What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

> but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.

Interesting perspective. On the other hand, just like the comment below, I never saw a single person raise the lab leak theory as an alternative explanation to a naturally occurring disaster. It was always in the context of "COVID is a weapon to control and kill us".

Thanks for the correction. So some coronaviruses have been found in nature in Hubei, but surely in rural areas correct? Why would the center of a dense city like Wuhan be the epicenter for an outbreak (according to the official story a wet market that contained no bats walking distance from the Wuhan laboratory), and not an area where bats exist?

Thanks, Alina. A well-balanced point of view.

There's also very scant evidence that the WIV was doing anything along the lines of GoF. They worked a ton with Baric's group in NC and other "western" scientists who did all of the genetic engineering that I'm aware of. The purpose of this engineering is to develop vaccines and treatments for the most likely natural viruses before they exist in nature and have a chance to infect humans. Even if they were doing more pseudo-GoF than I'm aware, I'm a bit nonplussed.

The source I linked at the top with Markolin's analysis on why he thinks it was a zoonotic event is titled, "Nature’s neglected GoF laboratory" for a reason. Viruses are going to mix/match, they're going to produce chimeras, they are going to undergo directed evolution by the trillions, all completely naturally. As we encroach further into the urban/wildlife interface, zoonotic events are going to keep happening, and likely going to get worse. MERS and SARS1 were both "near miss" pandemics that we were fortunate to have avoided a SC2-like global nightmare. Wuhan was a 'control' for latent coronavirus sampling not because of the lack of bats or coronaviruses in Hubei, but because it was an urban environment. Millions of people in China live near bats and domesticated animals capable of acting as intermediate hosts. We can't just hope that every coronavirus they're naturally infected with is mild or burns out before the wrong person takes a fateful bus trip.

I'm not 100% certain GoF experiments are worth it, but they're highly mischaracterized by most of the people who are accusing scientists of all sorts of malfeasance. The vast majority of this work takes place in strains that couldn't possibly infect humans and with animal models that also have no potential for spillover. Skim this paper from 2018 and tell me it wouldn't be worth knowing more about in the lead-up to SC2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132729/

> and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology

This is absolutely crazy to me. So far most of the evidence for a lab leak is "we don't have any close relatives" and "we've never seen the RBD or FCS like this before".

Of course we haven't! We've barely sampled any viruses!

We know a ton about how viruses enter cells and we know a ton about how spillovers happen, but we don't know very much about the potential "problem space" due to very limited understanding of the diversity of viruses out there.

> You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms.

No offense to anyone I've 'shut down' but this is akin to me wading into a discussion on cryptography with very strong opinions about quantum computing based on having read some Neal Stephenson books. I'd love to spend more time enhancing public knowledge, but it's near impossible unless people have some baseline level of understanding of the underlying science and the ability to figure out when they're being mislead.

I think Alina Chan is mostly well-intentioned but leans into the 'controversy' a bit much in order to sell books -- but her coauthor is a complete hack who knows exactly what he's doing. Ridley has no background in virology whatsoever, his claim to fame before this was being a prominent climate change denier who owns and operates a literal coal mine.

So sure, I'll continue to hope to educate people about what they've been mislead about but there's British Aristocracy with millions of dollars in book sales on the line working to gaslight everyone so here we are.

GoF on pathogens that couldn't possibly cause a human pandemic (including viruses that don't infect humans, or anything replication-incompetent) seems much less risky to me, and I believe that was excluded from the 2014 restrictions. It may still present some risk, to the extent it would guide later practitioners working in replication-competent human pathogens, with or without malicious intent. I generally dislike the framing of the debate in terms of a "GoF ban", which is why I chose the phrase "high-risk research" and qualified GoF to potential pandemic pathogens. I'm aware that very few people are going to understand this nuance; but that's the reason why practitioners need to competently regulate themselves, instead of leaving this to an uninformed mob.

That said, there's zero question that DEFUSE proposed to collect and enhance replication-competent potential human pandemic pathogens. That proposal wasn't funded, and that proposal indeed anticipated that the GoF work would be done at UNC; but the WIV seems clearly capable of that work too. We don't know what happened next, and I believe we should do everything in our power to find out. If possible, that would occur with China's cooperation; but since that seems impossible for now, it should proceed without. For example, large amounts of raw sequencer reads exist on the servers of American and European research groups and their service providers. Those should be subpoenaed, and searched for evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 genomes as contamination, similar to that found in the Antarctic soil samples. Do you disagree?

I also dislike the framing in terms of "GoF ban" because I agree fully that nature may present a greater risk than anything we could make in a lab. It seems entirely plausible to me that right now, there are viruses deep inside some cave that could end human life as we know it, but that we've simply been lucky enough that the virus has never left the cave. But how could that possibly be a reason to send some grad student into the cave? From pictures and videos of WIV sampling trips, they were sending researchers in with no protection beyond a surgical mask and nitrile gloves. That seems insane to me. If humans will be entering an area regardless--for agriculture, or tourism, or whatever else--then I agree we should be sampling it. But why should we go looking for trouble in areas that no other human is likely to approach?

You keep saying that virology brings potential benefits, and that's obviously true. It also brings potential detriments though, including research-origin pandemics, and it's done so at least once in the past. I see no evidence that you're making anything like a cost/benefit tradeoff here; you're simply disregarding all the costs, somehow classifying deaths quite directly caused by research activities as "natural" and thus unimportant. That's not how anything else in life works--if I'm careless with my campsite, then the resulting wildfire may be indistinguishable from one set by lightning, but the ranger is still going to say it's my fault.

I have no special affection for Ridley, though I still prefer him to the author of the article you linked, who called Alina Chan a "moronic psychopath"[1]. In any case, the messenger shouldn't matter. As to the narrow question of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2, I believe Ridley is right and you're dangerously wrong. You've correctly shut down some genuine nonsense here (e.g., Moderna patents on the sequence). You've also posted at least two unequivocal falsehoods yourself though (WIV situated based on diversity of nearby relevant viruses, no prior unnatural pandemic), and presented other evidence in much stronger terms than any scientific consensus (e.g., the two lineages; George Gao[2] thinks they probably evolved in humans, and I presume you're not going to call him a lab leak conspiracist). I don't see how that enhances public knowledge.

1. https://twitter.com/PhilippMarkolin/status/15208575112969994...

2. https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1497627179965845506?la...