There is a risk that such a survey includes Peter Daszak and his friends and collaborators, who may have been the ones responsible for the covid-19 lab leak.
Or, that it includes people who have been influenced by Daszak via spreading false information and so on, or are collaborators or are otherwise incentivized to lie for personal and career advancement. The field is small enough that personal relationships are essential to getting funded, hired, published and so on.
Plus, there are effects like information cascades and respectability cascades; everyone updates towards the more respectable opinion rather than the true one. And surveys like this are part of that effect.
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.
As such I would label this entire exercise as mistake, akin to asking a sample of organized criminals whether organized crime is a problem in their area, and having 90% of them saying it isn’t.
People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter. They do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.
Or, that it includes people who have been influenced by Daszak via spreading false information and so on, or are collaborators or are otherwise incentivized to lie for personal and career advancement. The field is small enough that personal relationships are essential to getting funded, hired, published and so on.
Note that Ralph Baric, a prominent scientist who has done gain of function research on SARS-like betacoronaviruses and was on the DEFUSE proposal lead by Daszak, signed an open letter with Jesse Bloom, Alina Chan, and others calling for further investigation of the lab leak hypothesis than had been done previously. So Daszak is apparently not so powerful that he’s able to silence the whole field.
not so powerful that he’s able to silence the whole field.
People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter.
They do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.
(Loosely quoted from a famous 4chan greentext)
Daszak—who likely killed 20 million people a few years ago—is using “brute force manufactured consensus” to hide his crimes, and the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute is unwittingly helping him. This report doesn’t give any reasons why covid-19 wasn’t a lab leak. It’s just people posting an unjustified and false opinion, which other people then see and most (but not all) succumb to the “brute force manufactured consensus”. They likely got that false and unjustified opinion from a previous version of this same attack; high-status manufactured consensus spreads like a virus.
I do not think this kind of exercise helps to get at the truth or to reduce global catastrophic risks; in fact it increases them because it makes this “brute force manufactured consensus attack” easier to run.
Don’t ask people with status to post opinions, ask them to give gears-level explanations and justifications. Make them commit to cruxes. Make them give probabilities for specific testable sub-questions.
It’s a response because I am explaining how I think this works; most (but not all!) people are updating on the consensus opinion about what’s high status, and then of the remainder some are rationally lying, and there are some small number of people in the field who are both rational and honest.
I think you grossly underestimate how hungry scientists are to prove each other wrong. This is part of how you build status to begin with. Yes, there are collaborative relationships, but there are also a great many adversarial relationships. There is no top-down hierarchy, so silencing dissent in this manner is unavailable.
I do think some degree of self-censorship occurs, absolutely. Are there biases, sure. But I find the claim that any given person is so influential in epidemiology that there is a conspiracy of silence lasting quite this long rather absurd.
FWIW much of the sample is epidemiologists who don’t think it was a lab leak. The survey was also anonymous, so people could dissent from the pro-zoonosis consensus without fear of retribution (as many did).
But I don’t think this is how normies work. They don’t first believe the truth, then strategically decide to lie about it to keep in good standing with the high-status people, then when you ask them anonymously revert to their true belief.
No, they don’t look for truth at all. They look for what the high-status tribal belief is, then they go and believe that honestly and earnestly.
This is why we needed a 500k+ word sequence of blog posts to teach people what truth even is.
In addition to Roko’s point that this sort of opinion-falsification is often habitual rather than a strategic choice that a person could opt not to make, it also makes strategic sense to lie in such surveys.
First, the promised “anonymity” may not actually be real, or real in the relevant sense. The methodology mentions “a secure online survey system which allowed for recording the identities of participants, but did not append their survey responses to their names or any other personally identifiable information”, but if your reputation is on the line, would you really trust that? Maybe there’s some fine print that’d allow the survey-takers to look at the data. Maybe there’d be a data leak. Maybe there’s some other unknown-unknown you’re overlooking. Point is, if you give the wrong response, that information can get out somehow; and if you don’t, it can’t. So why risk it?
Second, they may care about what the final anonymized conclusion says. Either because the lab leak hypothesis becoming mainstream would hurt them personally (either directly, or by e. g. hurting the people they rely on for funding), or because the final conclusion ending up in favour of the lab leak would still reflect poorly on them collectively. Like, if it’d end up saying that 90% of epidemiologists believe the lab leak, and you’re an epidemiologist… Well, anyone you talk to professionally will then assign 90% probability that that’s what you believe. You’d be subtly probed regarding having this wrong opinion, your past and future opinions would be scrutinized for being consistent with those of someone believing the lab leak, and if the status ecosystem notices something amiss...?
But, again, none of these calculations would be strategic. They’d be habitual; these factors are just the reasons why these habits are formed.
Answering truthfully in contexts-like-this is how you lose the status games. Thus, people who navigate such games don’t.
I’ve seen a preprint which is very close to being a smoking gun, although its claim needs to be independently reproduced. The preprint says that when they have filtered the standard sequence database by the date of submission (keeping only sequences which were submitted before the start of the pandemic (as opposed to being marked as discovered before the start of the pandemic)), then there is a clear match with a particular 2008 PNAS paper and the sequence published in connection with that 2008 paper.
To make sure those claims are correct someone would need to independently reproduce its findings. It’s not all that straightforward, because people running the sequence database in question has turned the ability to filter by the date of submission off since then (which might has been done for related or unrelated reasons, I would not know for sure). However, I think one can still download the whole thing and run the needed searches locally and let people know whether claims do reproduce or not, although it would require some effort.
then there is a clear match with a particular 2008 PNAS paper and the sequence published in connection with that 2008 paper.
I don’t think “clear match” is a good term. Whether something is a clear match or not does not depend on other sequences that were published. If you sort them, you can see which of the published sequences is the “nearest match”, but that’s a different concept than “clear match”.
With that nearest match having only 74% identity, that’s a lot of distance to the actual SARS-Cov-2 virus.
To me, it looks like a low-quality paper that doesn’t deserve much attention and is far from anything worth being called a smoking gun.
To make sure those claims are correct someone would need to independently reproduce its findings. It’s not all that straightforward, because people running the sequence database in question has turned the ability to filter by the date of submission off since then
You don’t really need that. You can just look at the sequences under discussion.
My impression is different. If what they say does reproduce, then to me this would look likely that the pandemic has been the result of research which has been partially reproducing this particular published 2008 work.
In any case, this would need to be publicly discussed, not hidden under covers (I know some details of how decisions whether to accept this for publication have been made in some of the cases and it has never been about the quality of the paper, when it has been explicitly discussed it has always been about possible repercussions for a journal in question and for its editors (and when it has not been discussed, it has always been a technicality in the style of “in this particular case it looks like the venue profile is not a fit for this text”, even if the venue has published on similar topics)).
To summarize the claim:
this is the best match among all sequences ever submitted before the pandemic,
and the critical region match is very high,
and the critical region match is not high for any other sequences for which the overall match is approaching this one.
So, the claim is not just about this being the best match among all sequences ever submitted before the pandemic, it’s quite a bit more than that.
It is rather obvious that Covid is not derived directly from this virus (the difference is too big), but it does look to me and to many other readers of this preprint, although not to everyone, that it’s likely that people who have synthesized the original Covid have been looking at the published 2008 sequence while doing their work.
All that is conditional on the claim actually reproducing (which is why it is very annoying that the database admins has made it more difficult to try to reproduce it, either deliberately or accidentally).
There is enough here to discuss publicly, I think (and yes, enough room to disagree about the interpretation of the findings).
Why are you using vague terms like “very high” instead of being specific about the numbers you consider to be “very high”? It would be much easier to follow your claim if you would be more specifc.
It is rather obvious that Covid is not derived directly from this virus (the difference is too big), but it does look to me and to many other readers of this preprint, although not to everyone, that it’s likely that people who have synthesized the original Covid have been looking at the published 2008 sequence while doing their work.
Why? How do you expect that synthezing process to look like? What motivation do you imagine for it as a research project?
Why would they synthezise the whole genome instead of just taking one viruses they had in their lab and insert the mutations they want to study? Inserting specific mutations is much easier than synthesizing the whole thing.
Why are you using vague terms like “very high” instead of being specific about the numbers you consider to be “very high”?
It’s a visual illustration, no? Visually this looks rather strong (Figures 1 and 2 on pages 16-17).
I don’t think they had the virus. They had what’s was published, not the materials.
And I do think that China might have enough research manpower to just routinely reproduce all published findings of this kind of experiments if they want to (I don’t know if they actually do that; I would not be too surprised if they do that as a routine though; this depends on what are their actual policies; I have no means to investigate that).
(So, I would presume they would have reproduced it earlier, and were using the results of that reproduction for various things as needed without thinking much, and one of those subsequent things leaked.)
It’s a visual illustration, no? Visually this looks rather strong (Figures 1 and 2 on pages 16-17).
The visual match can quite easily show you that one match is stronger than another but they don’t tell you how good a match in question actually happens to be. There are ways to measure whether something is a good match with numbers.
And I do think that China might have enough research manpower to just routinely reproduce all published findings of this kind of experiments if they want to (I don’t know if they actually do that; I would not be too surprised if they do that as a routine though; this depends on what are their actual policies; I have no means to investigate that).
The idea that a country would just spend that much research capital and do that without it leaving any trace in their research publications and other public communication seems farfetched.
The visual match can quite easily show you that one match is stronger than another but they don’t tell you how good a match in question actually happens to be. There are ways to measure whether something is a good match with numbers.
Yes, an independent reproduction would also evaluate if their methodology is actually good in this sense (I can imagine all kinds of methodological “underwater stones”).
I did not mean to give an impression that I had made up my mind about the outcome of this potential further exploration. I had made up my mind that it’s worth further exploration, but I would not predict the results. Unfortunately, it is not all that easy to arrange (we do know that neutral prior here is important, rather than someone heavily leaning towards one side doing it, because there is always room for pushing results towards this or that direction; for example, I’ve spent too much “quality time” with this paper to be considered a fully neutral person, although I would certainly make an effort to avoid the bias if I were to do this work; then one might be unsure how safe it would be to publish on this, even today, and so on).
The idea that a country would just spend that much research capital and do that without it leaving any trace in their research publications and other public communication seems farfetched.
They would report to the government (if the order to reproduce things comes from the government). The government would decide what to make public and what to keep for more restricted use. It’s very natural (especially if the subject is potentially “dual-use”, or, at least, is considered relevant to national defense).
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.
There is a risk that such a survey includes Peter Daszak and his friends and collaborators, who may have been the ones responsible for the covid-19 lab leak.
Or, that it includes people who have been influenced by Daszak via spreading false information and so on, or are collaborators or are otherwise incentivized to lie for personal and career advancement. The field is small enough that personal relationships are essential to getting funded, hired, published and so on.
Plus, there are effects like information cascades and respectability cascades; everyone updates towards the more respectable opinion rather than the true one. And surveys like this are part of that effect.
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.
As such I would label this entire exercise as mistake, akin to asking a sample of organized criminals whether organized crime is a problem in their area, and having 90% of them saying it isn’t.
Note that Ralph Baric, a prominent scientist who has done gain of function research on SARS-like betacoronaviruses and was on the DEFUSE proposal lead by Daszak, signed an open letter with Jesse Bloom, Alina Chan, and others calling for further investigation of the lab leak hypothesis than had been done previously. So Daszak is apparently not so powerful that he’s able to silence the whole field.
People often parse information through an epistemic consensus filter.
They do not ask “is this true”, they ask “will others be OK with me thinking this is true”. This makes them very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus; if every screen they look at says the same thing they will adopt that position because their brain interprets it as everyone in the tribe believing it.
(Loosely quoted from a famous 4chan greentext)
Daszak—who likely killed 20 million people a few years ago—is using “brute force manufactured consensus” to hide his crimes, and the Global Catastrophic Risks Institute is unwittingly helping him. This report doesn’t give any reasons why covid-19 wasn’t a lab leak. It’s just people posting an unjustified and false opinion, which other people then see and most (but not all) succumb to the “brute force manufactured consensus”. They likely got that false and unjustified opinion from a previous version of this same attack; high-status manufactured consensus spreads like a virus.
I do not think this kind of exercise helps to get at the truth or to reduce global catastrophic risks; in fact it increases them because it makes this “brute force manufactured consensus attack” easier to run.
Don’t ask people with status to post opinions, ask them to give gears-level explanations and justifications. Make them commit to cruxes. Make them give probabilities for specific testable sub-questions.
How is this a response to my point, that you can apparently be a virologist who has worked with Daszak and still publicly disagree with him?
It’s a response because I am explaining how I think this works; most (but not all!) people are updating on the consensus opinion about what’s high status, and then of the remainder some are rationally lying, and there are some small number of people in the field who are both rational and honest.
I think you grossly underestimate how hungry scientists are to prove each other wrong. This is part of how you build status to begin with. Yes, there are collaborative relationships, but there are also a great many adversarial relationships. There is no top-down hierarchy, so silencing dissent in this manner is unavailable.
I do think some degree of self-censorship occurs, absolutely. Are there biases, sure. But I find the claim that any given person is so influential in epidemiology that there is a conspiracy of silence lasting quite this long rather absurd.
FWIW much of the sample is epidemiologists who don’t think it was a lab leak. The survey was also anonymous, so people could dissent from the pro-zoonosis consensus without fear of retribution (as many did).
But I don’t think this is how normies work. They don’t first believe the truth, then strategically decide to lie about it to keep in good standing with the high-status people, then when you ask them anonymously revert to their true belief.
No, they don’t look for truth at all. They look for what the high-status tribal belief is, then they go and believe that honestly and earnestly.
This is why we needed a 500k+ word sequence of blog posts to teach people what truth even is.
In addition to Roko’s point that this sort of opinion-falsification is often habitual rather than a strategic choice that a person could opt not to make, it also makes strategic sense to lie in such surveys.
First, the promised “anonymity” may not actually be real, or real in the relevant sense. The methodology mentions “a secure online survey system which allowed for recording the identities of participants, but did not append their survey responses to their names or any other personally identifiable information”, but if your reputation is on the line, would you really trust that? Maybe there’s some fine print that’d allow the survey-takers to look at the data. Maybe there’d be a data leak. Maybe there’s some other unknown-unknown you’re overlooking. Point is, if you give the wrong response, that information can get out somehow; and if you don’t, it can’t. So why risk it?
Second, they may care about what the final anonymized conclusion says. Either because the lab leak hypothesis becoming mainstream would hurt them personally (either directly, or by e. g. hurting the people they rely on for funding), or because the final conclusion ending up in favour of the lab leak would still reflect poorly on them collectively. Like, if it’d end up saying that 90% of epidemiologists believe the lab leak, and you’re an epidemiologist… Well, anyone you talk to professionally will then assign 90% probability that that’s what you believe. You’d be subtly probed regarding having this wrong opinion, your past and future opinions would be scrutinized for being consistent with those of someone believing the lab leak, and if the status ecosystem notices something amiss...?
But, again, none of these calculations would be strategic. They’d be habitual; these factors are just the reasons why these habits are formed.
Answering truthfully in contexts-like-this is how you lose the status games. Thus, people who navigate such games don’t.
I’ve seen a preprint which is very close to being a smoking gun, although its claim needs to be independently reproduced. The preprint says that when they have filtered the standard sequence database by the date of submission (keeping only sequences which were submitted before the start of the pandemic (as opposed to being marked as discovered before the start of the pandemic)), then there is a clear match with a particular 2008 PNAS paper and the sequence published in connection with that 2008 paper.
If this reproduces, this would make it very likely that it has been a lab leak, and that moreover, the research involved has been reproducing the synthetic virus published in 2008 (and would not be possible without that 2008 publication). For obvious reasons, the paper has not been welcomed at all by any established outlets, since it makes both US and China scientific establishments and their collective practices look really bad. Nevertheless, here it is: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353031350_The_possible_laboratory_origins_of_SARS-CoV-2_the_likelihood_of_a_subsequent_deadlier_COVID_pandemic_and_necessity_to_introduce_blockchain_practices_for_verifying_and_tracking_scientific_data
To make sure those claims are correct someone would need to independently reproduce its findings. It’s not all that straightforward, because people running the sequence database in question has turned the ability to filter by the date of submission off since then (which might has been done for related or unrelated reasons, I would not know for sure). However, I think one can still download the whole thing and run the needed searches locally and let people know whether claims do reproduce or not, although it would require some effort.
The 2008 paper which is supposedly involved is this one: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0808116105
I don’t think “clear match” is a good term. Whether something is a clear match or not does not depend on other sequences that were published. If you sort them, you can see which of the published sequences is the “nearest match”, but that’s a different concept than “clear match”.
With that nearest match having only 74% identity, that’s a lot of distance to the actual SARS-Cov-2 virus.
To me, it looks like a low-quality paper that doesn’t deserve much attention and is far from anything worth being called a smoking gun.
You don’t really need that. You can just look at the sequences under discussion.
My impression is different. If what they say does reproduce, then to me this would look likely that the pandemic has been the result of research which has been partially reproducing this particular published 2008 work.
In any case, this would need to be publicly discussed, not hidden under covers (I know some details of how decisions whether to accept this for publication have been made in some of the cases and it has never been about the quality of the paper, when it has been explicitly discussed it has always been about possible repercussions for a journal in question and for its editors (and when it has not been discussed, it has always been a technicality in the style of “in this particular case it looks like the venue profile is not a fit for this text”, even if the venue has published on similar topics)).
To summarize the claim:
this is the best match among all sequences ever submitted before the pandemic,
and the critical region match is very high,
and the critical region match is not high for any other sequences for which the overall match is approaching this one.
So, the claim is not just about this being the best match among all sequences ever submitted before the pandemic, it’s quite a bit more than that.
It is rather obvious that Covid is not derived directly from this virus (the difference is too big), but it does look to me and to many other readers of this preprint, although not to everyone, that it’s likely that people who have synthesized the original Covid have been looking at the published 2008 sequence while doing their work.
All that is conditional on the claim actually reproducing (which is why it is very annoying that the database admins has made it more difficult to try to reproduce it, either deliberately or accidentally).
There is enough here to discuss publicly, I think (and yes, enough room to disagree about the interpretation of the findings).
Why are you using vague terms like “very high” instead of being specific about the numbers you consider to be “very high”? It would be much easier to follow your claim if you would be more specifc.
Why? How do you expect that synthezing process to look like? What motivation do you imagine for it as a research project?
Why would they synthezise the whole genome instead of just taking one viruses they had in their lab and insert the mutations they want to study? Inserting specific mutations is much easier than synthesizing the whole thing.
It’s a visual illustration, no? Visually this looks rather strong (Figures 1 and 2 on pages 16-17).
I don’t think they had the virus. They had what’s was published, not the materials.
And I do think that China might have enough research manpower to just routinely reproduce all published findings of this kind of experiments if they want to (I don’t know if they actually do that; I would not be too surprised if they do that as a routine though; this depends on what are their actual policies; I have no means to investigate that).
(So, I would presume they would have reproduced it earlier, and were using the results of that reproduction for various things as needed without thinking much, and one of those subsequent things leaked.)
The visual match can quite easily show you that one match is stronger than another but they don’t tell you how good a match in question actually happens to be. There are ways to measure whether something is a good match with numbers.
The idea that a country would just spend that much research capital and do that without it leaving any trace in their research publications and other public communication seems farfetched.
Yes, an independent reproduction would also evaluate if their methodology is actually good in this sense (I can imagine all kinds of methodological “underwater stones”).
I did not mean to give an impression that I had made up my mind about the outcome of this potential further exploration. I had made up my mind that it’s worth further exploration, but I would not predict the results. Unfortunately, it is not all that easy to arrange (we do know that neutral prior here is important, rather than someone heavily leaning towards one side doing it, because there is always room for pushing results towards this or that direction; for example, I’ve spent too much “quality time” with this paper to be considered a fully neutral person, although I would certainly make an effort to avoid the bias if I were to do this work; then one might be unsure how safe it would be to publish on this, even today, and so on).
They would report to the government (if the order to reproduce things comes from the government). The government would decide what to make public and what to keep for more restricted use. It’s very natural (especially if the subject is potentially “dual-use”, or, at least, is considered relevant to national defense).
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