There is a great kerfuffle right now of people wanting to be The Guy [word used advisedly] Who Got It Right on the origin of the virus. FRIST! Unfortunately, none of those guys are virologists.
According to Politico, that raggiest of political rags, Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is human engineered.
The question of the virus’s origin has already been muddled badly by irresponsible blatherers like Nate Silver, Nicholas Wade, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (who printed Wade’s fantasies), and Nicholson Baker, among others. What those muddlers have in common is that none of them are virologists, and at least two are pushing their favored fantasies. Wade has proved his inability to separate his fantasies from science by publishing a book arguing that “racial” differences are real.
On the origin of the virus, here’s where a scientist starts:
The virologists and serious people who are looking into this have not “changed their minds.” Their position has been that we don’t have enough data to figure out the virus’s origin. That continues to be their position. More investigation is good.
Unfortunately, there is a gaggle of people pushing pet ideas and their egos. Don’t listen to them.
GregMulka
Life is better when you mute Nate Silver.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Maybe the Atomic Scientists can create some other meaningless clock-like thing for some more performance art.
Raoul Paste
When you don’t have enough data to reach a conclusion you have to admit it. Too often people will literally make stuff up instead of living with uncertainty
jonas
I’m definitely NAV (not a virologist), but my layman’s understanding is that lab-engineered viruses have a distinctive genetic “signature” that is pretty easy to spot and that the SARS Covid-2 genome that came out of China doesn’t have it. Now, that doesn’t preclude a lab having a sample of a naturally-occurring virus that somehow infected someone or escaped the lab, but from what I’ve read we’re definitely not dealing with some bio-weapon or something.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
I honestly don’t understand why people keep pushing that it came from a lab. There are many other examples of zoonotic viruses that humans contracted because we push into previously unsettled areas or displace local animal populations, causing them to come into contact with us or our domesticated animals. Examples: Ebola, SARS-1, HIV, Nipah
I figure this is yet another situation where a virus that originated in a wild animal population transferred to humans, maybe because of clearcutting and displacing bats, maybe using local wild animal populations as a food source, maybe keeping wild animals as pets.
citizen dave
Good post Cheryl–was just reading over at cnn.com. They will not be left out of the hyperventilating. Homepage big headline is “Growing Storm over COVID’s Origins May Have Massive Consequences” and when you click it’s “The Covid-19 origin story has massive political consequences
In one sense it matters because if the Chinese state did it, etc.
In another sense, it doesn’t matter AT ALL once the virus was loose. The world has to deal with it either way.
Eunicecycle
@GregMulka: I stopped following him when he started opining on the virus, which is very far out of his area of expertise. And he wouldn’t let go of it, which I find annoying.
germy
This is a great old photo:
https://www.shorpy.com/node/26201
dnfree
It seems to me that there have been stories about labs in this country mishandling and being careless with viruses they are studying. So something like that wouldn’t surprise me at all.
Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Xavier
Where it came from is not that interesting. Who fucked up the response, and how we can respond better next time, is interesting.
Cameron
@Xavier: You mean that orange elephant in the room they’re desperately trying to get us all to ignore?
Jeffro
It’s not like we’re ever going to satisfy the conspiracy theorists and nutjobs, no matter what we find out, so here’s my hopes regarding this issue:
MattF
Oh, data-shmata. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is weakness.
ruemara
Far too many smart people failing to comprehend that they are smart IN THEIR FIELD.
JCJ
I wonder if the 600,000+ who have died in the US will feel better if it is confirmed that the virus is natural vs man-made. If it were to be proven that it is man-made then the obvious thing to do is nuke Wuhan?
germy
@JCJ:
They feel somehow that proving it came from a lab somehow excuses the bad job Trump did responding to the crisis.
I don’t understand their logic, but I think their motivation is to defend the former guy.
WaterGirl
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
It all part of the hate in the pandora’s box that was opened by T****. You will understand better if you read it like this:
Calouste
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
Racism, that’s why.
bbleh
@germy: Yes, and to attack Biden, and all those know-it-alls who are trying to steal their FREEDOM™️ by saying they need to wear those TERRIBLE AWFUL TOO HORRIBLE TO BEAR masks to “protect other people” or whatever…
It’s just more aggressively ignorant tribalism.
Eunicecycle
@germy: I also don’t get why, if they’re trying to hurt Donald Trump, they released the virus in China. Wouldn’t they have released it here and made it look like WE started the whole thing? I’m not ruling out that it is man-made, but I think the release was accidental, if it was (man-made).
germy
@bbleh:
They’re connecting Fauci to the lab theory. Their argument is that Fauci is complicit with the Chinese labs.
This way they get to attack one of the former guy’s critics, and also dirty up the Biden administration for “covering up” the “scandal”.
But Biden never cooperates with them. He asking for an investigation. How frustrating that must be for them.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Florian Krammer via Anne Laurie @ Top:
Yep, that’s similar to my reasoning. Leaving out the high exposure rates to bats (which I didn’t know about), we’re still left with a multi-millennia history of viruses crossing over to humans from other species versus no documented history of pandemics caused by lab leaks.
Occam’s razor tells me that viral spread mechanisms which have been common for millennia are way, way, more likely than something that, to my knowledge, hasn’t ever really happened before.
That’s not to say it’s impossible – but we’re going to need evidence that’s a lot more compelling than accusations from people politically motivated to seek an alternate cause for the extent, and high death rate, of the pandemic than their own party’s policy failings.
MattF
Just a note on COVID origin from Brad de Long. And no, he’s not a virologist.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@germy: If you have not seen them the online photo exhibits at Yale are fascinating, especially the old tobacco ads:
Selling Smoke
bbleh
@germy: Yeah he’s the head know-it-all, plus he was insufficiently deferential to The Leader, so they’ve gotta dirty him up.
My general feeling about them is, who cares? It’s like trying to make sense from the barking of dogs.
@Eunicecycle: It’s generally a mistake in my experience to attribute rationality and logic to their comments.
Baud
Putting aside the bad faith critics, (1) China has been cagey on this and (2) China is a major geopolitical concern in a number of areas. An fact-based investigation that puts the focus on China to be forthcoming seems like an appropriate response.
Ruckus
@germy:
Even if their motivation isn’t to defend TFG, their result is.
Is it the most important thing to know their motivation?
Isn’t it far better to worry about their results and what that tells susceptible people?
NotMax
“It could be some 400 pound guy in his parents’ basement, fiddling with a chemistry set.”
//
@WaterGirl
OT. What’s up with the sidebar?
Suzanne
One thing that’s going to be an unintended consequence — IF it was a lab leak — for the tRump contingent will be a push for much stricter lab regulations. I will laugh if the conclusion of this is the right wing pushing for greater safety regulation.
germy
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
In a perfect Republican world, Mike Pence could supplement his income like Reagan by posing for Camel ads in magazines. Or maybe Marlboro.
ArchTeryx
I am a virologist. Something like nCoV2 is unusual for being zoonotic, because it’s a positive strand RNA virus. In other words, it imitates normal messenger RNA in your cells, only instead of normal cellular proteins it spews out viral proteins when translated by ribosomes. Most zoonotic viruses have multiple strand genomes, i.e. they have tiny “chromosomes” that can mix and match, like influenza virus has. However, there are more than ample examples of +-strand RNA viruses that can cross species to make bats or other human-adjacent animals prime suspects.
In English: The virus does a really good job pretending it’s a normal product of the cell’s nucleus – its hard drive – but in fact it takes over the cell and forces it to make viral proteins, eventually killing it. This kind of virus is usually limited to one host species, but some can still cross from animals to humans and that makes animals the likely suspects for the source.
Reminder: I’m working a lower-than-secretary office job instead of in a lab, because the politics of the science job market is fucked up and bullshit. Just the fact that the idiots mentioned in the OP get press releases should tell you that.
ETA: All members of the CoV family are zoonotic, i.e. they spread from animal to human. That gives strong impetus to the hypothesis that SARS-CoV2 is also zoonotic. The only real difference between CoV2 and the other coronavirus family members is that this one is much, much more pathogenic – typical for a novel virus.
germy
@Suzanne:
The Law of Unintended Consequences is often harsh and painful.
dmsilev
@GregMulka:
He touts this whole “hedgehog vs. fox” thing where the fox “knows a little about a lot of things” and is better than hedgehogs that have deep knowledge in specific subject areas. In other words, he has Pundititis.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Lacuna Synecdoche: Pandemics caused by lab leaks, nope. Although reportedly at least one case in 2004 of lab-acquired Ebola, in the same Russian BSL4 lab that later had a gas-leak caused explosion…
Gas explosion at Russian lab storing Ebola
Lacuna Synecdoche
Well, there are specific genetic codons used for snipping and inserting genes into DNA that are easy to recognize, and aren’t present (as far as I’ve read) in SARS-CoV-2.
But the current conspiracy theory isn’t that the virus was genetically engineered, but was collected and stored for further study, and then somehow (insert extended hand-waving here) escaped the lab.
It’s not impossible – but it’s very unlikely, and has the CT bonus feature of being extremely difficult to absolutely disprove absent proving another cause.
Ruckus
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
I wonder if they are arguing that it came from a lab, in that in any reasonable lab they take a lot of precautions to avoid getting/exposing anyone to a virus, such as wearing masks – and as we all know masks are the devils work that do nothing but steal the air from something, something.
And if it was released from a lab as a weapon then,,,,, yeah I can’t get there from here.
Barbara
@GregMulka: Yeah. Nate is definitely embodying Peter’s Principle on full view. I think most people who are smart at math are logical thinkers (math majors tend to do really well in law school) but there are no guarantees, and it certainly doesn’t impart substantive knowledge from any other field.
As a person whose claim to fame is statistics Nate should be able to figure out that the millions of interactions between humans and bats (or other critters) that have been shown across time and distance to be responsible for MOST diseases in human history — before people even knew about all those tiny pesky particles that jump from them to us and from us to other people — would be responsible for this one. Whereas, there is in comparison an infinitesimal number of interactions between those working in laboratories and other people. So just based on the numbers game and the proven historical links, that would strongly support the wild origin.
New Deal democrat
A pretty good takedown of the WSJ article that originated this latest kerfluffle appears here.
MJS
Look, if you’ve read the authoritative work on the dangers of lab created viruses multiple times, as I have, there is no question that this came from a lab. You don’t need to be a virologist to understand no other explanation is possible.
I’m speaking, of course, of “The Stand”. Also, please don’t try to tell me there aren’t vampires in the U.S., primarily located in New England.
Roger Moore
@Xavier:
Where it’s from is very interesting to people who want to shift attention away from questions about our response. I think a lot of people believe that if they can the virus came from human error- or even better, human malice- then they can focus the blame on where the virus came from rather than how they screwed up the response. I don’t think that’s why people like Nate Silver are interested in it, but it’s easy to imagine why somebody who already wants to talk about the China Virus would want to focus attention on the virus’s origin.
leeleeFL
@jonas: I believe the virus was being studied, or at least that’s what I thought I read way back when. That would make sense, since scientists have been expecting a viral pandemic to kick our asses for awhile. It is entirely possible someone working there caught it and was asymptomatic and started the whole chain of events we are navigating now.
To Cheryl: thanks for posting your take on this. it is looking like the Scribblers have a new shiny object to chase, and I like having some cold water to throw when I need it!
Eolirin
@leeleeFL: Far more likely that someone working in a lab caught it because community spread was already occurring on a wider than understood at the time level, since they wouldn’t be following the sorts of safety protocols they do in the lab out in the community.
Searcher
Re: the Bulletin, “we scientists have gone to far” is kind of the raison d’etre for the publication/organization’s existence. A bunch of atomic scientists in the post-war era looked at the nuclear bomb, shouted “What have we done!?!” and decided it was the scientific community’s responsibility to prevent the creation of “bad technology”.
So it’s no big surprise that are against the more aggressive virology research, because it could potentially be abused, and that sort of abuse must be prevented at all costs.
The thing that worries me more about the “EVERYONE MUST ADMIT THAT THIS WAS OBVIOUSLY AN ENGINEERED LAB RELEASE” position is that there is a sense of urgency to it, and I don’t think most of the people who want everyone to admit something happened and something must be done are just worried about banning gain-of-function research or instituting international standards and inspection of biological research laboratories. And I can’t imagine any reason to push the urgency that doesn’t end in something bad that is extremely tangential to the pandemic and its origin.
IMO understanding the origin of the pandemic is important, but it isn’t urgent. It’s more important to reach the most correct conclusions possible about the origin of the pandemic, carefully consider what if anything could have reduced the likelihood of this or future pandemics, and take measured actions. Doing something now now now as opposed to “over the next 2-5 years” is more likely to do the wrong thing, and is much more likely to be misappropriated for, hmm, nefarious cultural purposes.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
The difference between an accidental lab-caused illness in an employee and a global pandemic is, to put it mildly, pretty significant.
The point I, and others, are making with regard to Occam’s razor is that a whole lot of stars have to line up just right to go from an accidental lab infection to a global pandemic – and that the time-tested route of species barrier-crossing plus natural selection is a lot more likely than the never-happened-before route of accidental lab infection to global pandemic.
Omnes Omnibus
@MJS: How else would you explain Barnabas Collins and the horrors chronicled in the song Wolcott?
Baud
Guys, everyone knows the virus was first reported in China. And it’s a fundamental law of nature that he who
smeltfelt it, dealt it.Check and mate.
cmorenc
One of the most pernicious purposes to which the “lab origin” theory is being put by the rabid RWers is to point to the funding that the CDC / Faucci were providing for observers at the Wuhan lab to concoct a claim that Faucci is a fraud who was actually knowingly teaming up with the Chinese in the bioweapons research that resulted in the lab leak of the virus. The readiness of the RW to discredit Faucci stems from the fact that he did not hold back from calling out Trump’s bullshit about the virus.
Ken
I for one feel that there has not been enough investigation into Germany’s role in the origin of measles.
(Well, by “Germany” I mean cattle-herders living somewhere in the northwest part of Eurasia.)
germy
I saw this over at a conservative mom blog:
JCJ
I also wonder if the 1918 flu pandemic was created in a lab in Kansas. You know that Obama could have taken an engineered virus and used his time machine to go to the future home of his mother to something something…
Ken
@Omnes Omnibus: OK, I watched the YouTube video, and I think you must have meant “the horrors that are the song Wolcott.”
cmorenc
@Roger Moore:
Unfortunately people like Nate Silver function as useful idiots for the sort of people wanting to shift blame to China for the virus rather than role the wildly inept, mendacious response of the Trump Administration played in failing to contain its spread.
Roger Moore
@MattF:
He has a very good point about the likelihood of an outbreak at the lab if that’s where the virus came from. We know just how fast it spread before we adopted serious public health measures to stop it, so it seems very likely the majority of the lab would have been infected if it were the result of a leak.
MJS
@Omnes Omnibus: I was thinking more of the pernicious infestation in Jerusalem’s Lot, but you’re right – Collinsport and Cape Cod are additional examples.
Omnes Omnibus
@germy: I don’t mean to kink shame, but is sharing the loony right wing blogs with us an important part of it for you?
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Ruckus:
Heh. Just letting you know I’m not ignoring this response so much as I just don’t have anything to add after “can’t get there from here.”
gvg
@germy: Don’t forget racism. Picking on Asians gives them a new target to bully and if they convince enough other people that it was malice, then more people will allow them to indulge in enjoyable to them bullying.
People don’t like them if they bully blacks or gays anymore, so those thug minds are looking for a new target. Just like arab looking people after 911.
Kineslaw
I am not a virologist and will defer to them. That said, I understand why people would be attracted to the accidental leak lab hypothesis. It seems ridiculously coincidental that a coronavirus pandemic starts in a city that has a lab that studies coronaviruses, but it doesn’t come from the lab.
Humans don’t cognitively deal with coincidence well, and I would love to see some discussion that deals with this fact better. Most of the dialogue seems to be either “Evil China is lying” or “Lab leaks are unlikely” and not enough “Lab leaks are unlikely, but it did start in Wuhan, so it merits better checking. On the other side, because of the nature of Wuhan, and the markets there and wildlife surrounding it, chances of a zoonotic origin are higher there than in a lot of other places, so statistically the coincidence isn’t as weird as you might initially think.”
I understand all the reasons to think the virus was of zoonotic origin and see no reason to doubt all the research that says the virus shows no sign of gain-of-function modification. An accidental escape would take a string of things going wrong, but history teaches us that things going wrong happens, and it often takes fewer things being askew for disaster to strike than we are willing to admit to ourselves.
While knowing the exact origin is beside the point by now, I really wish it was a more fact-based, less political discussion.
catclub
Trump seized on this so he could spend all his energy blaming China.
Never mind that no matter where it came from, or who did it, we need to have a better response to it once it is here. And THAT is where your energy should be applied.
ETA: see Cmorenc at comment52
gvg
@Baud:
I don’t know. I don’t approve of authoritarians routine reflex to cover everything less than perfect up.
In this case it also makes them look suspicious and possibly guilty.
On the other hand, there is no sign that the rest of the world is going to investigate fairly or even if we did, that our populations will understand what ever a report says fairly. They are going to get smeared and info taken out of context to blame them stupidly no matter how fair an actual investigator is…..I am not seeing an upside to them for cooperating.
Jeffro
@Baud: yes…this is where it’s strategic to let China feel some heat and distrust from other nations.
Just Chuck
My opinion on FB’s policy is … mixed. What I definitely don’t like is the fact that Facebook is big and central enough that their decision on this one way or the other has profound geopolitical impact.
leeleeFL
@JCJ: I would love to subscribe to your newsletter. you know you have one!
Ric Drywall
@Raoul Paste:
Yes, and this applies top those who were completely dismissive of the lab leak theory.
The fact is, too many progressives are staking out an overtly confident “wet market” position on this debate for political reasons.
Omnes Omnibus
Blog functionality question: Why is TWiB! back in the sidebar? And with a link that goes to a page that seems to be from Jan. 2016?
FWIW I thought the TWiB collaboration was a great idea that fell down because their production was a podcast (which I just don’t really do) and intelligent and informed participation required having listened to it.
Steeplejack
One quibble: Florian Krammer’s “Occam’s razor” seems a little flimsy. “So many people are exposed to bats every day in South East Asia.” Wuhan is in central China, not “South East Asia”—it’s about 850 miles north of Hanoi—and it’s in a metro area of 19 million people. Maybe humans were exposed to infected bats, or bat meat, in a wet market, but that’s not how Krammer makes it sound.
As Kalmen Barkin put it: “This is like saying an alligator pathogen appearing [in] Bethesda, Maryland, has Occam’s razor telling us it’s from alligators in Florida because thousands of ‘Americans’ come in close contact with alligators in Florida.”
Nonetheless, it does seem likely that COVID-19 came from animal-human contact—in a Wuhan market, not southeast Asia. But if, as Baud said at #26, a fact-based investigation can clear up some of China’s obfuscation, that’s to the good.
Old School
I’m not saying it was aliens, but…
Old School
@Omnes Omnibus: I think the whole blogroll was removed from the side in one of the revamps, but now it’s back.
Just Chuck
@ArchTeryx: I am always awestruck at the expertise we have among the jackals, and thank you for the explanation.
BTW, what’s a negative-strand RNA then? Is it the complementary strand that comes together to make DNA?
Also, do you have any good pithy way to debunk antivaxxers who scream “retrovirus!” regarding the RNA vaccine? I normally don’t bother with these people, but my gf has to talk with one of those regularly, and he actually might be on the fence. My explanation would have something to do with the mRNA in the vaccine not hijacking the cells to make the proteins, it just straight to the ribosome to tell it to do so. So unless the proteins themselves are somehow toxic… At this point I’ve long scraped the bottom of my knowledge of biology.
Another Scott
+1
repost – WHO Report from 2021 (it’s well done and worth a look):
Note the “extremely unlikely”. That probably means < 1% likelihood.
tl;dr – there’s no evidence that it came from a lab in Wuhan.
As I said downstairs, I assume that the report Biden directed will come to the same conclusions, with more footnotes.
The screaming about this is political. The GQP is doing their usual gin-up-outrage performance to prevent action on things that the country needs done by the federal government. It’s what they do. (See Ebola.) I think it’s good that Biden didn’t let this fester, and that he’s wanting a report within 90 days. It gets it out of the news and making the deadline longer won’t help – it will take years to figure out the pathway – and a smoking gun may never be found.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cheryl Rofer
@Another Scott: The WHO report was probably influenced by China. It’s no fully dispositive. But it’s better than a novelist’s take.
Ric Drywall
@Another Scott:
But I think we know that isn’t true. There were researchers who hospitalized back in November.
MomSense
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
I think that it is preferable for some to ascribe this pandemic to negligence or malevolence than it is to acknowledge how powerless we humans can be to the natural world. I also think there is a lot of denial about how our actions, especially encroachment into formerly uninhabited areas for ranching and development have caused us to be exposed to new threats, like novel viruses.
Bill Arnold
@Eunicecycle:
Easy answer is that would be too obvious. :-)
(Actually, since we don’t know where it came from, we don’t know that it wasn’t engineered in the united states (either by government or others), then shipped by infected operatives (perhaps unknowing) to Wuhan. :-)
The US right wing in particular is very creatively impoverished about such things. Failure of imagination, and in particular a failure to tag all their conjectures and the often-delusional fluff from which they are built with probability estimates. (That’s what actual smart people do (notably including the intelligence community), Mr TFG.) Roughly:
(1) deliberate lab release. (either skillfully engineered to look nature, or natural virus.)
(2) accidental (random) lab release of natural virus (zoonosis).
(3) zoonosis, with purely random (not lab) spread to humans (perhaps recombination of some sort in either humans or an intermediate animal population)
(4) other?
What were the not-unexpected effects of the pandemic?
(1) Sharp global economic collapse
(2 ) Sharp temporary reduction in GHG emissions
(3) Border restriction infrastructure enhanced
(4) Small but significant reduction in elderly population. (In the US, death probably skewed Republican; not sure though.)
(5) Trump lost, Democrats took Presidency, Senate, held House.
(6) Similarly political upheavals in multiple countries, with particularly obvious COVID-19 response failures by right wing populist (or authoritarian) governments.
(7) Nature of work changed a lot of ways in many developed countries. Office work is now less desirable except for very needy extroverts. Open plan offices are now petri dishes. Commercial real estate interests are hurting (need confirmation on this last)
(8) Industries with a business model of packing people into indoor spaces, like cruise ships, theaters, airlines, bars/nightclubs all suffered.
(9) A lot of science was done, quickly, both on COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 and on general modeling and tuning/modification of responses to pandemic respiratory diseases, and many large (and unethical) natural experiments were performed, with much better data collection than in the past. Some dogma overthrown. We know what to do now for a severe pandemic flu, for instance. mRNA vaccines are now a major proven new tool. (Hard to plausibly map this to a motive, though.)
(10) long term consequences of COVID-19 (“long-term sequelae”) are still be accurately or fully characterized, but will differentially affect countries depending on the percentage of their population that was infected. E.g. China will suffer much less economically from these than the US or the UK or India or Russia or Brazil (etc).
(11) etc (please fill in the list!)
So if SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately released (not necessarily by a nation state), these effects can potentially be mapped to motives. If it was not deliberately released, they could be motives affecting pandemic response, including influence ops affecting pandemic response. (Investigative reports might e.g. want to look at commercial real estate interests and pushes to get people back in the office. The anti-mRNA vaccine apparent ops that might be Russian are another example.)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Baud: What ever the origins of the virus the CCP sure screwed everyone with their knee jerk cover up. The CCP has procedures in place on how to contation another SARS like outbreak and instead, everyone in the government went in CYA mode.
The real driving force behind the Lab conspiracy theory is natural forces are scary. Same thing with the Black Death with conspiracy theories it was the Jews who were poisoning the water supply.
lowtechcyclist
Amazing as it may seem, its spawn Axios is even worse.
Major Major Major Major
Thanks for this post. I got in trouble in the comments a couple weeks ago for pointing out that virologists are saying this. People seem to be getting their brains scrambled by the discourse around this otherwise very obvious point.
Omnes Omnibus
@MomSense: This is the truth behind most conspiracy theories.
lowtechcyclist
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
FTFY.
WaterGirl
@NotMax: I just read your comment after fixing that issue after TaMara had pointed that out.
Ken
@Just Chuck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-strand_RNA_virus
Positive-strand means the RNA in the virus codes for the proteins. It can go straight into the ribosomes as mRNA.
Negative-strand means the RNA in the virus is the complement of the protein-coding sequence, so there’s an intermediate step where the mRNA is synthesized from it.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Kineslaw:
It’s not even a coincidence. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the lab is there because of it’s proximity to earlier zoonotic outbreaks.
ant
this is the post that got me wondering about an accidental c-19 release from the lab in Wuhan:
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
there is some push back in the comment section, but a thorough debunking or rebuttal is certainly something I’d like see. This post above certainly comes up short in my view.
It’s worth reading and thinking about, for those who haven’t already decided on the matter.
Another Scott
@Ric Drywall: 3 people who work there got sick in the winter, when people usually get sick in the winter. Especially people in a city of 18M.
Did they have SARS-CoV-2? Not that I’ve seen.
See the WHO report – they talk about the hospitalizations for flu-like illnesses in 2019. Most of the people hospitalized in the fall-winter with flu-like illnesses were children.
Cheers,
Scott.
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: This OT.
Did you get the question I left for you in one of the dead threads, last week. I was wondering which software you use to draw with your pen display. Thanks!
Major Major Major Major
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
Oh, yes, when has a SARS virus ever escaped from a lab in China, how outlandish
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: Nope. The original was better. I think a lot of people simply have trouble with the fact that nature really doesn’t care. It just is. It is easier to wrap one’s mind around the idea that someone made it happen – then your out-group theory comes into play.
See also, Religion.
YY_Sima Qian
@gvg:
Unfortunately, that is indeed where we are. In fact, discussions in internal facing Chinese media (as opposed to the more overtly propagandistic outward facing state organs) often make those very same points. There is full expectation in China, at the regime level and the population level, that any US facilitated investigation will be a witch hunt. I too would very much like to see a fact based investigation into COVID-19’s origins, cajoling the Chinese government at all levels into being more forthcoming and transparent. However, given the domestic politics in China, the domestic politics in the US (and Five Eyes countries in general), as well as state of geopolitics, conditions do not exist for such an investigation.
As an aside, if anyone wonders why China started exacting trade punishment against Australia last year after the country’s PM Scott Morrison called for international investigation into the pandemic’s origins, and yet did not do so against other countries calling for investigation, the spark was Scott Morrison calling for “weapons inspector” powers be given to such investigators. This is shortly after Trump and GOP started insinuating conspiracies theories about COVID-19 being a Chinese bio-weapon, not to mention “weapons inspectors” instantly recalls “WMD in Iraq”, and it was quite obvious that Scott Morrison did so in obsequious act to curry favor w/ Trump. Talk about being obtuse.
Ric Drywall
@Another Scott:
The head of WHO (Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus) has called for more investigation into lab leak theory. He clearly disagrees with you that the case is closed.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/who-head-calls-for-further-probe-of-covid-lab-leak-theory/ar-BB1f7PYL
ArchTeryx
@Just Chuck:
A negative strand RNA virus is one that uses the complementary strand to the positive strand. That requires the virus to bring along a special enzyme: RDRP (RNA dependent RNA polymerase) that can copy RNA -> RNA. Our cells can’t do that. When one of these viruses enter the cell, the on-board RDRP copies the negative to the positive strand, which can then act as messenger RNA and attract the ribosomes necessary to run its “program”.
Most positive-strand RNA viruses also have to use RDRP: They make a negative strand “template” of their genomes, which then can spew out massive numbers of positive strand genomes to package. But they don’t have to bring it along in their capsids, meaning the virus kick starts faster and gets ahead of the cell’s defense mechanisms.
To make a retrovirus, you need SEVERAL genes: envelope gene, reverse transcriptase gene, capsid gene, integrase, and several others. The mRNA vaccines make ONE PROTEIN ONLY: the spike protein, the part of the virus the immune system can detect and target. Spike proteins alone can’t make a virus – but they can activate the immune system just as if they WERE a virus. The mRNA vaccines do not have the machinery necessary to translate themselves to DNA nor implant themselves in our chromosome’s “hard drive.” They make their proteins and disappear. What’s left is the Memory B cells that now patrol for the *real* COVID virus
Ask your idiot debaters, “If you were given a factory making only car doors, could you take one and drive it away? No? Then why do you think a vaccine that makes the equivalent of car doors is really making a whole automobile?”
Major Major Major Major
@schrodingers_cat: Ah, no, didn’t see it. I use Clip Studio Paint. It’s great!
WaterGirl
@germy:
Fixed that for you. :-)
Lapassionara
Can someone tell me what difference it would make if the virus originated in a lab rather than in the wild? What would we have done differently?
schrodingers_cat
@Major Major Major Major: Thanks. Was wondering if you used ArtMaker that comes with the xp-pen.
Fair Economist
I think the way way to attack this nonsense is to go after the motivation, which is defending Trump. If the Chinese were actually covering up a lab leak, the Trump, who we know was deeply indebted to the Chinese, was acting as a Chicom agent by hiding info about the flu cases *and* the severity of COVID. So every time somebody brings up the lab accident theory just say something like:
“And Trump was helping his Chinese playmates by trying to cover up their lab leak!”
And this crap will go away because it won’t serve the purposes of the sickos pushing it.
Major Major Major Major
@Lapassionara: Done differently? Nothing. Do differently going forward? Well, if this is the result of gain-of-function research, perhaps not that. Perhaps labs need to be more closely monitored by the international community. Etc. If this is something we’ve wrought, we ought to think about how to prevent a repeat. What do we learn from this research? Is it worth the potential cost? Basic stuff we might want to reevaluate. (Assuming the big if, of course.)
@schrodingers_cat: Haven’t used it. Might be good! Clip Studio came with my old Wacom tablet and I already had a license.
Ken
I expect if there’s ever a day when we detect a largish asteroid on collision course with Earth, we’ll see that played out. “What put it on that course?” many will ask, and won’t be satisfied with the answer “gravity”.
ArchTeryx
@Ken: And a whole lot of this planet will either pray to God to deflect the asteroid, or actively fight against the scientists trying to figure out a way to deflect the asteroid. Because it’s God’s Will.
Barbara
@YY_Sima Qian: The reflexive need to cover things up that might even possibly be bad is as natural as it is frustrating. Even relatively transparent government structures — and the U.S. is relatively transparent — have to be pushed and prodded for transparency when blame is in the air. See, e.g., Cuomo, Andrew — nursing home Covid death rate report. I think all you can do is state the obvious: you can’t fix a problem that you won’t identify.
If — and I don’t believe it — but if there had been a leak from a lab then you need to fix lab safety or security controls. I mean, do people think that labs should stop studying viruses altogether? Or find it shocking that labs would study the kinds of viruses that seem to have the potential to cause human illness? I know that the end point accusation is much worse and much more paranoid than that, but still, if I were the Chinese government I would also like to know if some lab was creating health and economic havoc because it didn’t bother to adhere to safety protocols.
laura
Everybody knows that this was made in a military bio-weapons lab and escaped due to a snafu, and then a soldier drove the virus to a gas station, and then a guy in New York wrote a terrible song – but it wasn’t Billy Joel this time. Then some folks rode their bikes to Colorado and ate some fried chicken and started a town and a guy started another town in the town of Las Vegas even though he was flying around and had Jeans and old boots. And then a guy who was a fire bug rode a bomb to Las Vegas where he blowed up the New York singer probably because he thought it was Billy Joel. Everybody knows this. \\
Glad to see the tip of the hat to Soonergrunt in the Brad DeLong substack.
Lapassionara
@Major Major Major Major: yes. Going forward I can see, but the R’s seem to think that, if COVID is lab based, then somehow Trump’s inaction and attempts to downplay can be justified.
ant
Well, this analogy comes up short in my view to the Covid situation.
It would be more like if we had people guiding asteroids towards earth to better understand them, and folks are unsatisfied with “gravity” as an explanation.
YY_Sima Qian
@Bill Arnold:
That is the fashionable CT in China, that there was an accidental leak at Fort Dietrich in the US, and infected members unknowingly brought the virus to Wuhan during the World Military Games in Oct. 2019. According to Chinese media, a few members of the US contingent became sick and had to go home early. (I haven’t tried to check if it is true.)
I do not get the sense that the CT is strongly held by anyone in China, but it is readily brought out whenever someone suggests that the virus escaped from the WIV lab.
BruceFromOhio
@ArchTeryx: Or some combination thereof.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
If you want to have a real conspiracy theory, consider this; the CCP would be looking like a pack of utter buffoons if it wasn’t for Trump and followers never ended bleach injecting clown show. It’s not impossible the CCP is egging on the conspiracy theories over here to keep the attention on the old American white guys with their pants on the floor while screaming at the clouds and not on what the CCP failed to do.
Barbara
@Lapassionara: The only response necessary: Other countries — sometimes not the ones we expected — did much better than we did. Nothing was inevitable about the level of suffering inflicted on people.
Kent
This seems entirely plausible. We know lots of people (especially younger people) are asymptomatic carriers. So any young researcher (or even say a custodian) could have gotten accidentally exposed and unknowingly carried the virus out of a lab.
The idea that the Chinese manufactured this virus as some sort of bioweapon is rather ridiculous though. China is an enormously and densely populated country. They have been relatively lucky and successful so far, but keeping Covid at by is an enormous and costly effort, even in China. No one would deliberately design a bioweapon that works like this for fear of the blowback. There are much better types of bioweapons if that is what you are trying to create
And besides, if you are creating a bioweapon, why release it on your own people in Wuhan? That makes even less sense.
Another Scott
@Ric Drywall: Please don’t put words in my mouth.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Subsole
@citizen dave:
It doesn’t matter, actually.
If Godalmighty himself conclusively demonstrates that it is zoonotic, they’ll just pivot back over to their ORIGINAL talking point, which is that the diseased foreign hordes shouldn’t be eating bats and rats and all of that weird food they eat from their ‘unsanitary’ markets.
The purpose of all of this is to call Asians filthy and backward. That’s it. It’s all just a slur looking for an excuse.
And as I keep saying – if these folks can’t blame the Devil, they will blame Jesus.
YY_Sima Qian
@Barbara:
If it was an accidental lab leak, I fully expect the Chinese government to have known long before now, and required necessary corrections/rectifications done. It is perfectly capable of doing so. At the same time, I would fully expect the Chinese government to continue to obfuscate and stonewall, both because it does not believe foreigners have any business poking around in China, and to prevent the embarrassment from coming to light.
If it was an accidental lab leak, I would expect it to come from the BSL-2 Wuhan CDC lab, and not the BSL-4 WIV lab. The latter has much higher profile internationally, and Dr. Shi’s team are extremely well respected in the field for the quality of research they have conducted.
Cacti
All that’s missing from the lab leak theory is evidence
catclub
@Omnes Omnibus: No. This is.
Barbara
@Subsole: Oh my God. If people understood how many “microbes” they are eating in their All American Beef they would collapse in disgust. Yes, you are eating cow shit most likely every time you eat a hamburger!
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: I have no response to that.
Another Scott
@Major Major Major Major: Fauci said yesterday that the Wuhan lab was not doing “gain of function” research.
Cheers,
Scott.
catclub
@Kent:
Except contact tracing of the early cases would point very distinctly at the lab. Maybe China has done this and is not telling.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: all that’s missing from the zoonosis theory is evidence of zoonosis
The current state of the evidence basically supports the null hypothesis, whatever that may be for you
Ken
@ant: I’m fairly sure that within a few days of the announcement of the approaching asteroid, there will be people claiming that there are secret programs to move asteroids, and the incoming is a result of a mistake. They may even re-purpose one of the existing claims, like HAARP, or vril, or Nibiru, or Project Blue Book (ooh, that sounds likely; they made a deal with the Greys to move the asteroids, but you can’t trust Greys…)
And there’s no way to refute the claim that there’s a secret program, because the total lack of evidence shows how good they are at keeping the secret. It doesn’t matter how often you point out that humanity can’t even get to the Moon (NASA had to get Stanley Kubrick to fake the moon landing footage), people will claim there are secret lunar bases using vril technology to rain asteroids on Earth.
BruceFromOhio
Thanks, Cheryl. I evaluate this hyperventilating as a corollary to effective executive administration leaving a huge gap in “things I can get excited about to post repeatedly and drive site traffic”.
And I’m certain the dead will be relieved to discover … it matters not, they’re still dead.
Fair Economist
A theory being smothered by the conspiracy theorists, *much* more plausible than lab escape, is that it emerged from fur farms in China. Both racoon dogs and mink get and spread SARS2, and racoon dogs in particular are very infectious but only mildly symptomatic, typical of a reservoir host. Both are farmed on an industrial scale in China.
In addition, the very early sequences suggest the root of the epidemic is *not* the first sequences from Wuhan. The first Sichuan sequences, which are almost contemporary, are 2 mutations different, which is a bit much for such early spread. The logical explanation is the true root is in between those two, and from there it spread independently to the populations of Sichuan and Wuhan. Sichuan, incidentally, is much closer to the Southest China areas the bat viruses come from.
Barbara
@YY_Sima Qian: Yes, that occurred to me to, although I don’t know how secret they would have been able to keep it. As we sometimes are wont to say, the cover up can be worse than the crime if for no other reason than it actually makes the “crime” seem worse than it actually was.
Subsole
@JCJ: No, but the snot-nosed, selfish pricks throwing a shrieking temper tantrum at the Holocaustian tyranny of having to wear a mask will be prancing around feeling mighty full of themselves.
Which is the OTHER thing this is actually about : “How dare you make me be responsible.”
Hoodie
@Omnes Omnibus: Yep, this must get imprinted in childhood, there has to be someone behind everything. Note the difference in the response to 9/11 to the pandemic. The former generated a vigorous, mostly unified response even though the latter represented a greater systemic threat to public health and the economy. Relatively few complained about grounded flights and elaborate security theater, even though it was extremely unlikely that the attacks could be replicated. Perhaps this is because 9/11 had a clearly identified villain.
BruceFromOhio
@Barbara: It’s lunch time, so let’s explore 9 Disgusting Things That the FDA Allows in Your Food!
Select your favorite, I know what mine is!
villiageidiocy
@ruemara: Oh god don’t get me started on engineer-libertarians, or doctor-politicians or PhD scientists v. any support staff of any kind . . .
Cacti
Link
Kthxbai.
GregMulka
@Baud:
Baud 2022?
Omnes Omnibus
And, of course, that is why we invaded Iraq.
Major Major Major Major
@Another Scott: This seems like it is at least partly a definitional issue (worthwhile parts are in the second half mostly).
I haven’t seen any compelling evidence that they were engaged in intentional GoF research (as opposed to any natural changes that might happen while infecting those human-y mice).
Cacti
The proponents of the lab leak hypothesis remind me of creation scientists or Iraq WMD proponents.
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major: The null hypothesis is absolutely zoonosis. About 5 percent of the population in the areas with bats have antibodies to bat viruses, indicating tens of thousands of zoological events. Any virus the virologists haul back to Wuhan has almost certainly already been transmitted to humans multiple times in South China already.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: Ooh, a single paper with an admittedly weak conclusion, I’m quaking in my epistemological boots.
I think that it was zoonosis, personally, but the strongest evidence for this is that the drains and sewage from the wet market were crawling with COVID. Plus like, history. Lab escape of a zoonotic virus, second most likely.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Major Major Major Major:
And you think the existence of this 2004 report of a minor laboratory outbreak makes it likely that a similar event is responsible the current global pandemic?
Anyway, I’ve repeatedly stated in this thread that such an outbreak leading to a global pandemic is not impossible, just very very unlikely given the long history of such pandemics occurring prior to and without lab leaks.
Furthermore, I’d posit that the very existence of the article you cite is evidence in favor of the proposition that, if such an outbreak leading to this global pandemic had occurred, it would have been documented and reported on at the time.
Anoniminous
A real paper: How SARS-CoV-2 first adapted in humans
Cacti
@Major Major Major Major:
Can you offer anything for the lab leak theory that isn’t based solely on supposition and conjecture?
Major Major Major Major
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
Don’t blame me for responding to your snarky statement about “somehows” and “handwaving” by noting that something exactly like the event you were snarking about happened in recent memory.
Another Scott
@Fair Economist: Relatedly, from the WHO report referenced above:
Hmmm…
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@laura: That is a very convoluted and implausible Covid-19 origin story. Occam’s Eightball clearly tells us that this pandemic was created by Bill Gates and the Freemasons.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: Every theory for the origins of this virus is based on supposition and conjecture until intermediaries are identified or some smoking-gun documents come out. I have already said that I, like most of the experts opining on this, think zoonosis is most likely, but, like said experts, I am also glad that people are keeping an open mind and investigating the lab.
Hoodie
@Omnes Omnibus: As my old man used to say, you don’t need a reason, just an excuse.
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist: Wasn’t there also a theory about the illegal wild animal trade with Iran? Pangolins and such. Would help explain Iran’s early outbreak.
Cacti
@Major Major Major Major: That’s a long way of saying “No”.
Another Scott
@Anoniminous: Thanks for the pointer.
Nature is always full of surprises.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: I just don’t see what’s so hard about keeping an open mind and not being a dick. (Although your presence in my pie filter reminds me that the latter is hard for you.)
Cacti
What reason does China have to believe that anyone in the US orbit is interested in conducting a good faith investigation?
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Major Major Major Major:
Other than the millions of years of such origin and transmission of viruses versus the mere decades of modern scientific laboratory research into them?
Look, you’re scientifically literate. You know just as well as I do that extraordinary claims and novel claims require a much a higher standard of evidence than claims of a mechanism already proven to be common, with centuries of experience and study behind it.
Should we be trying to get a better accounting of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological genesis and route of transmission? Of course we should.
Should that include looking into the possibility of an accidental lab origin? Also of course it should.
Should we assume that the uncommon route of accidental lab origin is more likely than the historically far more common origin of species barrier crossing and natural selection?
No. That’s where you lose me.
Calouste
@Subsole: Yeah, they shouldn’t be eating bats and rats, they should be eating squirrels like Mike Huckabee.
Anoniminous
Another real paper: Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the prepandemic period in Italy
Abstract
There are no robust data on the real onset of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection and spread in the prepandemic period worldwide. We investigated the presence of SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD)–specific antibodies in blood samples of 959 asymptomatic individuals enrolled in a prospective lung cancer screening trial between September 2019 and March 2020 to track the date of onset, frequency, and temporal and geographic variations across the Italian regions. SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%), with a cluster of positive cases (>30%) in the second week of February 2020 and the highest number (53.2%) in Lombardy. This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Finding SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in asymptomatic people before the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy may reshape the history of pandemic.”
Emphasis added
Betty
@jonas: That’s what I heard a virologist explain about a year ago. Should not be an issue.
Cacti
@Major Major Major Major:
Creation scientists make the same high minded sounding argument as a shield for their evidence free offerings.
But I’m deeply hurt that I’ve been in your pie filter. I’ll probably lie awake tonight thinking about how another anonymous political blog commenter who doesn’t actually know me, doesn’t like to talk to me. ;-)
rikyrah
@Eunicecycle: \
Truth
rikyrah
@ruemara:
It’s called
STAY IN YOUR LANE
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Major Major Major Major:
Well … snarky and ironic are my default settings. I apologize for being myself.
Subsole
@ArchTeryx: At the rate we’re going, the NFT for the astetoid will be about equivalent to a small country’s annual GDP…
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: Me too! It’s awful, isn’t it??
catclub
Before you fix the problem fix the blame.
trollhattan
Your daily dose of depraved indifference.
“Hey, let’s kill us some moocher inmates.”
“Sounds good.”
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major: Yes, farmed pangolins or other illegally traded animals could also explain the origins, and those responsible would be even *more* motivated to cover things up than the fur farmers.
Speaking as a geneticist, which I am, this thing looks like it has been evolving for over a decade after switching hosts from bats. It has over a thousand changes from the reference bat sequences, with a huge bias for synonymous changes, which shows lots and lots of selection. Virologists and molecular biologists have shown it has lost some of its ability to infect bats as well. So that strongly favors zoonosis from an intermediate source, which is even more evidence against the Wuhan lab escape, because they study *bat* viruses and wouldn’t even have had it.
rikyrah
@germy:
This is true. This is what they want.
46 and his Administration’s handling of the Vaccine Rollout, after starting from scratch, proves everything that some of us have been screaming since February 2020.
See, they wanted Biden to fail, because then, Dolt45 and his merry band of criminals doing their DELIBERATE MALICE, when it comes to COVID , isn’t the story that they want.
It’s not INCOMPETENCE.
I hate people saying that Dolt45 and his folks were INCOMPETENT.
It was not INCOMPETENCE.
It was DELIBERATE MALICE.
From the moment the Woodward tapes dropped, and we knew that Dolt45 knew EXACTLY what COVID was….
The INCOMPETENCE excuse flew out the window.
Omnes Omnibus
@catclub: I blame Baud. Or maybe Steve in the WTF. Are they in collusion? It is irresponsible not to speculate.
Hoodie
@Cacti: Or that the usual suspects will be happy if such an investigation fails to reveal what they want to believe? They’re looking for bamboo fibers in ballots, for chrissakes. My fear is that doing this investigation just feeds their paranoia and won’t yield any significant results. The bioweapon theory is obvious nonsense. The lab leak hypothesis is not insane, but you’d have to have Chinese cooperation on investigating that, which it in itself is problematic and also means that the various loons fixating on this will never be satisfied if the Chinese government does anything short of a full confession.
Another Scott
@Anoniminous: The WHO report discusses early detection of the virus outside Wuhan. It’s a good summary of what we know (as of early 2021).
Cheryl is right, of course, that it’s not the last word and China’s efforts to control the flow of information, and interpretation of that information, needs to be kept in mind. But it’s a fairly comprehensive and readable starting point.
We also need to keep in mind that no test is 100% accurate. Progress and knowledge is incremental, especially with biology, especially with a “novel” virus.
Cheers,
Scott.
Subsole
@Barbara: As somebody in high school during the Mad Cow freakout, it is A-mazing how fast we got over our fear of prions…
JR
Just a few notes
1) There are viruses almost completely identical to SARS-2 circulating in bats.
2) There were enough research accidents with SARS that the Chinese government banned continued research using the virus. (sorry no link ATM).
3) The US had a similar ban on all lethal virus research due to accidents from 2014-2017.
Subsole
@Ken: Shoot, that was a subplot in the old Deus Ex games, I think…
Fair Economist
@Anoniminous: Perhaps I should mention Italy imports a lot of fur from China for its garment industry?
hueyplong
It seems like there isn’t much to add once you acknowledge that the only purpose for intense interest in a Creation Story is to turn attention away from interest in how the crisis was handled when it arrived in the US.
I want to see the first 1/6 defendant’s prison term announced, whether via plea deal or conviction by a jury. That should start the ball rolling on some daily good news that occupies the attention of our crack media
FORMER DINER INTERVIEWEE AND JAN 6 PRISONER EXPERIENCING BUYER’S REMORSE REGARDING TRUMP
chopper
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
right. i mean, viruses were jumping the species barrier long before the first virology lab was ever built.
Major Major Major Major
@Lacuna Synecdoche: ha, likewise!
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Major Major Major Major:
Also, I just gotta say:
Seriously? You’re criticizing someone for being snarky on Balloon-Juice?
I thought snark was our raison d’être.
Ken
Hmm, and both China and Iran are centers of bitcoin mining. In fact, Iran just announced they would be shutting down crypto mining, ostensibly to “conserve power”, and China has had some “coal mine disasters” that ALSO shut down crypto operations. But what’s the real story of the link between BITCOIN and COVID? And who is keeping the LID on this explosive —
Hang on a minute… Oops. That’s better. Had my hat on with the shiny side in. The semi-random capitalization, italics, and scare quotes is a sure sign.
Fair Economist
@JR: No. The SARS2 virus is not almost identical to the circulating bat viruses. They have over a thousand changes from the SARS2 sequence with a huge bias for nonsynonomous changes, indicating enough time under strong selection to remove a thousand or so other changes. Plus, there are *synonomously* biased regions showing extensive selection under different selection pressures.
So, close relative, but one which has been in a different host for probably a few decades.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: we are unable to confirm or deny that allegation.
@Barbara: I would be afraid to read a brief written by a math major.
Robert Sneddon
The United States took eight years to determine how weaponised anthrax was mailed to various people and organisations after the 2001 terrorist attacks and that investigation had a lot of first-hand evidential material such as the letters to work from. That attack killed and sickened a bunch of people but it’s been memory-holed to a large extent and the blame dumped on someone who was reported to have committed suicide. That person worked at Fort Detrick in Maryland, the US biowarfare R&D centre and that’s where he supposedly worked on the anthrax that was distributed.
If the WHO and the CCP demanded access to Fort Detrick to carry out an independent investigation of how this man-made anthrax “escaped” from the lab and infected civilians they would be told to FOAD by the US government but it’s assumed that the Chinese will welcome outside investigators with an agenda to go through their research facilities with a fine-tooth comb and issue a report at the end of it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Subsole: I am still not allowed to give blood because I lived in the UK for more that 90 days in the ’80s.
Another Scott
@JR: “Almost” is doing a lot of heavy lifting, there.
From the abstract:
93.3% is not “almost identical”.
For comparison, humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist:
Yeah so this brings up one important open question (though obviously intermediate strains/intermediary species have always been). Where… has it been? Absence of evidence and all that, I know, and it’s a big planet, but the amount of drift from the viruses we’ve found is really interesting (and is of course catnip to conspiracy theorists).
@Lacuna Synecdoche: I was explaining my own snark, not criticizing! Excuuuuu-uuuuse me!
Subsole
@Calouste: Ohmygod thank you.
I’ve known people who ate roadkill and river dirt growing up. Which, fine, you do what you have to. I’m not gonna judge people hungrier than I’ve ever been for eating whatever presented itself. But maybe don’t go sniffing down your nose at wet markets…
Anoniminous
@Fair Economist:
And China imports a lot of Gucci leather goods that could have been contaminated by asymptomatic leather workers.
The arrow of data-free speculation flies both ways.
Ken
FTFY.
Oklahomo
@Calouste: What’s the best way to cook a Huckabee?
jl
What irritates me is bogus charges of a cover up or sinister plots by the NIH, or the crypto-tyrant Fauci who apparently is a secret dictator of everything health.
As far as I can see the consensus among experts who understand these thing is, and always has been:
No evidence it was engineered and a lot of evidence that it’s a natural bug
Some slight circumstantial evidence of a lab accident. Less of a possibility that the Wuhan lab was doing some work they were not authorized to do, which has also happened in labs around the world in the past. That has something to do with a Furrin cleavage something something that I don’t understand at all. Any bio experts here can explain it to me, I’d appreciate it.
Most likely explanation is natural origin. And I remember evidence being reported that it was circulating slowly in China or SE Asia more broadly a couple of months before the Wuhan outbreak. When I have time, I’d like to catch up on that angle.
That last possibility is plausible. Consistent evidence of the two mode transmission theory of covid spread continues to accumulate: slow droplet mode, and fast aerosol mode, with 80% to 90% of the cases from 10% to 20% of the transmission events. So certainly possible it could have been spreading slowly in rural areas then took off like a rocket when it hit densely packed poorly ventilated enclosed work and retail sites in a large urban area.
From what I’ve read of the history of recent outbreaks, there is a problem with lab safety all over the world, in all sorts of countries, so that can be investigated without BS conspiracy theories and China bashing. China’s reluctance to cough up all their data is bad, but governments and private organizations doing that is as common as dirt.
I assume that Biden’s 90 day review is a snipe hunt to maybe draw the attention of all the conspiracy theorists. From what I’ve read about the origins of zoonotic epidemics and outbreaks, it often takes “The Data And The Science” a decade or more to figure these things out.
Bottom line is that I haven’t seen any change in that consensus for almost a year.
Subsole
@Omnes Omnibus: Wow. I remember they killed some herds, the papers hyperventilated, then we all went right back to our burgers and chops…
Where in England, if you don’t mind me asking?
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Major Major Major Major:
Sorry, our responses crossed paths:
My latter comment was just an addendum to my previous response, not a riposte to your later responses – which, upon reading them, indicate to me that we’re basically on similar, if not the same, pages. We both think zoonosis is most likely. There’s no real point of contention between us, we’re just prioritizing different approaches/points-of-view.
Fair Economist
@Major Major Major Major: It’s been in the reservoir host and we haven’t noticed because the general public has absolutely zero interest in colds in animals. Even those who care enough about animal wellbeing will focus on the horrific caging conditions, not on them occasionally catching colds.
For some reason, even before it was shown to infect racoon dogs, I saw several comments by virologists in discussion threads suspecting racoon dogs. No idea why when there are so many potential hosts. Maybe racoon dog farm workers are prone to mysterious respiratory viruses?
Omnes Omnibus
@Subsole: London.
JR
@Fair Economist:
The viral genome is barely over 30KB. Thousands of nucleotide substitutions is practically the difference between SARS-1 and SARS-2.
The paper that I linked shows viruses identified in bat samples that are, by nucleotide identity, 93% and 98% identical to SARS-2. You can read it, it’s an open access paper.
The critical note is that the majority of these mutations are in the RBD of the spike protein. Which I guess you alluded to, but not really. The identified viruses probably don’t bind ACE2 and likely wouldn’t infect people the way SARS2 does.
That doesn’t mean anything nefarious, though. We know that the spike protein is a rapidly evolving part of the virus.
Subsole
@Anoniminous: “Jones’s Isotropic Arrow of Speculative Causality”
Roger Moore
@Kineslaw:
It’s not a coincidence. Wuhan was known as a place where these viruses were jumping to humans, and that’s exactly why the lab was put there. It’s like putting a group studying polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba and then assuming they must be responsible when a local is attacked by a bear.
trollhattan
Seems probable that COVID-19 has been in circulation longer than first understood and has infected and killed far more than counted by the official tallies. If routine blood tests, e.g., those paired with annual checkups, include COVID antibody screenings will we eventually learn how widespread the virus actually was?
ETA Are the antibodies persistent once somebody has been infected? Do we even know this yet?
chopper
of course. in the absence of truly solid evidence, common sense has to take precedence. it has been the case, throughout the entirety of human existence, that novel pathogens’ introduction to the human population was via the natural route, that is, a person is exposed to a pathogen through their environment (such as through an animal reservoir), and either the pathogen was already adapted to spread widely, or it mutated in a human host and attained that function.
as far as any of us know, infectious disease labs have been the source of a novel pathogen’s introduction to the human population absolutely zero times.
Peale
@Robert Sneddon: Especially since the name of the experts they want to hire go by the name of “Virus Ninjas”.
Matt McIrvin
@Robert Sneddon: That reminds me that in the 1980s, the Soviet Union energetically pushed the rumor that HIV/AIDS was a US bioweapon invented at Fort Detrich. (I remember hearing it directly from Radio Moscow on shortwave.) This story made no sense for a variety of reasons, but it’s still a popular rumor. The whole business had me expecting the inevitable story to drop about how any pandemic is a bioweapon.
I remember when Fred Hoyle was on his kick about how disease viruses came from outer space on comets, somebody asked him if he thought HIV came from space, and he basically said “oh, no, I don’t think so, HIV is more likely a man-made bioweapon.”
Spanky
@Fair Economist:
Waaaaait a minute …
Calouste
With all this talk about the origin of the virus, the following question should always be mentioned:
If the virus was a bioweapon, why did TFG basically hold the door open for it to spread in the US?
Subsole
@Oklahomo: The same way you prepare awful kimchi.
1. Seal in airtight pot.
2. Bury.
3. Forget.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Why are you trying to cover up for murderous polar bear researchers?
chopper
@Roger Moore:
isn’t it convenient that this lab studying lyme bacteria is in the northeast instead of, say, new mexico? must be a conspiracy
JR
@Another Scott: Viruses evolve at a rate that is completely incomparable to primate evolution.
Spanky
@Oklahomo:
Fire ’em into the sun.
Anoniminous
Another Scott:
Well, yeah. Tracing is going to take a while. Decades, most likely. HIV-1 group M has been traced back using time scale evolutionary models to 1920 in Kinshasa. DNA analysis has proven it developed from Simian Immunodeficiency Virus.
Yet the Infotainment Medium’s bullshit marches on, same as it ever was.
I’m old enough to remember the RWNJs claiming it was from African boys having sex with chimpanzees.
Subsole
@chopper: Yep. And I have questions about that hurricane tracking center in the Florida Keys, too…
Subsole
@Anoniminous: Oh, that myth is still going ’round. Very popular in the local churches. Lets ’em blame closeted gays for introducing it into the population.
Because what gay wouldn’t have sex with a monkey, right???
JoyceH
@laura:
It’s not just The Stand. Every ‘virus wipes out majority of humanity’ post-apoc thriller seems to feature an accidental release of a virus that had been tinkered with by humans in a lab. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s just considered more dramatic if ‘we did it to ourselves!’ rather than just a natural occurrence that we were unable to control. But I do think that has sort of conditioned people to believe an out of control pandemic must have originated in a lab somewhere.
ARE there any post-apoc thrillers where the humanity-destroying virus was a naturally occurring one?
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I’m glad that California seems to have made vaccinating inmates a high priority, and that doing so seems to have been highly effective in stopping COVID in our prison system. It also seems like really strong evidence that vaccination can effectively stop transmission, not just symptomatic infection.
jl
@Fair Economist: Thanks for the info.
Maybe you can explain the furin site or cleavage or whatever stuff.
As for slow transmission before explosive outbreak in Wuhan, as noted above, the evidence for two mode transmission has been very consistent. I’ve seen estimates of R0 for droplet mode inside a building around 1.1 to 1.2. And aerosol transmission is site specific due to local environmental factors, including a lot of densely packed people in specific sorts of enclosed environments (aka, buildings). And very low chance of transmission outside unless people are packed together very tightly.
So, I think epidemiological evidence fits with genetic info you gave that it could have been circulating at very low levels in rural areas before it hit densely packed places in Wuhan, including the market.
Major Major Major Major
@JoyceH:
Not the recent Wanderers, by Chuck Wendig!
But, in general, it’s a staple of apocalyptic fiction because “what have we wrought??” is part of the thrill.
Anoniminous
@Subsole:
The bullshit never stops, does it?
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
There are also a lot of Chinese guest workers in the garment industry in Italy. People seem like a more plausible vector than furs.
jl
@Roger Moore: There have been results that I’ve seen in seminars, I don’t think published yet that in very poorly ventilated densely packed buildings, covid aerosolizes in a way that basically exposes everyone in the building. In those cases, it acts like measles, and need to have very high rates of immunization to keep it from spreading.
So, not published but I’ve seen independent epi, modelling and aerosol engineering studies that all reach that conclusion.
Need to vaccinate almost everyone in prisons, otherwise there will be a lot of cases. But, human rights crimes in US prison are common, IMHO, and we have a lot of vicious state governments.
Cheryl Rofer
@ant: Please see the opening post, in which I excoriate the Bulletin for publishing someone who can’t separate his racism from science.
Roger Moore
@Major Major Major Major:
My first guess would be that we haven’t sampled the wild viruses very well, and if we did we would find other viruses that were much closer to SARS-CoV-2.
Ken
@JoyceH: Alan E. Nourse, The Fourth Horseman. New strain of Yersinia pestis (plague) that goes pneumonic in over 90% of cases, and is resistant to current antibiotics. Human case zero gets it from an infected rodent in the mountain U.S., where the plague really is endemic among rodents.
Cacti
The best description I’ve read of Chinese foreign policy towards the west is that is guided root to branch by what they refer to as the “century of humiliation” from 1839-1949, when they were occupied and had their resources pillaged by the various colonial powers of the west.
Trump’s bully boy antics and the neo-fascist turn of the European and American right wing guaranteed that they’re never going to let any western-led investigation just come in and start poking around.
Roger Moore
@chopper:
Oddly, the one lab I’ve worked with that was studying Borrelia burgdorferi was at Colorado State, even though the main tick-transmitted disease in Colorado is Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
catclub
something I never think about.
Eunicecycle
@Major Major Major Major: I just finished The Wanderers! And there’s going to be a sequel!
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: Lab accidents involving lethal pathogens do happen, so the drama has some ripped-from-the-headlines cachet. A lot of the modern stories were ultimately inspired by The Hot Zone, which was about a real incident with the Ebola virus in Reston, Virginia. But The Stand, The Andromeda Strain (slightly different variant: alien space germs collected for bioweapon purposes), etc. are older than that.
Roger Moore
@JoyceH:
I’m not sure if it counts as a thriller, but Earth Abides is set in a world where the terrible pandemic that wiped out most of the population was natural.
H-Bob
@ruemara: They are knowledgeable in their field.
As for the Chinese being closed-mouth, the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published a paper on their research on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Origins of SARS-CoV-2: Focusing on Science (nih.gov)
Perhaps it’s not so much close-mouthedness as Merkin media being monolingual and expecting the Chinese to issue reports in English.
A Wall Street Journal article discusses a group of Chinese miners who came down with a serious respiratory illness after collecting bat guano in an abandoned copper mine.
It seems that the collection of bat guano and other practices involving the handling of wild animals (including collection of their body parts as aphrodisiacs) and their wastes provides a very plausible mechanism for cross-species transmission. It’s not a mechanism that would occur to Westerners in their antiseptic high-rises.
Another Scott
Relatedly, StatNews:
I’ve mentioned before that I caught the flu in Japan in May 2019. It was a horrible thing (and I did have the flu shot the previous winter). I plan on continuing to mask up when I’m around others. (And I wonder how much worse the GQP’s anti-mask crusade is going to make things compared to how it might have been.)
Cheers,
Scott.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Roger Moore:
Sounds…plausible.
(Shakes fist at bear scientists!)
Major Major Major Major
@Eunicecycle: I enjoyed it but not enough to do a post about it, though I think it’s up a lot of y’all’s alley. I will read the sequel.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: I never really liked the ending of The Andromeda Strain. (SPOILERS) The alien organism had escaped containment, but it was treated as no big deal because it had mutated into a form that didn’t kill humans. Um, yes, and if it mutates again? I don’t recall any of the characters discussing that, or even saying “there’s nothing we can do about it now”.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: The one in The Andromeda Strain seems to be naturally occurring in space, but it was brought to Earth by a spacecraft apparently intended to collect organisms that could be useful as biological weapons, so that angle is still there.
sab
@ArchTeryx: We so rarely here from you anymore, so thanks for weighing in to maintain our standards as a full service blog ( we even have jackal virologists!)
As someone who is not a virologist, I don’t even care how it started. It’s here now.
I don’t think blaming China now is in any way useful. They have a huge country with lots of people in contact with lots of animals, so virues will inevitably start there. It would be useful if we could stay on good enough terms with them so that next time they will let us know what is going on in health issues, like they used to do. The current frenzy is certainly not helping that.
If we want to argue with the Chinese, I would rather we argue about what they are doing to the Uighurs.
Robert Sneddon
@H-Bob:
Bat guano (no, not the famous Tuscaloosa gunslinger of the same name) is a very useful fertiliser and it’s free for the collecting in rural areas with well-established bat colonies.
Matt McIrvin
@Ken: Also, that is not how mutation works. Apparently all of the microorganisms changed simultaneously?
Also also, the thing is somehow capable of generating new matter out of radiant energy, which is why the sterilizing nuke would only feed it. There are a lot of things in that story that don’t make sense.
Fair Economist
@jl: According to virologists, the furin cleavage site is yet more evidence against lab accident. They are only useful in whole animals and are rapidly lost in culture. Plus the cleavage site looked defective – it was a surprise it worked.
Ken
Not even the ones who watch Dirty Jobs? Plenty of episodes involved animal waste or dead animals — or combinations of both, when leatherwork was involved.
Another Scott
@Ken: I liked the ending better than the proposed solution to the escape problem that was designed into the facility (in the book – I don’t recall if it’s different in the movie(s))! It was of the times, though.
Who was it, Teller? (It’s always Teller), that proposed taking care of Los Angeles’s air pollution problems by setting off a few H-Bombs in the mountains to change the prevailing winds to blow out the smog from over the city?
“H-Bombs! Is there anything they can’t do??!”
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
Michael Crichton knew how to write an engaging story, but his science always had a ton of holes.
Brachiator
A lot of people love conspiracy theories. They are easy to explain. And unlike the other favorite simplistic explanation, God’s will, a good conspiracy theory also provides people with a convenient scapegoat on which they can focus their fear and hatred.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@sab:
It might be useful to know it’s pathway into the human population so that we can take step to reduce the chance of it happening again in the same manner.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Another Scott: Great, constant Santa Ana winds, now with more radiation.
Kineslaw
@Roger Moore: That makes absolute sense. My point is humans are naturally going to link where SARSCov2 originated and the lab unless given reasons to de-link them.
I have not seen enough of the de-linking in this round stories, just wild conspiracy theories or outright dismissal of the lab theory. I doubt I am alone in vaguely remembering facts about the lab placement. The people talking about the tiny chance SARSCov2 started from a lab leak would be well served to reiterate those facts.
trollhattan
@sab:
I think it’s fair to pound the hell out of China for not cooperating fully, earlier with WHO and for making the critical error of presuming the virus was not transmissible by asymptomatic carriers.
Needs to be better for the next time.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
There were a lot of crazy ideas about peaceful uses for nuclear explosives in the post-war era. I think there was some combination of a genuine desire to come up with peaceful applications and an excuse to continue building and detonating nuclear devices in the face of objections to nuclear weapons. Reading about things like Project Plowshare and Project Orion is amazing. It makes you understand how things like poisoning the world with DDT and CFCs happened.
gvg
@Subsole: I visited England around then. They killed millions of cattle and burned them. Farmers were suicidal. I am not kidding, there were news stories. When we visited famous gardens, we had to step in trays of disinfectant before boarding buses, because cow poop is garden fertilizer. Apparently British farming is not all that profitable anyway and their are all kinds of rules to keep the farmside looking quaint because tourism is a big part of their economy. They can’t modernize the appearance of barns and such but have to keep the looks, more strictly than our historical districts…..
jl
@Fair Economist: Thanks. If you have any links that can explain how the furin stuff relates to origin of covid that a layperson can understand, I’d appreciate it.
Thanks again for info. I think your take is consistent with epidemiology of how it spreads and (since your handle contains ‘Economist’) the economic mechanics of how the animal trade works in that area.
MisterForkbeard
@Brachiator: On top of this, my understanding was basically:
1. We don’t have enough information to say conclusively one way or the other.
2. No signs of the virus having been created in a lab. Doesn’t bear any of the necessary markers.
3. It’s possible that the virus was naturally occurring by was being studied in a lab and got loose. There’s not anything beyond some vague circumstantial evidence to indicate this.
4. Some evidence of people getting sick before any lab accident would have occurred.
So basically: It’s technically possible it’s a naturally developed virus that escaped from a lab on accident, but not terribly likely. It’s far more likely it’s a naturally occurring adaptation, but we won’t know without a lot more data that we probably can’t get.
SFBayAreaGal
@Roger Moore: Great book. I have the paperback
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
I agree on the first but not on the second. It’s important to accept that people are going to get stuff wrong, especially in the early stages of something like this. Not realizing the importance of asymptomatic carriers was a critical mistake, but it was an honest one. It’s something to remember for next time, but it’s not something that anyone deserves to be punished for. Not cooperating with WHO is a different category. That was something everyone knew at the time was a mistake, and they did it anyway because they cared more about public relations than public health. That’s a culpable error, and they fully deserve to be roasted for it.
TomatoQueen
@Robert Sneddon: I moved to the DC area about two weeks before 9/11 and so about a month before the anthrax events. Job hunting in those days wasn’t done over the internet the way it is now, but the transition was happening to be sure. So, the regional mail distribution center was closed, and all those paper resumes and job applications, including the ones from me, sit in perpetuity. Those job openings didn’t rematerialize, however, as the area was in recession by that time. As for the two individuals caught up in the investigation, WaPo did yeoman service, although very late in the story, and maybe all their work is online now, if not it should be. Suffice it to say: the first guy Mr X was Mr Espionage, known to a number of agencies, versatile, used in a lot of dodgy environments, and a bit of a glamor figure, and so as a person of interest he was an easy target. The second guy, Mr Y, was a Fort Detrick research scientist whose work included lab anthrax. Both of these men were hounded, tried in the press, and the second guy committed suicide (by taking a large amount of Tylenol). The clear story of the anthrax events has never been told, as where it concerns the presence of lab anthrax, there’s a lot of denial and classified. That’s how I remember it and I’m not satisfied with the story in total. But, the second guy seemed to be a better candidate, based on the amount and type of evidence. There was no physical evidence at all for the first guy, for the second guy there were records of his travel to some of the places from which the anthrax-laden envelopes were mailed, there was anthrax in his lab–in other words circumstantial stuff, which is not nothing, at times. But that story–the question of why never was answered.And then the DC shooter events started. You never know, in this town.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@ruemara: It’s not just that…all the fundies and white working class schmoes who never went to school past high school on my facebook feed is convinced that THEY have the real inside knowledge of what is really happening when it comes to EVERYTHING. If an “expert” says it, then it is inherently suspicious because the experts are always wrong. The only people who are always right about everything are dimwits who barely made it through high school. Or so they seem to believe.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
I don’t consider it honest, I think it was lazy and politically driven, and certainly counter to best practices. It badly hampered their efforts to contain the virus, much like the Trump admin tossing Obama’s pandemic playbook and instead playing it fast and loose.
There’s a large shared responsibility between the two autocratic regimes.
Fair Economist
A point on motivations: of course a detailed audit of the Wuhan lab will find problems. Every place and organization has problems. Anti-CCP groups want to look because they know they will find something, and can use the interest in COVID to amplify it. The Chinese government doesn’t want anybody poking around for the inverse reason. It’s like the reporters asking for access to Biden’s papers over Tara Reed’s fabrication: it’s not about finding corraboration for a far out theory, it’s about an opportunity to manufacture a scandal.
Any real interest in origins would start with coronavirus surveys of farmed animals known to be susceptible to SARS2. But nope, because that’s not what this is about.
Hoodie
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Which explains why they barely made it through high school . . .
raven
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: Plenty of people “barely” made it through high school and plenty of others didn’t make it at all. That’s no big fucking deal.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Hoodie: Yup. It just is unbelievable how many morons (thank you Gene Wilder) think they’re the font of all wisdom about everything and that the people who actually know about the stuff are all wrong. Honestly I don’t know why any of them seek medical care because doctors are experts and experts are always wrong so why would I get my cancer treated by a doctor when the auto mechanic next door read about a cure in a facebook meme that totally sounds legit?
Robert Sneddon
That’s what caught the epidemiology world by surprise, they had been obsessing over a possible bird flu/swine flu hybridisation after a series of bad influenza outbreaks and a lot of the preparations were to cope with an serious novel influenza similar in scope to (or worse than, God help us all) the 1918 flu epidemic. A highly contagious respiratory coronavirus crossing over into the human population was something no-one had put a lot of thought or work into, even after SARS-COV-1 happened because it fizzled out.
It’s always something different and planning to fight the last war over again rarely works. Bummer.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan:
I believe that’s known as “freewheeling passion”.
Major Major Major Major
@Fair Economist: On top of that, as I understand it, the reality of life in China is just that everybody is extremely paranoid and reluctant to take a position on a lot of things, lest that position later be forbidden. People won’t even praise stuff. (From a James Palmer twitter thread earlier today.)
So by default you get wagon-circling even if there’s nothing to see.
The Pale Scot
@germy:
Pence’s shtick will be Funyuns
Ruckus
@Kent:
Making sense is not part of the conservative mind. Sense actually has to be suspended for conservative dogma to be viable because it is bat shit insane.
chopper
@The Pale Scot:
pfft, those are too much fun. he likes responsibilityuns instead.
Searcher
@Another Scott: It would be hilarious if the disease originated in Italy and then spread to Wuhan from there shortly thereafter. I’ll note that people have studied coronavirus in bats in Northwest Italy, but I assume if there were any concrete evidence everyone would already know about it.
Gravenstone
Another (probably less likely since I would hope staff understands day to day precautions) possibility is staff at the lab became infected locally, and spread it to others in the facility.
Gravenstone
Don’t tell anyone I told you this, but fangs are the reason they talk with such a pronounced accent…
Shakti
@germy: My problem with this conspiracy theory is more of one with the people who hold this theory and their related beliefs.
These are the same people that believe that COVID-19 transmission, symptoms and death are overhyped and exaggerated; children don’t catch or transmit covid; the vaccine is experimental gene therapy that will rewire your genes and kill your fertility; masks don’t work to prevent transmission of disease but definitely fuck up your brain from oxygen deprivation; this is all a conspiracy to turn the proles into serfs, etc.
TL; DNR: I like my conspiracy theories to have some cohesion and to make a grand overarching sense. It can’t just be some fear spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks and to get a reaction. This is why I got bored with the X-Files back in the day.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@raven: I don’t have a problem with no schooling beyond high school it so long as they don’t hold themselves out there as an expert on everything. The keeper of all the real knowledge while the rest of us “sheeple” get lead down the primrose path by “experts”. It’s the combination of militant ignorance coupled with absolute certainty that they’re in the know about everything and the rest of us are dupes that irks me.
Fair Economist
@Robert Sneddon:
That’s not *quite* true. Most work on possible pandemics was on flus, but some of the scenario-building about a possible pandemic *did* consider a coronavirus, usually related to SARS. Virologists were quite aware that a highly coronavirus *could* come in zoonotically because the human coronavirus OC43 is a bovine coronavirus which crossed over in the 19th century. It’s a candidate for the still unidentified Russian flu (maybe “flu”) of 1889-90.
TBF, the public health responses to a flu pandemic and a coronavirus pandemic are pretty interchangeable. They spread quite similarly, and have similar biological effects.
Philbert
@JoyceH: The 1949 book ‘Earth Abides’ I believe does not dwell on the disease that kills 99%, or its origin, just that it happened. Didn’t make it to the movies however.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Fair Economist: I’ve been listening to Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast (I’m real late to the party but…Roman history hasn’t changed in the intervening years :)) and covid nor the Russian or Spanish flus had anything on the Antonine plague. Or there was another one a few Emperors later (the Cyprian plague I think) they think was some sort of hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola that was really awful. That said, the past year and change has not been any fun and I’d prefer it if the next pandemic is another 100 years away because I don’t have real good prospects to live that long. I’d be 152 by then.
Brachiator
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Slight chance you might make it that long. From Scientific American:
Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
Also, there was at least some basic research on coronaviruses- that’s what the Wuhan lab was doing, after all- which turned out to be really important. The groundwork on the viruses was a key reason the vaccines were developed so quickly. They knew which protein was likely to be a good vaccine target and even how to stabilize it. Without that background research, it would have taken a lot longer to get the vaccine out. That should be one big take-home lesson: we need more basic research so we’ll be able to get the same kind of fast turnaround for the next nasty viral epidemic.
ETA: This is one reason I am worried about the lab leak stuff. A lot of people who hear it are going to conclude we need to stop doing this kind of research, when that’s 180° away from the truth.
Ken
I worry that the title should continue: The Last 50 Years Spent Screaming Silently Inside Their Heads, “For the Love of God Turn Off the Machines and Let Me Die!”
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore:
There’s basic research being done on everything all the time while edumacated folks complain about their taxpayer dollars being wasted on braniacs looking at bugs through microscopes for no purpose. Then something like this comes along, the genomic sequence of the original SARS-COV-2 virus is published a few days after Patient Zero is identified and six fucking months later we’ve got multiple different types of vaccines in Stage 3 trials and the same edumacated folks are going on about vaccinated people shedding virus particles and holding “pray the COVID away” church services.
I remember the Good Old Days when it was thought it would take years of effort and millions of dollars to sequence a single human cell’s DNA. That was 2000, I think. Now it’s pretty much AP Biology high-school homework, all because of those braniacs.
Ken
Ah, that’s what they said when that fertilizer plant blew up in Texas eight years ago and destroyed a school, apartment building, and nursing home, but public sentiment (as expressed through the elected legislative bodies of Texas) decided it was a risk that people were willing to live with. Or next to, as the case might be.
Ken
In fairness, it did take that, the first time. Now, as you point out, people do it as casually as they stroll up Mt. Everest during a pandemic.
Brachiator
@Ken:
Humans Could Live up to 150 Years, New Research Suggests
I am hopeful that we will be able to improve the quality of extended life, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it to have the extra years.
A friend’s grandmother is 106. The lady is physically frail, but still mentally sharp.
sab
@?BillinGlendaleCA: That’s why I said I’m not a virologist ( also not an epidemiologist.) That’s for them that know what they are doing to think about.
J R in WV
@MattF:
I’m thinking Dr. de Long is an economist by training… which means he is trained in reading gobbledegook and making some sense of it. Anyway, I followed the link and found that Brad had quoted a great tweet, which I take the liberty of providing right here below:
So very sweet !!
TKH
At the risk of repeating something that may already been said in the ~ 270 comments above: if you can stand listening to a podcast for an hour, head over to “this week in virology” aka TwiV, episode 760. The crew has an interview with three members of the WHO study group that went to China and reviewed the available information. Very informative!
You do not have to be a virologist, a biologist, a scientist to understand what’s being said. It is very good at defining what the questions are and what’s at stake and cuts through the current media noise
J R in WV
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
My mom died from COPD, no doubt caused by the Pall Malls she smoked most of her life.
Mom got hooked as a college student. At the University football games, other students were hired to pass out free cigarettes to other students at the big games.
Then, many years later, I get a new boss at work. We get along pretty well, both vets, both IT techs. Then I learn that his wife sells and promotes Phillip-Morris products… like Pall Mall~!!~ I never said a word about losing my mom to Pall Mall. I don’t think his wife smoked, I know he doesn’t, he’s a power lifter athlete guy.
But his wife kills people for a living. No question about it… She might as well use a pistol…
All my cousins on my mom’s side who smoked are long gone already. But my grandma and Aunt K, mom’s older sister, lived into their 90s, not smoking at all.
J R in WV
@Ric Drywall:
I think I know you don’t know anything about this issue. What is your degree in? Where did you study what?
No Bio degree? So then do you have close friends who work in medical fields? No?
Posting history at Balloon-Juice? Seven (7) comments — sounds like a troll to me!
Fuq you with a rusty rake, ass.
Just Chuck
@ArchTeryx: The car analogy is just perfect, thank you :)
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Thanks for letting me know that I am not the only Jackal using the very excellent Pie Filter to weed out the pointless posts!
When one has posted a total of 7 times in the past couple of decades, what glory should be associated with your nym?!?
I have posted about 4,800 times so far, many late at night on nearly dead threads……. ;~)
Original Lee
@Omnes Omnibus: Me, too. I am O- and had been donating pediatric bags on the regular to the hospital near where I worked. Then one day, the phlebotomist who came to my office to collect called up to ask me about travel to the UK, and that was the end.
Bill Arnold
@J R in WV:
A very salient point, if one accepts the Wall Street Journal[1]
is that Chinese medical care (in urban areas at least) is different than in the US but reporting mostly did not bother to inform people of this important prior. Unlike in the West where family doctors and clinics handle most outpatient services, Chinese prefer to visit public hospitals for outpatient consultations in addition to inpatient and emergency medical services.
That is, assuming truth of the report, they were not necessarily going to the hospital because their condition was dire; hospitals deliver ordinary care (and routine care) as well.
(To be honest, I looked at that user’s posting history as well; the comments seemed fine to me though.)
[1] The WSJ is a Murdoch paper; decades ago it was accurate except for the editorial pages, but has been descending into propaganda-raghood for the last 10-15 years. I had a Marxist friend in the 1980s who used subscribed (then) to the WSJ.
J R in WV
@Cacti:
<blockquote…But I’m deeply hurt that I’ve been in your pie filter….
Don’t be… you are not in my pie filter at this time and space. This condition may change at any time or space.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
The thing that I notice is:
Somehow, that “and common seasonal illnesses” gets ignored. So a few people going to the doctor with flu-like symptoms during the flu season is getting blown up into proof that COVID came from the Wuhan lab.
YY_Sima Qian
@Bill Arnold: You are correct about hospitals being the place even for routine care in China. The WSJ article does not say that these 3 staff members were actually hospitalized.
There was also a major Influenza epidemic in Hubei in Nov. & Dec. of 2019, parent were warned about outbreaks at schools back in Nov. 2019. The flu epidemic probably also helped hide the COVID-19 outbreak. The only reason CVOID-19 was even noticed was because of the higher virulence and the ground glass patterns of infected lungs. If COVID-19 is as virulent as SARS or MERS, it would have been noticed earlier.
YY_Sima Qian
@Major Major Major Major: Average people in China are full of strong opinions, and are not afraid to share it in private conversation, even with strangers (though not necessarily foreigners). Bureaucrats with careers to protect, on the other hand, are very reticent to take public stands, and only the most uncontroversial ones, under all circumstances. This is especially true in the Xi Jinping era.
YY_Sima Qian
@Roger Moore: The Chinese immigrants that dominate garments in Italy are mostly from Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, along the southeastern coast of China. There is also a large Wenzhouer community in Wuhan.
Hey! Maybe the origin is actually in Wenzhou, and immigrants and traders brought the virus to both Wuhan and northern Italy! :-0
In all seriousness, Chinese immigrants in northern Italy are highly concentrated at the Tuscan town of Prato, not Lombardia. They also had the lowest infection rate in all of Italy during the 1st wave, because they took greater and earlier precautions than their Italian neighbors.
While Wenzhou did have one of the worst outbreaks outside of Hubei Province, it was because some 150K Wenzhouers reside in Wuhan, and many went home for Chinese New Year, and were partying around town to flaunt their wealth accrued in the previous year, before lockdown measures were implemented.
randy khan
Apparently not yet a dead thread, so I’ll jump in to say that I read the Nicholson Baker article all the way through, and even he didn’t say there’s any evidence that it started in a lab. He said it feels right to him (paraphrasing, but that’s the gist) because the species-jumping story seems wildly improbable.
In the end, the evidence will say what the evidence says, but Baker’s analysis reminded me of a lot of things I’ve read over the years by people who don’t really understand probability. Incredibly rare events are incredibly rare, but they happen all the time because there are a lot of incredibly rare events. People who say “It’s a one in a billion chance that COVID-19 could have jumped to people from bats” don’t get that they’re counting the wrong numbers – you don’t have a real sense of the probability unless you know how many diseases there are that could jump from bats. Baker has an easier time believing that people working in a very carefully controlled lab made a mistake than that a virus jumped from an animal host to people, even though there are many diseases that know actually have made the jump.
Another Scott
@randy khan: +1
Given enough time, **everything** that is possible **will** happen. It’s the meaning of the math of probability.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.