What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

If I tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 and then visited a nursing home without a mask, exhaling the natural virus all over the home's vulnerable residents, then I'm pretty sure you'd say I'd done something terrible. I think you'd be right. It's obvious to most people in most circumstances that even if a pathogen exists in nature and naturally causes some degree of death and sickness, a human who enables that pathogen to cause a greater degree of death and sickness is doing something bad. This is especially true if they're doing so maliciously (e.g., in biological warfare), but still true even if they're merely reckless (e.g. my nursing home visitor, or that flu shot nurse who reused the syringes).

So why does this intuition fail when the virus passes through a lab? The 1946-1957 flu virus was indeed natural, but the 1977 pandemic of that same virus was near-certainly not--without the activities of the scientists involved, the virus would probably have stayed safely in the freezer forever. The scientists also had the option not to put it in the freezer in the first place, in which case it would have probably just gone extinct. That scientific activity almost certainly caused those deaths.

Maybe it's just that one death is a tragedy, and 700k deaths are a statistic? When the last smallpox death (so far, at least) occurred following a lab accident in the UK, the director of the lab in question killed himself out of guilt, even though that lab was basically in compliance with the standards of the time. Perhaps he just had an unusually sensitive conscience; but I wonder if the scale of death in the 1977 flu pandemic (or this pandemic now, if it turns out to be unnatural) is simply so great that people can't engage with it, and their usual moral mechanisms just shut down.

In engineering school, we're taught from the first week that our work has the potential to kill people, and that it's our fault if it does. If a structural engineer responded to a building collapse simply by explaining that buildings are very important for society and that many people would die of exposure without them, then his colleagues would be mystified, and perhaps concerned for his mental health. We're expected to study and learn from our failures, in order not to repeat them. The argument that "X has benefits, therefore we can ignore its costs completely" is so ridiculous that I've never heard it spoken.

Yet a vocal subset of virologists are somehow able to make just that argument for their discipline, shrugging off the deaths they cause as a "natural" cost of doing business, unworthy of study or thought--and a significant fraction of the public accepts it! I find this strange, and terrifying. Don't you?

> I don't think he's a lab leak conspiracist but I do think he's got as much of a motive to shift blame elsewhere -- namely outside of China -- as anyone in the world, [...]

George Gao is clearly beholden to the CCP's official story that SARS-CoV-2 originated outside China. I don't see why that would require him to disregard strong genomic evidence for two introductions into the market, though--he could simply propose two packages of frozen fish, or two of whatever other story they're claiming now.

In my own limited judgment, I don't see what in the genomic evidence excludes evolution of the two lineages in humans--it seems entirely possible to me that sampling of human cases simply wasn't thorough enough to pick up all intermediates (if they even exist). None of your responses address that question of sampling coverage. I also see many highly-credentialed experts who consider evolution in humans to be possible. This makes me believe that you, Worobey, and quite a lot of media headlines are greatly over-representing the significance of two lineages separated by two SNPs.

> As recently as 2019, scientists from the WIV were researching Hubei bat populations... people are acting like it would be completely impossible for betacoronaviruses to show up in Wuhan but it's a misconception that dishonest people are happy to promote.

Non-specialists often use sloppy language, but the important question is clearly one of probabilities, not of possibility vs. impossibility. The greatest diversity of SARS-like viruses lies in SW China and SE Asia, including BANAL-20-52 with its extremely close spike, closer than omicron is to the original Wuhan virus.

That SARS-CoV-2 spilled over in Wuhan certainly isn't dispositive evidence of unnatural origin, but it's not what anyone expected. It would be nice if you could make that clear when you correct people.

> Loosely, much GoF work is akin to controlled burns,

I used that analogy in another comment here--when a recent controlled burn in New Mexico got out of control and destroyed hundreds of homes, everyone involved realized they'd screwed up. They're forming committees to understand what went wrong, and to compensate the victims, and to change their practices so this doesn't happen again.

If a disastrous controlled burn somehow killed 700k people, then I'm not sure the practice would ever be re-attempted. And yet the 1977 flu pandemic did just that, and no one really noticed or cared. Don't you find that remarkable?

What do you make of reporting that claims a virus almost identical to COVID19 was previously identified and studied at the Wuhan lab as early as 2012?

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> Since the middle of last year, Li's postgraduate thesis has been circulated online as purported evidence that a coronavirus very similar to SARS-CoV-2 could have been infecting humans as early as 2012.

> Some also believe the paper provides circumstantial evidence for broader allegations that WIV had captured, studied and conducted "gain of function" experiments on viruses found in the mine, including RaTG13.

> First identified in 2016, RaTG13 shares 96.2% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, according to a paper released by Shi and other researchers early in February 2020, just weeks after the first COVID-19 cases had been identified in Wuhan.

Ding! Had to really dig through the comments to find a mention of this...

Pre-pandemic blood samples were later tested and found positive in europe

Which makes the wuhan-zoonotic vs wuhan-leak a false dichotomy.

> First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.

You can't possibly claim that without being a qualified expert in the field. I'm not, but I have asked friends who are--and they're quite firm that this type of experimental research (1) did help speed up our COVID-19 response, and save lives, and (2) is critical to prevent future outbreaks from becoming much, much worse.

I'm not asking for journal cites or anything, but I am curious: What's the source of your conclusion that gain-of-function research didn't help prevent the COVID-19 pandemic from becoming even worse?