A Sense of Doubt blog post #3423 - COVID ORIGIN: Two Theories
Lab leak or bat transmission through meat sold at a Wuhan wet market?
 June 14, 2024 |
Good morning. We’re covering the origin of the Covid virus — as well as the G7 summit, policing and soccer.
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| An exhibition on the fight against Covid in Wuhan, China. Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times |
Dueling theories
The origin of the Covid virus remains the pandemic’s biggest mystery. Did the virus jump to human beings from animals being sold at a food market in Wuhan, China? Or did the virus leak from a laboratory in Wuhan?
U.S. officials remain divided. The F.B.I. and the Department of Energy each concluded that a lab leak was the more likely cause. The National Intelligence Council and some other agencies believe that animal-to-human transmission is more likely. The C.I.A. has not taken a position. The question remains important partly because it can inform the strategies to reduce the chances of another horrific pandemic.
A recent Times Opinion essay — by Alina Chan, a biologist — refocused attention on the issue by making the case for the lab-leak theory. In today’s newsletter, I’ll try to lay out the clearest arguments for each side to help you decide which you consider more likely.
The case for natural transmission
1. It’s the norm.
Covid is part of the coronavirus family, so named because the virus contains a protein shaped like a spike. (Corona is the Latin word for crown.) In recent decades, the main way that coronaviruses have infected people is through animal-to-human transmission, which is also known as natural transmission.
The SARS virus, for example, appears to have jumped from civet cats, a relative of the mongoose, to humans in Asia in 2002. MERS seems to have jumped from camels to people in the Middle East around 2012. There is no previous example of a major coronavirus escaping a lab.
When you’re trying to choose between a historically common explanation for a phenomenon and an unusual explanation, the common one is usually the better bet.
2. Look around the market.
Two scientific papers have pointed out that a suspiciously large number of early confirmed Covid cases had connections to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. Many of these cases, in late 2019, occurred in people who lived near the market. This map comes from a Times story about the research:
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| Source: Michael Worobey et al., preprint via Zenodo | By The New York Times |
Importantly, the market also sold live animals, including raccoon dogs, that scientists previously found to be susceptible to coronaviruses.
3. Look inside the market.
Shortly after Covid began spreading, Chinese scientists swabbed walls, floors and other surfaces inside the Huanan market for the virus. They found a cluster of positive samples in the market’s southwest corner, where 10 stalls sold live animals.
“Strikingly, five of the samples came from a single stall,” my colleagues Carl Zimmer and Benjamin Mueller wrote. That stall appears to have had a history of selling raccoon dogs.
The case for a lab leak
1. Follow the lab.
If historical logic points to natural transmission, a different concept arguably points to a lab leak: Occam’s razor. It’s a philosophical principle holding that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is usually the correct one. In this case, a new SARS-like virus started in a city with one of the world’s leading labs for researching SARS-like viruses. Many Chinese cities have markets selling live animals; only one is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The Wuhan lab maintained “one of the world’s largest repositories of bat samples, which has enabled its coronavirus research,” U.S. intelligence officials have written. Before the pandemic, the lab’s scientists traveled to faraway caves to collect virus samples. And bats, like raccoon dogs, can carry coronaviruses.
One possibility is that a virus that would otherwise have remained in the caves infected a lab employee. Another possibility is that scientists in Wuhan engineered a contagious new virus while researching cures and that the virus accidentally escaped.
Notably, there is no evidence of any infected animals, dead or alive, from the Huanan market. Consider this table, from Chan’s Opinion essay:
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| By The New York Times |
2. Leaks happen.
In recent decades, reports suggests that laboratory employees working on a variety of diseases have been accidentally infected in the United States, Britain, China, Germany, Russia, South Korea and elsewhere.
Even before the pandemic, the Wuhan lab seemed to present a safety risk. When one outside expert heard that the lab planned to research coronaviruses without using state-of-the-art precautions, he wrote in 2018 that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.”
3. China controls the evidence.
It’s worth asking which of the two stories China would rather the world believe. Either would be damaging, but a lab leak seems significantly more so. It would mean that China’s scientific incompetence killed millions of people — which could explain why Chinese officials have worked so hard to restrict outside research and scrutiny about the virus’s origins.
The bottom line
Do you find both explanations plausible? I do.
As I’ve followed this debate over the past few years, I have gone back and forth about which is more likely. Today, I’m close to 50-50. I have heard similar sentiments from some experts.
“No one has proof,” Julian Barnes, who covers intelligence agencies for The Times, told me. “Everyone is using logic.” Julian’s advice to the rest of us: “Be wary, keep an open mind, rule nothing out.”
Related: Read the letters that The Times published in response to Chan’s essay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/well/live/covid-symptoms-mysteries.html
https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/02/26/2115243/virologist-disputes-wsj-report-on-a-minority-opinion-suggesting-covid-lab-leak-origin
https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/we-dont-really-know-covids-true-death
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Transcript:
Well, it’s June, so I guess it’s once again time to talk about the lab leak hypothesis. If you haven’t seen my two previous videos on the topic, the first in June of 2021 and the second in June of 2023, allow me to summarize: at the beginning of the SARS-CoV2 pandemic, researchers traced the virus to its origin near Wuhan, China, and wondered if the virus had evolved naturally in the environment (thanks to a bustling wet market where such viruses often spring up) or whether it had perhaps escaped (through incompetence or evil-doing) from the laboratory nearby where scientists were studying coronaviruses.
Further investigation pinpointed the wet market as the precise location where the virus jumped to humans several times, that the genome of the virus is consistent with a natural evolution, and that a virus that “escaped” from a lab would not behave the way that SARS-CoV-2 behaved. The first of this data was published in the journal Nature in March of 2020, and in the years since, a multitude of researchers have added data supporting and refining this hypothesis.
Despite that growing amount of data, certain people have continued to hold onto the idea that the virus must have escaped from the lab. The evidence they initially offered in support of the “lab leak” hypothesis is that there is a lab near the area where the virus first emerged. In the four years since, they have added exactly zero data to support this hypothesis any further.
But hey, who needs data when you have a compelling conspiracy theory? As with all conspiracy theories, this one scratches an itch in the average human brain: no one wants to think that 7 million people died because of poor sanitation, a random genetic mutation, lack of preparedness, and inadequate global healthcare. Wouldn’t it be so much nicer to blame a specific person for fucking up? Or one shady government trying to cover things up? Or another shady government developing a bioweapon? Something we can fix with a prison sentence, a guillotine, or a quick little land war in Asia?
So yeah, understandable! But what’s frustrating is that the mainstream media should be helping the average person understand this stuff, but instead they’re helping the lab leak whack-jobs continue to spread their bullshit. Last time I talked about this it was the Washington Post, and this time it’s the New York Times: Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points, by noted loony Alina Chan. Spoiler alert, none of those 5 key points is actual evidence for the lab leak. Point 1 is their one data point: there’s a lab near where the virus emerged.
Angela Rasmussen has, as usual, a great thread explaining the other points, which I welcome you to check out (all links to everything I discuss are found in the transcript, linked in the dooblydoo). But the quick overview is that they’re a mix of long debunked ideas and outright lies.
Alongside this ridiculous opinion piece, lab leak proponents have also managed to convince Republican Congressional representatives to waste their time using this conspiracy theory as an excuse to yell at scientists. That’s right, that’s qAnon doofus Marjorie Taylor Greene, given ample time to scream at an accomplished scientist who saved thousands of American lives during the pandemic, for which he’s already been rewarded with at least two “credible attempts on his life that prompted the arrests of two people.”
And that’s where I come to the actual topic of this video. There’s nothing left to talk about concerning the legitimacy of the “lab leak hypothesis,” because proponents have had several years to offer any evidence for it and they have failed. There would be nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with a handful of kooks continuing over the years to desperately try to find anything that fits their narrative. But as with most conspiracy theories, this one has a very real and very negative impact on our society.
This abuse of scientists on the public stage is one example. Congressional representatives are only encouraging the batshit science deniers to continue to threaten and harass scientists doing work they don’t like, which is bad enough but it also contributes to an overall distrust of scientists among the general public, who see this happening and assume if there’s smoke there must be fire. You would hope that as COVID restrictions went away, harassment of scientists would ease up, but researchers say it’s actually only getting worse: “All the data that we do have points to it increasing rather than decreasing; it’s certainly getting quite prolific,” says Lyndal Byford, director of news and partnerships at the Australian Science Media Centre in Adelaide. “I’m hearing a lot from universities and research organizations that they’re seeing it as an increasing problem.”
That article in Nature also mentions my friend Dr. Siouxsie Wiles, who was essentially the Dr. Fauci of New Zealand. You may think that because New Zealand had relatively great success controlling the pandemic, she’d be a national hero, but just like here in the US, anti-science lunatics have tried to make her life a living hell. The harassment got so bad, and her university did so little to try to help her, that she had to sue the University of Auckland. That case is still ongoing but once it finishes, I’ll give you guys a complete overview of it because it is BONKERS.
That distrust of scientists is one major reason why the US failed to protect citizens from COVID. People were taking dewormer paste rather than getting a free, safe, effective vaccine. They refused to wear free, simple, effective masks or avoid dining indoors with strangers. Continuing to erode the public’s trust in scientists and the work they do makes EVERYTHING worse: it delays our efforts to slow climate change, it fuels the bigots who want you to think there are only two immutable genders, and it will make the NEXT pandemic that much harder to handle.
And as we make “scientist” a high-risk, distrusted profession, we discourage people from becoming scientists. Who wants to spend 20 years in school only to be paid poorly AND get death threats for doing your job, AND get called up by Congress to get yelled at by a “bleach blonde bad built butch body” bitch with beans for brains.
Fewer scientists means less research and all those issues I mentioned before get even worse.
And finally, this “lab leak” hearing is taking up precious time, money, and energy that could be better spent on an investigation that would ACTUALLY HELP US PREPARE FOR THE NEXT PANDEMIC. Because believe me, there will be another one, and we can save millions of lives by acting now. An actual, helpful investigation would ask things like “Why was Trump allowed to simply delete the National Security Council’s pandemic preparedness unit in 2018?” “Had they remained in place, would they have been helpful in slowing or stopping the spread of COVID-19?” “Which politicians were responsible for spreading misinformation that led to extra deaths?” “How many American lives would have been saved with universal healthcare?” “How many lives would have been saved with universal basic income that allowed people to stay home?” And crucially, “How can we do better next time?”
Because here’s the thing: we can do better. Much better.
Do you know how scientists were able to develop a COVID vaccine in a single year? Not just hard work, but preparedness: the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, is an office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It was established in 2006 to use advanced research in biomedicine to fill in gaps in the private industry in order to prepare for future pandemics or bioweapons, and it directly led to the development of the mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 during “Operation Warp Speed.” OWS cost the country about $18 billion. For just $24 billion, “the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy estimates it (could) have prototype vaccines ready for each of the 26 known viral families that cause human disease. Showing that these vaccines are safe and promote an immune response before we need them will allow for vaccines to be ready for deployment within 100 days after virus identification.”
That’s according to the Institute for Progress, which also points out that currently BARDA only receives $2.6 billion in funding, or about the equivalent that the government spends on one nuclear submarine.
Another way to think about these large sums of money is that the $24 billion we’d need to have vaccines for every known viral disease in humans is only twice the amount we’ve given to Israel in the past eight months. Sure, we get a lot of that aid back because Israel uses it to buy our bombs to take out all those hospitals and universities in Palestine, but we also get back the money we spend on pandemic preparedness by not having a bunch of people die and our economy shut down for a year or two. Personally, I think that’s a better deal.
And so that’s another question Congress could ask in a COVID-19 investigation: why don’t we just do that? Why don’t we just spend that money and protect our future?
The answer is sadly very clear–it’s the same reason why the “lab leak” hypothesis still has legs: because we don’t want to deal with a big, sometimes complicated problem that won’t affect us until some unknown date and time in the future. We’d rather yell at a scientist, and feel like we’ve fixed things once and for all.
Hey patrons! Enjoy this video early and ad-free until Friday morning!
Transcript:
In the video I posted Tuesday about the “Lab Leak” hypothesis, I called out the US Congress for wasting time letting Marjorie Taylor Greene yell at Dr. Anthony Fauci instead of conducting an actual, helpful investigation into our response to COVID, which could cover things like “Which politicians were responsible for spreading misinformation that led to extra deaths?”
At the time, I was thinking about people like, well, Donald Trump obviously but also people who are still in power, like Ron DeSantis. I was not thinking about the CIA. But I should have been! Because within minutes of me finishing that video, I saw this explosive investigation from Reuters: “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic.”
Fucking Christ.
As usual, the link to the article is in the transcript linked below or easily found at patreon.com/rebecca. But, spoiler alert, they admitted it. This happened. Everything I’m about to tell you actually happened.
In the Spring of 2020, when COVID-19 was killing tens of thousands of people every day, the US military launched an anti-vaccine propaganda campaign in Southeast Asia in order to undermine worldwide trust in China. They began by targeting people in the Philippines, spreading memes on social media networks like Facebook and Xitter that claimed China purposely released the virus in order to push their vaccines, which the bots claimed contained pork gelatin and therefore should be forbidden amongst Muslims. This, despite the fact that Sinovac claimed the vaccines were produced without pork products AND the fact that mainstream Islamic authorities confirmed that even if they were, they would still be fine for Muslims to take. Because let’s be serious: when science and religion clash in a way that puts lives at risk, the smarter religious leaders learn to “interpret” the rules in a way that keeps their adherents alive. There’s a reason why the number of Christian Scientists has cratered in the past 100 years.
If you’re looking at the timeline of all this and feeling a little confused, let me be clear: this campaign launched several months BEFORE China had even finished producing their vaccine. Like, they were priming people to reject the vaccine before it even dropped, the same way bigots give bad reviews to movies before the premiere because they saw a black woman in the trailer. A little well poisoning, as a treat.
But instead of just screwing with a movie studio’s bottom line, the US government actually contributed to, if not outright caused, tens of thousands of deaths from COVID in the Philippines, leading to the country having the lowest vaccination rate in Southeast Asia at just 2%.
And why? Because Chinese authorities were spreading disinformation that COVID had actually started in the United States. They punched us in the face, so we burnt down someone else’s house. Perfectly sensible.
And if you can believe it, the story gets worse the more details you learn. Here’s a fun selection I’ve chosen.
First, one officer involved in the campaign specifically said they did it because “We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners…So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”
Ha ha, remember when we were all like “hey global health is important because viruses don’t respect borders, can we please share vaccines with the world” and Bill Gates and friends said “LOL no”? Well the military’s response was to make that problem a million times worse. Cool, cool.
Second, the operation was done so sloppily that Facebook figured out what the US military was up to and went to them to tell them to knock it off. The military responded by begging Facebook not to delete their bot accounts and in return they promised to stop the anti-vaxx stuff. Facebook agreed, but the military didn’t keep their end of the bargain and continued to spread that disinformation.
Third, we can’t just blame this on Trump. Yes, the campaign started under his leadership and his administration changed some rules that allowed it to happen despite it ostensibly being peacetime, but when the anti-vaxx propaganda was still showing up after Biden took office, Facebook had to go back and ask them to stop AGAIN just after the inauguration in January of 2021. The discussion “was terrible,” said a senior administration official describing the reaction after learning of the campaign’s pig-related posts. “I was shocked. The administration was pro-vaccine and our concern was this could affect vaccine hesitancy, especially in developing countries.”
It took several more months before the National Security Council issued a directive to stop the campaign, and then several more months for the campaign to actually stop.
The Reuters piece ends on a harrowing note: “in February, the contractor that worked on the anti-vax campaign – General Dynamics IT – won a $493 million contract. Its mission: to continue providing clandestine influence services for the military.”
I’m not going to sit here and tell you there’s no difference between the Democrats and Republicans. What I am going to say is that we can’t just say “well Trump was crazy wasn’t he” and then forget all about this. I was glad to see this piece also point out a previous instance of the US military doing irreparable damage to public health in developing countries: in 2011, the military had figured out that Osama Bin Laden was hiding somewhere in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad. They thought they had the right compound, but to be sure, they hired a local doctor to organize a hepatitis vaccination program for local children, because they could then collect the needles and test the DNA to find if any of the children in the compound were relatives of Bin Laden.
That ultimately didn’t work, because the doctor went to the compound but instead of being let in he was given a phone number to call and arrange a time to enter. That phone number was then linked to Bin Laden, and so the military went in and captured and ultimately killed him. This all boggled my mind at the time because it sure sounds like Bin Laden wasn’t even using a burner phone, which means they could have figured this out in a number of other ways, like, I don’t know, try to deliver him a pizza or something?
The repercussions of that inane operation were serious and long-lasting: Pakistan kicked out several important charities working to help citizens, like Save the Children (which actually WAS trying to vaccinate the population), resulting in millions of dollars in aid going down the drain. And a concurrent polio vaccination program tanked because people assumed the US military was also behind that, and that it wasn’t actually going to help them at all. Aid workers are still fighting the resulting vaccine hesitancy today, more than a decade later.
Anyway, who was president during that Bin Laden operation? That’s right, everyone’s favorite leftwing podcaster, Barack Obama.
Again, the takeaway is NOT that “both sides are the same.” But the biggest difference that I can see, at least in the way these operations went, is that one side, the Democrats, can be bullied into doing the right thing. Biden eventually put a stop to the antivaxx disinformation scheme. And as for Obama, the resulting uproar from public health officials forced the US to officially ban the use of vaccination programs for covert operations. But ya know, the 2020 operation wasn’t a vaccination program. It was an anti-vaccination program. So that’s okay.
A lot of replies on my recent Lab Leak video – and every previous one, too, actually – is that well, we can’t trust China because they are lying liars who lie. And that’s true! They do! They seem to have downplayed the severity of COVID, and of course they did spread propaganda trying to claim the virus started in the US. Is it possible it started in the lab and they covered it up? Sure. But we have actual evidence that they DID try to cover up anything involving the wet market, because they dismantled it as soon as it was identified as the most plausible origin site, the animals that had been for sale were all disappeared, they refused to allow outside investigators to see the remains of the market, and they pulled out of a 4-country United Nations program designed to survey wet markets for their potential to cause future outbreaks. THAT very obvious cover up is the entire reason why the lab leak has become a conspiracy theory.
So now imagine how people in Asia will react to this news, that the US government purposely spread anti-vaccine disinformation that resulted in substantial numbers of people dying. And think about what other conspiracy theories, like “lab leak,” will now spread there. And no matter how little evidence there is for them, there will be no good answer to the explanation of, “Well, look what they lied about before. How can you trust them now?”
So congratulations to the Pentagon for once again making the world a worse place. Can’t wait to see the shocked Pikachu faces when the next pandemic rolls around, the world refuses vaccines, and we all die. My god that’s a bleak ending, I’m sorry. I’ll find a particularly cute Indy clip to end with.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2407.02 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3287 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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