting his underlings more than the head of the CIA.

It is an interesting angle, because now he could potentially be subpoenaed by Congress or anyone else, and it seems unlikely that he would perjure himself over anything after 2014.

That pardon means that person is available for subpoena and cannot decline to answer any question.

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Essentially goes back to the start, bunch of rich nepo kids playing spy. See Sidney Gottlieb for a fun story.

That's just it. It was a very long time ago. Not many CIA employees are still there.

That's not reason to trust it. But "a bad thing happened in the 80s and that's all I need to know" isn't a compelling argument either.

> The C.I.A. has said for years that it did not have enough information to conclude whether the Covid pandemic emerged naturally from a wet market in Wuhan, China, or from an accidental leak at a research lab there.

From "we don't know if it was a lab leak or spread from the market" to "we think it maybe is". Sure, they started this investigation with Biden, but just released it a couple of days ago AND they have even low confidence on it. So, why release it if the confidence is low? Why now? The answer is: new government, new conclusions.

Normally I would disregard their findings. However, the FBI, former head of the CDC, and Congressional panel all came to the same conclusion: Covid was made in a lab.

Only one lab in the world doing GoF experiments on this specific furin cleavage site AND a random natural mutation happens within a few KM of this lab on this specific furin cleavage site. What are the odds of this happening? Very close to zero.

Trump wasn't confident in the theory. He is not confident in anything. He does not care about the truth or falsity of anything he says. He only cares about it serving his interests.

Well, if there is one thing about Trump that everyone would agree on, it is that he is very self confident in everything he says.

He has the voices in his head.

Date on the article you linked is 24 Jan 2020.

>US did not allow any outsiders to check out Fort Detrick which means they knew it was a US engineered bioweapon. US has no credibility here.

PRC maintains covid came from outside of PRC, they have no reason to let their labs be scrutinized by outside actors just because Mike Pompeo / CIA made up antiPRC propaganda. That's want weak idiots do. Reality is PRC already waste effort entertaining WHO, until US reciprocates by openning up US biolabs for international access to entertain PRC propaganda, they nor their narrative or people that endorse them have credibility either.

I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and found this article [0].

The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.

"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."

0: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...

1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...

Can you estimate the entropy of the sequence? Maybe by walking to it from other known sequences?

> there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).

could you cite this? not because i'm questioning the statement's credibility, but because i'm curious (and you could save me a lot of time from even knowing where to begin to look for credible information for myself—full disclosure, lol).

Sorry, I don't care about Fauci. From my perspective he stood up agaist trump, the all sorts of attacks appeared. They're always contradictive. He and his people don't care about consistency, because his followers only focus on what resonates with their fears and anger. They'll take that storyline and will find things to make that story work. For example on Biden in Gaza, he was both too pro Israel, and too pro Muslim, depending on the audience.

If you have lots of data, you can find all sorts of patterns. Now your looking at misspellings and inferring things from it..

More importantly, I don't care about 'getting justice' on an indvidual. I want lessons learned on how to deal with a new pandamic.

No. It doesn't matter, because just like with fire, with new virusses it is well known that these will happen regardless of people having bad intent.

You can't prevent someone with mental problems setting a tree on fire to smoke out the deamons in their head. It's a huge distraction and waste of energy that could be spent on the things I wrote about earlier.

I understand why China would spin it.

I understand why the NIH (who appears to have funded this) would want to spin this.

What was in it for CNN and MSNBC to spin this as racist when, IMHO, blaming COVID19 on culinary habits is far more racist? What was in it for Rachel Maddow to lecture America about the lab leak when she could have more effectively lectured us about financing the whole thing?

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released the following statement about the CIA’s findings on the origins of the Coronavirus:

“I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation of Covid’s origins and I commend Director Ratcliffe for fulfilling his promise to release this conclusion. Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world.”

The Times also includes this unusual sentence. "There is no new intelligence behind the agency’s shift, officials said."

And right below the headline on the Wall Street Journal they even stressed that the CIA says it had 'low confidence' in its finding...

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/cia-now-favor...

Specifically, we now have internal emails dating to 2020 from the CDC (NIH? Who remembers, it's been literally two years since this came out) about how it was probably a lab leak and then about the importance to bury the lab leak theory.

+1, the question of origin in general is politicized. I don’t think individual theories are taboo, it’s just very difficult to truly evaluate the evidence at this point, unless perhaps you are an expert and can do all the fact checking yourself.

"I have a question for you: do you trust the provenance, integrity, and completeness of data from the earlier stages of the outbreak in Wuhan?"

Nope.

And yes, I am equally cautious with my opinions about it being a zoonotic spillover event. I consider it the more likely of the two explanations, but far from definitive.

Both because I hold a microbiology degree as well, and also because that's not actually how epidemiology works either.

Society is like a meta-brain. One neuron may believe something to a different degree than the others - i.e. different priora. Highly-reported channels like this are the society brain updating its priors at large.

A lab leaking wouldn’t do any harm to the CCP. The harm they caused themselves was a mixture of lying and trying to cover up the whole thing. Downplaying it. Etc. The WHO says any unknown phenomena must be treated as airborn until proven otherwise. But they followed the CCP in telling us it was fine, it wasn’t transmissible.

I thought that was baseless speculation and the lab leak more likely explained it because it was in close proximity to the market.

Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it.

I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-...

I also know from experience that scientists, and people in general, are often not well trained in the kind of probabilistic reasoning that is required for combining and weighing up multiple sources of evidence.

Your memory is accurate. Yet elsewhere we have an infectious disease researcher claiming

> At the same time, I've come to distrust many of the voices who push the lab leak hypothesis, either because they're obviously doing so for geopolitical reasons, or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.

It's an incredible phenomenon, the collective memory blackout that seems to have taken place regarding the vibe in 2020-2021. Never before, or even after (so far), have we seen a more strictly coordinated ban on discussion of a specific topic across all major US social networks. It even reached as far as Wikipedia.

Here's what Yishan Wong (ex-Reddit) has said about it

> Example: the "lab leak" theory (a controversial theory that is now probably true; I personally believe so) was "censored" at a certain time in the history of the pandemic because the "debate" included ...massive amounts of horrible behavior, spam-level posting, and abuse that spilled over into the real world - e.g. harrassment of public officials and doctors, racially-motivated crimes, etc.

There are many problems with this reasoning, but the biggest one is that if true, it should have rightfully caused mob behaviour.

Gaza War (2023-present): <100k deaths Ukraine War: <1 million deaths Korean War: 2-3 million deaths Vietnam: 1.3-3.4 million deaths Covid: 6+ million deaths

Doubt. You appear to be Canadian, and their major zoos all have polar bears. Plus you live in Canada, where polar bears run amok. How do I know you're not looking at a polar bear right now, with their iconic black fur?

Conflation of very different factors. Animal origin was always going to be the most likely explanation, so wet market tracks. Lab leak after secret gain of function research is much more of a speculatory accusation than the existence of wet markets.

It's not racist to blame China, but it is racist to accuse/harass/disparage Asian people and that was what was happening in America. Pushing back on the lab leak theory was at least in part to stop the dumbest among us from blaming their Asian neighbor. That and the lack of evidence.

There were very good arguments that Covid (probably) leaked from a lab as early as April 2020 at the latest (and in January if you were a virologist included in top-level NIAID emails). HN largely went along with the shunning of debate, which helped give everyone the impression there was "zero evidence" of a lab leak compared to solid evidence of zoonotic origin, which was simply never true.

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

Censoring views that it came from a lab leak with zero evidence isn't any better. In fact I remember being lied to by major news outlets at the time saying that the evidence points to a non lab origin.

Yes, but the rush to the wet market theory was no better.

There was also no evidence against it. If there is neither solid evidence for nor against something I find it perfectly reasonable to apply the balance of probabilities. At least as long as you qualify your statement with a "probably".

And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to favor the lab leak hypothesis.

Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no evidence to support that claim

But we can say it leaked from wet market without evidence!

The lab leak theory was started by Chinese netizens. It was mentioned on Chinese media. Hell the name Wu Flu came from Chinese media.

It was forbidden since users were banned for talking about it. That is what is meant by forbidden. When an authority exercises their power over you to stop you.

I'm assuming this is satire?

Concern about China is not partisan anymore, pretty much everyone is on board now.

Also from the article: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."

Are they really anti-china? Or are they just trying to shake down China for some cash?

If this is true some of it may have been funded by the US, so it makes both countries look bad.

Trump (and Elon) are actually fairly pro-China. Or at least, Trump and Xi have a good relationship (and Trump was quoted last month as believing the US and China can solve many problems together), and Elon loves China.

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The demonization of the Ecohealth Alliance is one of the more depressing aspects of the response to the pandemic.

EHA has been warning for decades that a coronavirus pandemic is likely, and that governments should be taking steps to prepare for it and to make it less likely. Then, they're proved right, but instead of society thanking them, they're subject to a politically motivated witch hunt, with the aim of distracting from the US government's disastrous pandemic response.

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That was a serious debate with considerable time, effort, and independant third party scrutiny.

Another good overview is at:

https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses...

  The 18-hour video debate

  The Rootclaim debate was structured over 3 days with 3 thematic blocks;

  * the first block was about the geographic location and the evidence for the Huanan market versus the Wuhan Institute of virology being where the virus came from

  * the second block was about the SARS-CoV-2 genome and whether its genetic features more likely arose in nature versus gain-of-function research

  * the third block was about probability; how can the evidence be grouped and what probabilistic assumptions should be taken to accurate reflect odds of the evidence occurring

  Each side first got 90 minutes to lay out their cases, then another 90 minutes together to respond to questions. 

  No matter how you slice it, this is a serious effort and time investment, as the preparation alone of materials and research into it probably consumed hundreds of hours from speakers and judges alike.

There is no evidence. Period. Just a dozen contrived situations that “might have been” being aligned for political ends.

Meanwhile in reality they’ve all but named the goddamn specific animal that brought it from the zoonotic pool and introduced it to mankind.

Handwringing about the existence of a somehow malign bio lab in a city LARGER THAN NEW YORK that has DOZENS is preposterous. There’s no evidence, no scenario, no whistleblower, no documentation, nothing. It’s a chew toy for low-information busybodies who need this to be an evil foreign plot.

And it’s boring and sad, particularly when America’s first dictator is installing a profoundly corrupt lunatic who is here to overturn germ theory.

Have some dignity.

Fauci’s pardon curiously goes back to 2014. What do you suppose he needed cover for that long before Covid?