Thread

Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague

187 points · 150 comments · ericmay

robmusial · 1791169542 · focus · HN ↗
I literally just finished Annie Jacobsen's book 'Biological War: A Scenario' last week where the central plot point is an accidental release of modified form of pneumonic plague from a lab in Siberia. Very coincidental timing, especially since it made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
1. DJBunnies · 1791170257 · focus · HN ↗
  How’d it turn out, are we boned?
  1. Betelbuddy · 1791170372 · focus · HN ↗
    Netflix ends up the series after Season 1, just after your are emotionally invested...
  2. robmusial · 1791170541 · focus · HN ↗
    No spoilers but Jacobsen's scenario books don't end with "and society came together, acted rationally, and solved the problem!"
2. gazpachotron · 1791170600 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
3. petcat · 1791170758 · focus · HN ↗
  > made me wonder how often labs like these have accidents and we never hear about them because it is cleaned up without issue.
  Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
  1. mvlipwig · 1791171014 · focus · HN ↗
    It's difficult to say for sure, but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market. (I'm not very well researched on this topic and don't have any formal background in it, so hedge accordingly)
    fsckboy · 1791174099 · focus · HN ↗
    there is zero evidence for zoonotic origin, and messages have been found and made public showing that the public proponents of a zoonotic origin hypothesis were in private saying "lab leak".
    <a href="https://archive.ph/WTsga" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/WTsga
    refulgentis · 1791175450 · focus · HN ↗
    This says there’s 0 evidence to claim it’s a lab leak, and plenty of evidence, literal contact tracing from the wet market. They took the lab leak seriously and were emotionally resonant with you and I, however, they must deal in facts when they write.
    SV_BubbleTime · 1791174191 · focus · HN ↗
    >but the consensus is leaning towards zoonotic origin from a bat or pangolin in a wet market
    I literally had to check the date on this post.
    Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”… but “they eat tainted exotic animals at wet markets” was “the consensus”?
    Wild times!
    [deleted] · 1791174814 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    porkpies101 · 1791175058 · focus · HN ↗
    We should not be eating animals period
    fr2029 · 1791175960 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    mightysashiman · 1791178998 · focus · HN ↗
    They are so tasty though
    refulgentis · 1791175324 · focus · HN ↗
    Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird. It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
    somenameforme · 1791177078 · focus · HN ↗
    People immediately started suggesting that the idea to close the border to Chinese travelers was racist. After it happened you even had the ever-politicized Lancet jump in claiming that such actions were "anchored in fear, misinformation, racism, and xenophobia." [1]
    Similarly, you're referencing a name that was uncommonly used. People mostly called it the Wuhan Virus, which would be a far more typical name than "COVID-19". Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu, Hong Kong Flu, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Ebola, West Nile Virus, Marburg Virus, Zika Virus, Mexican Swine Flu, etc.
    [1] - <a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7133591/" rel="nofollow">https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7133591/
    happymellon · 1791179674 · focus · HN ↗
    > Major outbreaks are regularly named based on their origin: Spanish Flu
    <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
    > The earliest probable cases were documented in March 1918 in Haskell County, Kansas, United States
    Oh.
    Yokolos · 1791180301 · focus · HN ↗
    Okay, what about all the other examples?
    somenameforme · 1791180662 · focus · HN ↗
    That's a bit misleading: "The outbreak did not originate in Spain,[49] but reporting did, due to wartime censorship in belligerent nations. Spain was a neutral country unconcerned with appearances of combat readiness, and without a wartime propaganda machine to prop up morale,[50][51] so its newspapers freely reported epidemic effects, making Spain the apparent locus of the epidemic.[52] The censorship was so effective that Spain's health officials were unaware its neighboring countries were similarly affected."
    In other words other countries were effectively censoring it out of existence owing to WW1. Spain didn't have such censorship/propaganda going on, and so was seen as the epicenter, even though it ultimately wasn't.
    [1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid=42685098" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_flu&oldid...
    refulgentis · 1791180133 · focus · HN ↗
    They were right, closing borders with China doesn't stop the virus from spreading, there's no scientific basis for that claim.
    It's amazing how you had all those at the tip of your tongue, you are a clearly a learned medical scholar.
    A peer comment discusses where the Spanish Flu originated, and illustrates the gap between what you asked the LLM for and well, how humans think and what the people you're talking to are actually talking about.
    The LLM also went a bit overboard with the Wuhan Virus thing, it's a response, but it's hilariously out of context because, again, there's a gap between you're asking it for and what your interlocutor is communicating.
    It's so confused that it's giving "Ah, but, people didn't say the thing you said was bad, because it was bad. The politically correct version was Wuhan Virus." - thus validating exactly what I said, the Chinavirus version was weird and bad.
    SideburnsOfDoom · 1791183354 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    ipaddr · 1791177365 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't the formula: place + virus is racist. Racism is a serious issue and shouldn't be labelled on things that aren't making judgement using someone's race.
    Normally city + virus using country + virus is incorrect. But to call it racist or transphobic or fascist would be an incorrect usage.
    dwattttt · 1791177982 · focus · HN ↗
    The Spanish Flu's first known case was in Kansas. French papers changed from calling it American Flu to Spanish Flu to avoid angering an ally (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#cite_note-fiction-57" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#cite_note-fiction-...).
    Maybe place + virus isn't inherently racist, but it's been politically charged & exploited; best to put the combination down.
    retsibsi · 1791182215 · focus · HN ↗
    > It was an ex posto facto thing to claim saying it was a lab leak was racist. I’m sure someone said that, however, no one serious was nor was it a common position.
    I think you are misremembering.
    > The lab-leak theory had been floated by President Trump and others in his circle in April last year. It was widely dismissed at the time as an unfounded conspiracy theory with racist undertones.
    <a href="https://theconversation.com/covid-19-why-lab-leak-theory-is-back-despite-little-new-evidence-162215" rel="nofollow">https://theconversation.com/covid-19-why-lab-leak-theory-is-... (2021)
    > New York Times reporter Apoorva Mandavilli deleted a tweet Wednesday night that said the COVID-19 "lab leak theory" had "racist roots."
    <a href="https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-covid-reporter-deletes-132728236.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/ny-times-covid-reporter-... (2021)
    > The lab-leak theory came to legitimacy by a circuitous path. It was first auditioned by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo shortly after lockdown started, but journalists were quick to distance themselves from its overtones of crude Trumpian racism. Nevertheless the theory gained new life last spring, when some of those same journalists — abetted by a chorus of concern trolls — began to question if they had been blinded by liberal partisanship.
    <a href="https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/politics/lab-leak-theory-and-the-asiatic-form/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-42/politics/lab-leak-theor... (2022)
    Some of this was a case of people failing to recognise that Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence, reasoning (implicitly) like this:
    Trump lies all the time + Trump said X => not X
    instead of like this:
    Trump says whatever suits him, regardless of the truth + Trump said X => no significant change to our credence in X
    > Calling it the “Chinavirus” was obviously racist and weird.
    That was a dumb Trumpism for sure, but separately from that, here in Australia, before the global spread of covid became too obvious to ignore, there was a sense among right-thinking people that even being concerned about it, let alone wanting to take any kind of action, was a manifestation of anti-Chinese racism / very literal xenophobia.
    Angostura · 1791178994 · focus · HN ↗
    > Does anyone else remember when claiming it was a lab in China that leaked was “racist”
    No. I remember it being called a conspiracy theory. And it still is.
  2. hansvm · 1791171080 · focus · HN ↗
    Last I saw, plausible, unconfirmed, nobody is willing/able to provide enough information to be able to confirm one way or another.
  3. lumost · 1791171119 · focus · HN ↗
    I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
    We’ll never know if the lab in Wuhan originated the virus. But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
    aliljet · 1791173122 · focus · HN ↗
    Were they first patients?
    jijji · 1791174307 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, according to some reports, the first reported incidents happened in November 2019 and the months prior, from people who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology (according to US government sources) [0]. Those people were: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, Zhu Yan.
    [0] <a href="https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19" rel="nofollow">https://www.public.news/p/first-people-sickened-by-covid-19
    soganess · 1791175376 · focus · HN ↗
    Not according to them and this little-known publication called "Science." I've never heard of it, but seems legit:
    <a href="https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chinese-scientist-accused-being-pandemic-s-patient-zero" rel="nofollow">https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chin...
    jijji · 1791175537 · focus · HN ↗
    yes of course they all denied ever being sick in November 2019. China even denied that the wet market was the original source of infection. China also disputed any claims that they practiced "gain of function" research at all at WIV, even though that was uncovered by the recent evidence presented in Congress against Anthony Fauci, who funded the whole thing in the first place.
    soganess · 1791175662 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, of course, the absence of evidence is always evidence of a cover up.
    jijji · 1791176334 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    panja · 1791177126 · focus · HN ↗
    He has a target on his head. I would do the same, and pretty much any lawyer would recommend the same.
    jolux · 1791178273 · focus · HN ↗
    Treating pleading the Fifth as evidence of guilt is exactly the kind of unfairness the Fifth Amendment is meant to protect against.
    Fricken · 1791181944 · focus · HN ↗
    I first came across a news item about a mysterious outbreak and lockdown in Wuhan on November 2019. In February 2020 I went looking for that news item and couldn't find it. I had also done a bunch of reading online about Level IV biolabs and gain-of-function research, and that information had changed too. So maybe I'm crazy. Or maybe not.
    happosai · 1791176813 · focus · HN ↗
    According to partisan online newsletter "public.news" that claims to have interviewed anonymous US government sources.
    Unfortunately online search has gone useless and it's not possible to find out if anyone ever confirmed anything about that report. Just gazillion of other newslets repeating the original claim.
    bulbar · 1791177221 · focus · HN ↗
    Normally, I would count that as a strong signal that the origin was said lab. But with the current government, I don't think such a report in isolation should be considered as strong evidence. The US is not trustworthy at the moment.
    nostrademons · 1791181065 · focus · HN ↗
    It wasn't the current government. The statement was published at the tail end of the first Trump administration but the Biden administration continued to say they had serious questions about the lab leak hypothesis.
    tzs · 1791177661 · focus · HN ↗
    That is all based on the claim that they had illnesses with symptoms consistent with COVID. But those are also consistent with the flu and with the common cold and with other seasonal viruses which were also active at the time, since November is in the respiratory illness season there.
    cma · 1791173182 · focus · HN ↗
    Source on first patients being WIV workers? I think there was a US intelligence report that claimed several fell ill in Nov., some with incompatible symptoms, and with claims from WIV they didn't test positive for antibodies (not saying take those at face value). There's also the wet market and the sampling done in gutters around the different stalls and a whole competing story there, which is also the kind of scenario in the 2002 SARS outbreak.
    fsckboy · 1791173521 · focus · HN ↗
    >...were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus...
    ...with funding from a US group that discussed conducting this gain of function research in China using a spike protein at the furin cleavage site, a group whose members were appointed to come up with an explanation for what had happened.
    tzs · 1791175568 · focus · HN ↗
    Virus outbreaks are usually first recognized in large cities. Most large Chinese cities have labs that study coronaviruses. They were established in response to SARS-CoV-1 in the early 2000s.
    So no matter where it comes from the chances are good a coronavirus outbreak will first be detected in a city that has a coronavirus lab.
    lumost · 1791177043 · focus · HN ↗
    My understanding is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was one of only 2 BSL-4 labs in china in 2019, and the only one focused on emergent viruses. This is out of 684 major Chinese cities.
    hypfer · 1791179257 · focus · HN ↗
    The good thing about free will is that one can just believe that something is true, regardless of how much people on the web hit oneself over the head for it.
    Ideally, said belief is rooted in scientific methods, of course.
    But there is actually no need for this "lab! No! Market! no! Lab!" ping-pong that seems to be developing here.
    siva7 · 1791178886 · focus · HN ↗
    You seem to deliberately mislead readers...
    ANarrativeApe · 1791177642 · focus · HN ↗
    Beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean impossible,any more than on the balance of probabilities means beyond reasonable doubt.
    Angostura · 1791178768 · focus · HN ↗
    > But it is awfully strange that the first patients of a novel pandemic coronavirus were workers at a lab conducting gain of function research on coronavirus.
    Except - as far as I know - the first patients weren’t.
    nostrademons · 1791180951 · focus · HN ↗
    What do you know?
    In 2021 the WSJ reported that 3 workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 with symptoms resembling COVID-19 that they sought hospital care. Their source was a U.S. intelligence report.
    <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-at-wuhan-lab-fuels-debate-on-covid-19-origin-11621796228" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/world/china/intelligence-on-sick-staff-a...
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/asia/covid-19-origins-wuhan-lab-staff-treatment-illness-flu-14873524" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20210622121243/https://www.chann...
    The WHO responded by saying the lab leak theory was extremely unlikely, and this line of investigation was dropped (except possibly within the government - this is the sort of information that would be convenient for governments to know but inconvenient for the public to know). But then in a follow-up documentary, a WHO scientist that published that statement says that they were under heavy pressure from the Chinese government to do so:
    <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-embarek/" rel="nofollow">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/08/12/who-origins-...
    happymellon · 1791179086 · focus · HN ↗
    > I recently heard a scientist use a phrase something along the lines of “when two extraordinarily improbably events occur together, there is probably a connection”.
    Dumbest thing I've heard today.
    Ever since we started studying autism, we found it! Therefore studying causes autism.
    fragmede · 1791180536 · focus · HN ↗
    I might not have been the best student, but I wouldn't call studying "extraordinarily improbable".
    happymellon · 1791181737 · focus · HN ↗
    So it's not improbable research lab that was testing off runs from a wet market found the stuff they were searching for?
    jacobolus · 1791180431 · focus · HN ↗
    This is not an accurate description. The first identified patients were people working in or living near a "wet market" where (among other things) various wild animals were sold. It's plausible that someone was infected somewhere else and the market was only the site of a "superspreader event", but further details are speculative, informed by indirect phylogenetic evidence rather than direct forensic evidence.
    It's not unusual/unexpected that there were labs working on coronavirus research in several major Chinese cities: the 2002 SARS outbreak, which began in southern China and caught researchers and public health officials off guard, led to significant investment in the study of coronaviruses.
    anon48293 · 1791180955 · focus · HN ↗
    The first corona identified. The Wuhan workers got sick around a month before.
    They also didn’t find any animal corona samples at the market. Also around 50% of people of the initial cluster had no connection to the market.
    Also the hospital where the lab workers were treated was on the corner of this market.
    BonerWiener · 1791181291 · focus · HN ↗
    Now, we just need a few sources for these claims.
    jacobolus · 1791181961 · focus · HN ↗
    There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
    All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
    jacobolus · 1791182749 · focus · HN ↗
    Update: apparently the US intelligence report was eventually declassified and published in 2023: <a href="https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Report-on-Potential-Links-Between-the-Wuhan-Institute-of-Virology-and-the-Origins-of-COVID-19-20230623.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://archive.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Rep...
    Quoting the report:
    • The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
    • The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
    • The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
    • Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
    dualvariable · 1791182858 · focus · HN ↗
    That article was written by the same journalist who co-wrote the aluminum tubes story for the NYT that was part of the justification for the Iraq War.
    dualvariable · 1791182494 · focus · HN ↗
    It is very unlikely that the initial superspreader event of a pandemic would be in a wet market that would be the one place for an animal spillover.
    And when you look at the documented lab release of SARS-CoV-1, it killed the researcher's mother. If a lab leak happened, we would expect it to hit the people closest to the researchers at the lab who were infected, and the places they visited. Hitting only the wet market isn't very likely.
    The outbreak looks like a wet market spillover. The fact that it happened in the same city as WIV is an unusual coincidence, but if the virus developed in rural Hubei, it was likely it would spillover in Wuhan.
    julianeon · 1791181447 · focus · HN ↗
    I think we've overcorrected.
    For what it's worth, the "first patients were lab workers" part isn't established. What is documented is that the earliest cases cluster around the Huanan market. The lab workers attribution shouldn't be carrying the argument.
    Before COVID, people were just unable to be roused out of their sleep about the dangers of cross-species virus transmission. "Wake me up when something important happens." By a certain standard nothing important had ever happened: so people slept on.
    Then COVID hit. "Time to wake up." Suddenly people went from basically unconscious to hypervigilant overnight. Something which was a clear and present danger - the wet markets - looked uninteresting compared to the lab. Environmental samples taken there tested positive. In other words: don't sleep on the wet markets again - they are dangerous, then and now.
    While paying attention was arguably an improvement over complete indifference, I don't think we landed in the right place.
  4. chihuahua · 1791171312 · focus · HN ↗
    All the evidence was destroyed (probably just a coincidence, LOL), so it can't be proved either way.
  5. felixg3 · 1791171322 · focus · HN ↗
    Pretty much confirmed by western intelligence including the German BND
    gruez · 1791171685 · focus · HN ↗
    Source?
    theoreticalmal · 1791172291 · focus · HN ↗
    Copy and paste this into Google: Wuhan lab leak fbi
    MitziMoto · 1791172758 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah, the old "Do your research!".
    tzs · 1791176243 · focus · HN ↗
    The results show they said this was low confidence, and the results will also turn up that other US government agencies came to the opposite conclusion, also with low confidence.
  6. alexnewman · 1791171421 · focus · HN ↗
    I get downvoted every time I say this but the evidence doesn’t even prove it started in wuhan, or even China. It could of easily been brought here by the military games that happened before that
    theoreticalmal · 1791172345 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you have any thoughts as to why the FBI disagrees with your perspective?
    <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64806903
    bix6 · 1791172825 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t but this guy in your article does
    > A natural origin is still the more likely theory, said Professor David Robertson, head of viral genomics and bioinformatics at University of Glasgow.
    ericmay · 1791173092 · focus · HN ↗
    So the suggestion is that it occurred naturally in China and then military games happened near Wuhan which spread the virus? Or did someone from Wuhan with ties/service in the Chinese military contract the virus locally and then spread it throughout China via travel to these military games?
    Is that right, or is your point simply that it naturally occurred in China in the vicinity of Wuhan? I ask since the OP mentioned military games.
    alexnewman · 1791173240 · focus · HN ↗
    They don’t disagree. They don’t know. They just said what’s most likely. They don’t even give a %
    toast0 · 1791174820 · focus · HN ↗
    Is the US FBI a credible investigator for something like this?
    a) I don't know that they have the right skills to track down patient zero of a disease.
    b) They certainly don't have jurisdiction to do such an investigation in a foreign country, unless invited, and there's no way they were invited.
    I strongly doubt we'll ever see a good answer on this, unless we get very lucky and some random research sample is looked at later that shows detection months earlier in a different location or if the Chinese did a good investigation and kept it quiet, but it leaks in a couple decades.
    A timely and thorough investigation might have been able to determine an origin, but the US FBI certainly didn't do one.
    junofan · 1791176665 · focus · HN ↗
    The US can just declare extraterritorial jurisdiction. We do it for bioweapons. Uncle Sam doesn’t need an invite.
    IIRC one of the FBI guys who investigated anthrax was like “yeah, it’s pretty obvious looking at what that lab was up to.”
    ahtihn · 1791181827 · focus · HN ↗
    Anyone can declare anything.
    You think China just lets US law enforcement do investigations on their territory without their consent??
    tzs · 1791176362 · focus · HN ↗
    Your link also says
    >> And other US government agencies have drawn differing conclusions to the FBI's.
  7. potatoproduct · 1791172116 · focus · HN ↗
    Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
    vachina · 1791172796 · focus · HN ↗
    Source? Your account is no better hearsay.
    sudo_cowsay · 1791173060 · focus · HN ↗
    ur username?
    nxm · 1791173691 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s clear that they knew about the extent of the issue weeks earlier and tried to contain it, rather than letting the world know
    vintermann · 1791179742 · focus · HN ↗
    I agree it's clear they knew something was up and tried to control information getting out.
    But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.
    ruficufi274 · 1791173665 · focus · HN ↗
    now do NIH / Doge / Twitter
    khazhoux · 1791176153 · focus · HN ↗
    Objection: relevance.
    ididndn · 1791179268 · focus · HN ↗
    removal of evidence, there were British and US scientists involved also
    avidiax · 1791176884 · focus · HN ↗
    I feel it's more complicated than that. I wouldn't be surprise if Beijing does not actually know whether this was a lab leak or not.
    The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
    But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
    In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
    adventured · 1791179785 · focus · HN ↗
    There's no scenario where a local government knows whether it was a leak or not, and Beijing is kept in the dark. The fear local governments feel when it comes to being subservient to Beijing would entirely rule out hiding anything from them about what actually happened.
    nostrademons · 1791181185 · focus · HN ↗
    It is not in Beijng's interest to know. The truth that is convenient for the Chinese government is that it had nothing to do with Chinese government research. Therefore that is the truth and nobody is going to go digging much deeper, or if they do it's going to be buried in some report that never gets published.
    vintermann · 1791179530 · focus · HN ↗
    In a state like China, this would probably happen as a panic response, not because the people covering up and destroying evidence know that their institution has done something bad/embarrassing, but because they fear it might be so and it's far better for their personal careers to suppress too much than to suppress too little. It's quite possible the people running cover-ups knew as little as us.
    And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
    dualvariable · 1791182988 · focus · HN ↗
    Of course, it should point to China. They're the ones who didn't shut down the wet markets after SARS-CoV-1.
  8. thelastgallon · 1791176324 · focus · HN ↗
    Bill Gurley has a presentation about it, asking questions: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765794">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49765794
  9. khazhoux · 1791176436 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, Americans were essentially prohibited from discussing this (most obvious) possibility because of fears that doing so would incite racist feelings towards Chinese people.
    Then it was made worse by Trump's insistence on calling it the Chinavirus (just to make it "not my fault!") and predictably then the anti-Trump left reacted by censoring any connection between the lab and the outbreak.
  10. qznc · 1791177373 · focus · HN ↗
    I believe it was zoonosis, not a lab leak: <a href="https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab-the" rel="nofollow">https://marketwise.substack.com/p/did-covid-19-come-from-a-l...
  11. TacticalCoder · 1791177423 · focus · HN ↗
    > Did anyone ever confirm if the lab in Wuhan China was the originator of COVID? I remember that was a rumor but never heard if there was anything to it.
    Official report mandated by US Congress (under Biden btw): says it's likely it's a lab leak of a modified virus. CIA also changed its official stance and consider it's likely a lab leak.
    The international expert who everybody based its idea that "it cannot possibly be a lab leak" has been debarred and cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
    To me there's "something" off and it is a lab leak. And I always felt like this.
    kennywinker · 1791177880 · focus · HN ↗
    > And I always felt like this.
    Hence you looked for evidence that matched and dismissed evidence that doesn't match.
    Unless you can tell me that the majority of virologists agree it was a lab leak, I'm going to go with their majority opinion - which last I checked was that it couldn't possibly be a lab leak for specific genetic reasons.
    happymellon · 1791179955 · focus · HN ↗
    > cannot ever get funding from the US for research on modified viruses.
    So a guy who disagreed with the official CIA stance has been barred from obtaining funding for research from the US.
    I mean, that just makes them seem more trustworthy.
  12. matt123456789 · 1791178735 · focus · HN ↗
    That was exactly the strain of Coronavirus that the lab was working with, and exactly the kinds of mutations you'd expect them to make.
    But no, I'm sure it was the wombats.
    hypfer · 1791179591 · focus · HN ↗
    The english indie rock band that formed in liverpool in 2003 did covid-19?
    mikeyouse · 1791180837 · focus · HN ↗
    It wasn’t the exact strain, the mutations were nothing like you’d expect them to make, and good lord people on HN need better news and science sources if this is still the level of discussion on the topic.
    khazhoux · 1791183266 · focus · HN ↗
    There is still no conclusive explanation. You can find reputable sources for either theory.
  13. vintermann · 1791179026 · focus · HN ↗
    There was endless discussion about how unlikely or reasonable it was with furin cleavage sites and whatnot. I wouldn't trust authoritative summaries.
4. Mobius01 · 1791173635 · focus · HN ↗
  How did you enjoy the book? I did like her nuclear war volume, but it could have used some editing.
  1. aworks · 1791174515 · focus · HN ↗
    I preferred the Nuclear War scenario book. Same style of narrative mixed with expert insights. The first several days of the scenario were riveting, after that less so. This one tries to describe the impact of social media and influencers, which I found inconclusive.
    She also reports that Bush rode in the back of a laundry truck on the day of 9/11 to avoid detection getting to the Doomsday plane. Single source attribution, though.
  2. robmusial · 1791176533 · focus · HN ↗
    I thought it was better than the Nuclear war scenario, which I also enjoyed. I thought she did a better job in this one explaining possible off ramps or inflection points in the scenario but saying "this is the one we're exploring", which answers some of the critique of the nuclear war scenario.
5. Fricken · 1791181330 · focus · HN ↗
  "The Siberian Incident", "Devil's Pass", "The Siberian Incident", "To The Lake" also all deal with outbreaks of various sorts originating from Siberia. It's a trope.

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