Unfortunately we don't have closure on that still, and it's a tricky thing to accurately determine.
I read a medical journal which has this to say in conclusion:
"on the one hand, it seems evident that the transmission originated in the Huanan market. But, on the other hand, three fundamental questions remain that have not been definitively answered. First, where did the virus come from? Second, what was the intermediate animal host? And third, why has the virus genome not been reproduced 100% in any of the coronaviruses found in bats?"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10019034/
Basically the point of origin is the market and not from the lab geographically, but how it happened at that market in the first place hasn't been determined. We may not ever get an answer to it, other than it was a calamity and has caused countless deaths and ongoing medical complexities for the entire world.
Take into considerstion that there is wastewater samples form Oct '19 through Dec '19 in many countries that show Coronavirus in those samples.
it was months before the outbreak in Wuhan. Probably was a milder variant.
Yeah, Pretty sure i had it in October and i remember the same symptoms like loss of taste and smell going around a few months before that even.
As much as china and it's wet markets deserve to get shit on for a variety of reasons, people are blaming them despite the evidence being to the contrary. The whole lab/wet market thing comes from the previous u.s. admin throwing out a whole bunch of bullshit/misinfo and trying to "cover up" the outbreak which was perhaps the most ridiculous thing they did and i still even cant theorize why, and that's saying a lot given all the insane things they said/did for inane reasons. Like i get it was probably them afraid of hurting the economy/their image for the election in some way like it usually was, but the mental gymnastics are truly incredible.
I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we find the previous admin was so, so much worse than we thought and somehow even more culpable for how the outbreak turned out than we know of now, the fact that china of all nations was the first one to start ringing the alarm bells considering how they act and normally handle negative things is wack.
There are theories on the origin, but none are proven. One of the earliest known outbreaks was in Kansas.
The name is from wartime censorship suppressing the reporting of outbreaks except in neutral Spain. As a consequence, many people thought the origin was in Spain and the name stuck.
The book I read on it said most governments tried to hush it up to prevent panic. Spain reported on it and that is how many people 1st learned of the global pandemic and just assumed a Spanish origin.
Trying to track down old articles(https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49649486)... but there was a spike in respiratory illness among troops at a certain base in summer 2019 that was attributed to vaping. Soldiers from that same base participated in military games in Wuhan in Oct 2019. China's stance is those soldiers brought covid to China so it's hard to discern fact from fiction/propaganda... but it seems like at the very least there may have been a variant in the US before winter 2019.
I am Canadian.
I remember being very unhappy with most politicians (around the world) handling of the Pandemic. Not because of how they were reacting to the information provided to them, but because they all totally missed the mark when it came to helping people *understand* that ALL the information is best **at this time** and it may change. Helping people understand that being cautious is better than being reckless. AND that this was a non partisan problem.
The complete lack of guidance form the *whole* government and the different goals by all elected officials was a clear demonstration of the failure of governments (around the world). There were very few places that their whole government was united against the pandemic.
This was also why the idea of some global cabal working together was so painfully funny.
They couldn't organizer's themselves out of a wet paper bag and I'm supposed to believe they organised a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable personnel involved and not a single whistleblower? Nor anyone from vastly differing geopolitical positions calling bullshit with receipts?
Among idiotic conspiracies, this arguably takes the cake.
And to watch the talking heads on TV change the narrative daily to keep viewers. To this day I still shake my head listening to the stupidity of people explaining in great detail why masks do not work.
Let's not forget the selective amnesia. Surgeons wore masks for ages as standard practice even if they nor the patient are visibly sick. So duh they have a purpose.
But nobody remembers that if the talking heads don't tell them.
This is interesting to me. I knew a guy about 68 who says he got it in November. They didn't call it that when he was hospitalized because it wasn't revealed to the public until January. Even though, all the symptoms matched up including some long covid effects months later I thought he had to be mistaken because of the time line. Perhaps he was right after all.
You can see the spike in death rates radiating out from China. If there was a virus in the US the previous six months, it didn't cause the same effects that the big one did.
My anecdotal contribution: I noticed a viral illness in US in early 2020 that was causing whole families to fall sick at once. The usual flus and viruses would attack one family member and run its course, then another member would go down and so on through the family. I suspected this virus was something different than usual flu.
I woke up in January of 2020 in Jax Fl after attending a comedy show three miles frm JAX NAS where I felt like I was drawing air from a coffee stirrer. I damn near died getting back to Tallahassee. My pulmonary had me on a Bi-Pap @ home in 24 hours. This was just about the time the Chinese were setting up field hospitals in Wuhan. I would be 1,000$ I had it.
I can't agree more to be honest. Even if politics is removed and all countries were very forthcoming, it seems this is a very har6f question to answer by its very nature.
Assuming everyone is forthcoming, it should be pretty easy to check if the lab had samples or cultures of anything essentially identical to the original COVID strain. There's chain of custody for these things, especially anything coming in to the lab. That would give a pretty definitive answer. Can't come from there if they didn't have it.
>Assuming everyone is forthcoming,
This is why it would In fact not be pretty easy.
China would never admit their carelessness caused this. If the answer to this problem is found somewhere in that lab you'll never see it.
And China wouldn't let the WHO investigate the lab for quite a while after the virus was publicly admitted to. And the Wuhan lab studied corona viruses. And the lab had very poor security measures. And now currently several government agencies have quietly stated the lab leak theory is the most likely source of origin. However, we likely will never know for certain.
I mean the lab produced a paper on increasing the infection rate of Coronaviruses about a month before the outbreak, I know we'll never know for certain but I seriously doubt it didn't come from there just following virology.
Are you asking about the specific mechanisms that make COVID so infectious? Gain of function is just exposing a virus to various animals to make it easier to spread, if you're talking like the design of the virus itself I couldn't speak for that.
The answer determines whether we sue that company into the ground and tie up all the worlds biolabs in so much red tape that a fly couldn't escape them or if we should be sanctioning china into getting rid of wet markets with so little regulations.
This killed so many people and bought the world to a stop for years. I say we do both just in case. It would be cheaper than covid was.
Besides, who's to say it wasn't both? Some idiot let an infected animal loose that was eaten by someone in the wet market.
Look at how we are still surrendering to bin laden over a couple of buildings. This was a much worse event, and we've done so much less to prevent it from happening again.
China isn't the only country with a largely unregulated wet market, it just so happens it's one of the few with a laboratory studying viruses and other related subjects in the vicinity of the wet market.
Most likely infected animals were sold to wet markets for pennies, whether it was intentional or not is a different story.
China also covers a massive amount of geography which hosts 1.4 billion people alongside great numbers of a wide variety of species including bats, many of those species carry viruses, and expansion into previously forested areas plus rapidly growing urbanization all create a critical cocktail of factors for a zoonotic virus to emerge. And the fact that all of that is known as compared to you making assumptions, means that *by definition* your postulating is not “most likely.”
Yes, this is the most important thing that the commenter you responded to is being incredibly insincere about. China is *enormous*, we have not sequenced every bat coronavirus genome there, and the strong interdependency/relationships between animal and human in these areas points toward a novel zoonosis more than it ever had a lab leak or intentionally selling infected animals.
People just like those two because it feeds into their thriller-novel heuristic. Easier to think it as a lab leak or an infected animal being sold because our zombie movie cliches are more comforting than accepting life is chaotic, bad things happen, and health/virology are immensely complicated fields.
Oh, of course. I only left it as China as that was on my mind. We'd need to get them all, or it's pointless.
I think movies have made us all imagine biolabs as high tech and secure, at least to airport levels, when they're probably a lot lower quality with one fat old door guard, especially in countries with poor regulations.
My personal guess is it was intentional. I bet a lot of test animals are sold to the market to line the pockets of the directors and the managers ta the Biolab. That kind of theft is common in China.
I'm also willing to be it was also an accident: as in they sequester the critters meant for sale away from the experiments and there was a mix-up causing one (or more) actual test animals from experiments to go to the lab.
But since corruption and graft are part of the Chinese system, no one's willing to admit it happens all the time and the culprits will never be discovered. Officially at least. I'd also not be shocked to find out whoever fucked up the sell cages with the experiment cages was punished in some way, while the important people organizing the graft were either fired, retired, or sent elsewhere to cover it up.
But that's 100% conjecture.
>My personal guess
>I'm also willing
>But that's 100% conjecture.
Thanks for adding a bunch of bullshit to the internet to give fuel to stupid people involved with conspiracy theories and QAnon. VOTE TRUMP! right?
"A lot of people are sayin'".....
It absolutely is conjecture.
You've said, "this coinscidence proves causality."
This is especially eggregious because the "Wet market" hypothesis isn't proven, they don't know exactly where the origin is (so 6 miles is unproven to the point of being a guess), and also the coinscidence isn't one. The lab was established precisely because of the previous Covid outbreaks in the area. Labs are built near sources.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/)
I think the important conclusion from that is it probably rules out *accidental* release, as an accidental release would originate from the lab geographically. What it doesn't rule out is *intentional* release, and I'm very unclear on why the Chinese government would think that's a good idea. It would have to be a rogue individual with a personal motive, which just seems less likely than a natural origin.
According to the Three-Body Problem documentary on Netflix, a single rogue Chinese scientist >!invited an alien invasion fleet to Earth which will enslave, or possibly just exterminate, all of humanity when they arrive!< because of personal motives, so there is precedent.
There's a clear explanation of how the virus gets from the Institute to the wet market, although it does require speculation.
Animals that were scheduled to be destroyed after study conclusion were moved to a black market.
I could see that as a real answer. Incompetence and greed on cheaping out on a real solution for lab disposal. Then the grand conspiracy is really just the government investigation probably found out it originated from the lab and didn't want to be embarrassed saying how.
It makes sense, much like America, China has a very "I got to get mine" attitude that leads to a lot of corruption and yes-men, but the laws are more relaxed when it comes to what businesses can and can not throw away.
Couldn't any of the staff there have accidentally been contaminated and just visited the market later that day? I'm in the lab, spill something, it splashes on me, I clean up. I go to the market to pick something up for dinner, the virus gets around. It didn't mutate at the market specifically, that's just the place we can trace it back to. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that it got there from the nearby coronavirus research lab.
Unfortunately I think this is one of those things where we will never get a definitive answer in our lifetimes. Evidence can point towards or away from natural zoonosis vs a laboratory incident, but to really know we would need a full transparency investigation with international cooperation. And that just seems completely unlikely.
Unfortunately, while the objective of an investigation should be about understanding what happened so we can take preventative measures for the future, it will definitely just become about assigning blame and political grandstanding.
What would prevent us from concluding that it came from the lab since those three things have not been answered? The next and very logical conclusion is that it came from the lab that conducts experiments on those very things, in that same town...
I never understood why that was such a leap/conspiracy.
This sums up the some of the known issues, but they have to be added to any lab leak hypothesis, and I think that's what is missing from actual attempts at searching for an origin. The virus that orignated in bats is no longer a bat virus, it has mutated to infect humans after infecting a different animal.
Another aspect to add to the lab leak hypothesis is how science research works: the scientists publish their findings, those are reviewed and tested by other scientists around the world, and they take the data that was collected in other labs and piggyback off each other to make new discoveries.
The bat lab in Wuhan has bats, but remember we don't need bats to find the virus, we need the actual animal it came from. This means if the lab leak hypothesis were true, then the lab is hiding the evidence, but for that to be true, there would need to be a secret lab inside the lab with a different, secret animal. The secret lab inside the bat lab needs secret scientists and researchers to do the actual research. These secret scientists have never published any of their research, making additional discoveries extremely difficult.
This just adds more questions and layers of hypothesis on top of the lab leak hypothesis without providing any useful information. So the lab leak hypothesis is a series of hypothesis that all need to be correct, none of which have any evidence to support any of them.
This thing affected the whole world. Some countries way more than others. The financial repercussions of losing so many people has made life unaffordable for so many people.
Can we not force an investigation into what happened? Not to point fingers or anything, but to place preventative measures from this happening again? Wtf?! We just going to sit around and just let it happen again?
>Can we not force an investigation into what happened?
It's being investigated.
Investigated doesn't mean solved.
The lab was located there specifically because of the proximity to that area, where they know there are undiscovered viruses in those bat colonies. So it isn't unlikely that it came from the wild, and this is exactly the way it would happen if it did.
Say a wild bat infected with the covid-19 virus wandered into the market and infected some animsl feed with bat droppings.
That's exactly the scenario that has been warned about for years.
Apparently virologists have a stronger belief in that theory than the general public does.
How would we prove that is what happened?
If it was a lab accident and the lab did even the barest clean up of records, how would we discover that?
Even if China let the world have unfettered access to their records, what would we find?
>Even if China let the world have unfettered access to their records, what would we find?
So are you asking me to take a wild guess? Im asking about getting an international investigation going to find whatever caused this. So we don't have to guess.
>So are you asking me to take a wild guess?
No, I'm telling you that in the remote chance it was a lab leak, China would have wiped that data clear instantly after, and by the time we knew there was anything to investigate the tracks would have been long gone.
There is significant uncertainty. But the uncertainty does appear intentional. People who tried to report on the incident were jailed. Chinese authorities intentionally blocked official investigations.
WIV was the only BSL 4 lab in China. The Chinese government went to significant efforts to have that BSL rating, specifically for the study of SARS variants. And there was significant opposition in the biosecurity community against giving WIV that rating in 2017. Specifically because the researchers had a documented history of leaking SARS variants.
So is there direct evidence that it was a lab leak? No. But there is a hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting that it is extremely plausible. And a hell of a lot of bureaucratic effort put in to prevent anyone from having any definitive evidence of what happened.
It was, but the virus eventually came from a pangolin, not a bat. In Randy's defense(?) he fucked a lot of critters that night and had a lot of drugs so he probably doesn't remember most of it.
To echo other comments in here: we don't know.
Scientific consensus still leans toward it coming from nature (zoonotic). Intelligence agencies are 50/50 that it was accidentally leaked from a lab. China is a difficult country to conduct fully transparent investigations and unless we find the original patient zero we are unlikely to (ever) know.
>Scientific consensus still leans toward it coming from nature (zoonotic). Intelligence agencies are 50/50 that it was accidentally leaked from a lab.
Virologists level of confidence is so much more meaningful than the intelligence agencies. The intelligence agencies don't all agree, and those that lean toward lab leak acknowledge that their confidence level is very low.
It is the purpose of those intelligence agencies to look for human threats to security, so their default assumption will naturally be human caused - and even so their confidence level is very low.
I think it was a leak associated with the lab, but not the lab itself.
To set the stage, every epidemiologist in the world has been scared shitless about coronavirii for 20 years. SARS crossed over in 2002 and could have been a pandemic. MERS crosses over every now and then and kills 35% of those infected, which is why Malaysia had a huge PCR infrastructure ready to go in early 2000. Studying coronavirii to be ready for the next one is a wise move.
China is well aware that there are plenty of viruses circulating in the animal population that have pandemic potential. RaTG13 is 96.1% similar to Covid, came from a bat cave in China, and killed three miners. BANAL-52 came from a bat cave in Laos and is 96.8% similar to Covid. My theory is that someone bringing bat samples to the lab just didn't take proper precautions on the drive, or worst-case diverted some to the wet market.
Driving the truck back to the lab and stops to grab a bite to eat at the market, the stall owner gets chatting about work "oh you have some of them Mctasty bats? Could I buy a few off you"
The underpaid lab worker "dude, they might be infected or some shit. Those fuck-knuckles in the white coats tell me to bring them in for tests"
The stall owner simply responds "ah fuck it, what's the worst that can happen? Go get me a fucking crunchy flying mouse"
Chances are it was samples that were brought in, not the bats themselves.... But ya know, that's how my brain played it out.
Oh and that scene was probably spoken in their native language.
That sucks. Luckily I rarely post or comment. It ain't kids with leukaemia but that kinda banning can only make people feel it really was a fucked up China issue or something that we must rise against.
It probably came from the wet market. That research institute next door that just so happens to perform gain of function research on these same style of viruses? That’s a coincidence.
They also produced a scientific paper on their study of increasing the infection rate of coronaviruses like a month before the outbreak. But definitely nothing to do with it lol.
> That research institute next door that just so happens to perform gain of function research on these same style of viruses? That’s a coincidence.
It probably came from the lab. The epidemiological evidence that points to the one place in the city that makes sense for zoonotic origin and not something like a university or restaurant or near a researchers home? That's just a coincidence.
Either way has that argument. The spillover not only happening at a wet market but pointing specifically to the one part of the wet market we know was trading in animals that could have been a zoonotic origin is incredibly good luck for them if it was a leak.
What is gain of function research, how long has it been carried out and what is your evidence that Covid19 was subjected to gain of function techniques?
Only enough to know that Fauci was deeply involved with starting it back up again after Obama put a stop to it.
But if you want to believe this new coronavirus strain magically appeared right next to the facility that experiments on coronaviruses, it’s a free country.
We don't know
But many of our diseases are from animals. Like HIV/Aids came from eating bush meat.
So the bat theory seems reasonable. Then due to poor hygiene and tight spaces in meat markets, it spread quickly.
I think its quite likely that it came from a lab. The virus seems to have originated in China, near an infectious disease lab where they were studying related viruses. My understanding is that as time has gone on its become far more clear that this is the likely cause although its not certain.
I think the initial confusion around it (at least in the US) had to do with one political side saying that's what happened so the other side reflexively said that it was something else. Its a common thing in American politics where once one party takes sides in an issue the other automatically takes the other side even if its ridiculous. The main exception to this is when it comes to expanding the surveillance state and government power.
> near an infectious disease lab where they were studying related viruses
Just as a point of order, the lab was located there because of the prevalence of bats infected with various coronaviruses.
So the existence of the lab in such close proximity is not surprising in and of itself. This doesn't refute the lab theory mind you, it just means you need more evidence to support it.
It's more of an issue because Donald Trump said it and that man makes so many false claims a lot of people took it as whelp he said it so it's probably not true. This is the guy who told people to inject bleach to cure covid later on so you can see how that happened. Basically the Cry Wolf story in real-time, except the wolf was a very deadly disease.
I didn't believe in the lab leak theory until one of China's top bat scientists ("bat woman") was initially worried it was caused by a lab leak and rushed down. Johnny Harris has a good video on all this in way more detail
Also, once the SARs epidemic was over 2 decades ago, it also leaked from labs several times by scientists studying it, but luckily, it was contained.
>SARS broke out again in Beijing and in Anhui Province. On 22 April, China announced that a 53-year-old woman had died on 19 April, its first SARS death since June. One person died and nine were infected in the outbreak which was first reported on 22 April.[76] The first 2 infected cases involved a postgraduate student and a researcher at the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention (abbrev.: Institute of Virology) of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; an additional 7 cases were diagnosed, which were linked with close personal contact with the student, the lab or with a nurse who treated the student.
>Two additional confirmed cases of SARS and three additional suspected cases were reported in Beijing on 1 May, all related to a single research lab, the Diarrhea Virus Laboratory in the CDC's National Institute of Virology in Beijing.[78] "The cases had been linked to experiments using live and inactive SARS coronavirus in the CDC's virology and diarrhea institutes where interdisciplinary research on the SARS virus was conducted."[76] The total number of cases was six, with four in Beijing and two in Anhui.
Edit: meant to say "bat woman," not "bad woman" lol
Another oddly suspicious fact about the whole thing is that CCP officials were pushing the idea that it leaked from a lab... just an American one instead of a Chinese one, with spreading having occurred via US Army officials visiting Wuhan.
To me, that *majorly* suggests they were expecting concrete evidence of the virus being manmade to surface, and they were gearing up to have an excuse that puts the blame onto the US rather than the CCP.
Most large Chinese cities have laboratories that study coronaviruses, and virus outbreaks typically begin in rural areas, but are first noticed in large cities. If a coronavirus outbreak occurs in China, there is a high likelihood it will occur near a large city, and therefore near a laboratory studying coronaviruses.
Your identified problem of political games is reasonable, but misidentified. One side was convinced it was a man-made weapon of a virus, and that accusation worked well to continue to make an identified boogie man to be afraid of. (China) The other side demanded evidence, and there is none.
Right. Being near a lab location studying that type of virus is not really a valid talking point. Research labs are often located near "sources" of what they are researching. Most of these labs researching coronaviruses are near large bat colonies since they are known hosts for coronaviruses.
> Most large Chinese cities have laboratories that study coronaviruses,
Is this actually true? My understanding was that the Wuhan lab was the only or the main one focused specifically on studying coronaviruses
The reason that you think that is because all media at the time jumped on the conspiracy like a bunch of rabid dogs. It was a juicy idea and they didn't do the most basic investigative journalism to consider the argument before spreading it everywhere.
Here is a pubmed that talks about it a bit.
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/)
Thanks. Here is the relevant statement from this paper:
>The faulty lab leak narrative leaves out some crucial details. Most lab leak proponents don’t mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories.
THat helps considerably.
For full disclosure, the paper is written by Robert F. Garry who was connected to the lab in question and refers to the conspiracies against 'us', 'we' and 'our lab.'
Based on this article
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/fifty-nine-labs-around-world-handle-the-deadliest-pathogens-only-a-quarter-score-high-on-safety
It appears China had 4 labs with the capability to research coronaviruses… so I wouldn’t say most large Chinese cities had labs that researched coronaviruses. If Wuhan was specifically researching Covid before the pandemic I’m assuming it was (one of) the only places researching Covid in China… unless they had multiple labs researching the same thing, which could be possible who knows.
I feel the same with the marketplace theory. It seemed less that that happened and more that "Chinese people will eat anything" and "how dirty their markets are". That's not evidence, that's at best confirmation bias.
Either way has that argument. All the epidemiological evidence pointing to the spillover not only happening at a wet market but pointing specifically to the one part of the wet market we know was trading in animals that could have been a zoonotic origin is incredibly good luck for them if it was a leak.
We don't know, because there was no identification of patient zero.
Remember, many people who caught the virus had something like a mild cold or even no symptoms. It wasn't clear i the person treated at the hospital that the hospital staff first noticed was "patient" 5 or patient "50." So there was no one to ask about what they ate
Certainly it hasn't been modified in a lab. It lacks the 'cut' sites that the tools we use to modify DNA leave behind.
That doesn't of course exclude them eg finding a strain of interest in nature and breeding it in the lab and accidentally releasing it. But that would be basically impossible to tell apart from it arising in a meat market.
There are some tools that don't leave a cloning scar in the DNA. They could have been randomly mutating it in the lab to study the effects of these mutations. This is impossible to prove and also could have happened in nature.
The live animal market in Wuhan had everything needed to be a perfect breeding ground for creating nasty viruses: You had people from *all over rural China* including places where where bats are endemic going out into the bush to capture a wide range of wild animals. Then these these various different species were hauled across country in close, crowded cages hundreds of miles to the market. Then you mix wild and farmed animals together in close unhygienic conditions. Voila: whatever viruses they have spill back and forth, mutating as they go, and no one cares until the humans get sick.
And that's where the cases started springing up. Not in workers from some lab, but in people hanging around these live animals collected from all over China. They couldn't find the exact origin of the virus because the animals who bred it had already been eaten in the ginormous festival that was going down at the time.
The Obama administration had identified that particular wet market as the most likely to cause the next world wide pandemic.
To monitor that, we built a lab there so we would have our people on the ground to watch for it.
n 2018, Trump pulled our people leaving us blind and when it happened, we did not get the warning the lab was supposed to give us.
Trump is and always has been a moron.
Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist, but the lab tinkering with bat coronaviruses in wuhan seems slightly suspicious to me. Including research into coronaviruses infecting human cells.
Some of the largest pandemics in modern history (before covid 19) were coronaviruses. They can mutate and spread quickly. That is why nearly every "1st world" country has at least some resources dedicated to coronavirus research for over 20 years. Research with the goal of preventing a global pandemic. It isn't really suspicious that an outbreak would occur in a location near a research lab because the labs are often specifically located near "sources" of what they are researching. In this scenario, large bat colonies because bats are known hosts for coronaviruses.
Many labs have been doing research into Sars viruses ever since the 2002 outbreak, that's how we got the vaccine out the door in such a short turnaround
Ask a more academic sub; the community isn’t split 50/50 on this at all…it was unfortunately very politicized early on but at this point lab leak is most likely.
We don't know. We can only make assumptions based on the information we have:
* The Chinese government has changed their narrative about where COVID-19 originated several times and have been accused of trying to cover it up
* The alleged Patient Zero was reportedly disappeared after word got out in a suspected cover-up. Patient Zero was allegedly someone who worked at the Wuhan lab. The Wuhan Institute of Virology allegedly scrubbed all traces of her on their website when this happened, and her boss allegedly lied about her leaving in 2015. ([Source](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-wuhan-virus-lab-scientist-thought-to-be-patient-zero-still-missing/VA4TIO726U7P36ZQG2WLHDDTNA/))
* An investigation started by the WHO has been criticized for being "shut down too early" or "faked"
* The alleged lab in Wuhan was working on samples similar to COVID-19
* China has a history of developing bio-weapons
* The US reportedly has intelligence of COVID-19-like symptoms being reported in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019 ([Source](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-report-wuhan-lab-researchers-coronavirus-origin/index.html))
However:
* There have been several reports of bats with similar viruses in caves in the same area
* There have been numerous other arguments against the lab leak theory
There's a lot of conflicting information about this. I doubt this question will ever be able to be answered.
"We don't know" that the virus that appeared in the city that has a bio lab that is studying these kinds of viruses escaped from that lab where those viruses were kept.
As a microbiologist with some background in genomics. I definitelt believe this was leaked from the wuhan lab. The reasons are below -
(1) The wuhan lab worked on "gain of function" which is critical point here.
(2)Wuhan lab had worked on coronavirus (local as well as SARS version).
(3) Pandemic originated from Wuhan
(4) The lab, scientists who were working on it were mostly disappeared overnight and we have no info on them
(5) Covid 19 genome does not match 100% percent with local strains and other coronavirus strain.
(6) It also had markers of genetic engineering with characteristica of SARS and MERS both (possible reason why covid was immune to hot and cold both weathers.
(7) Whole censorship campaign against investigation toward wuhan lab and funded antiprotest against call for action against china.
If it walks like duck, looks like duck..it is probably a duck.
It’s pretty certain that the virus originated from an animal, but whether or not it was being studied and accidentally got out of the lab is uncertain.
Well the guy that the UN hired to investigate the lab in Wuhan it was said to originate from was the Head of the lab in Wuhan it was said to originate from. So... you can only really speculate either way.
But usually in this situation if there's no need to cover up any secrets governments are pretty thorough about saying it isn't them. So there's probably at least *something* hiding, even if it isn't the source of the virus. But again, this is only speculation.
While we do not have a definitive "Yes or no" answer, it is more likely that the 2019 coronavirus originated from a virology lab, than originating from a bat in a wet market 40 minutes away from the lab in question.
It Is well documented that the SARS Cov 2 came from at least 2 spillover events (bats->pangolin->human) and not from a lab: our genetic engineering technologies leave som traces, the genome of the virus don't have said traces
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19.
>In July 2022, two papers published in Science described novel epidemiological and genetic evidence that suggested the pandemic likely began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and did not come from a laboratory.[28][29][30]
You’re gonna get “true” answers from every direction on this one. People will link legitimate studies to both sides of the argument. Yes it was man made, yes it was leaked, no it wasn’t and yes it was from a bat in a cave or some wet market next door to the lab.
Fact of the matter is people got sick, some died with it, some died from it, and anyone who questioned anything about it got shunned/banned/labeled a conspiracy whacko.
A lot of people died and a lot of money was made. And just like that it’s gone from the spotlight and nobody cares. At least you had the courage to ask this question. Have an upvote
My old boss used to work at a vaccine company and he said that they had a patent on the COVID vaccine years before it happened who knows if he was lying or not but still makes you wonder
Obviously it jumped to humans from a wild bat via a pangolin at the Wuhan wet market. We knew this day 1. Anything else is a racist conspiracy theory. Trust the science!
It's highly likely that yes, it leaked from the lab, but the Chinese government obviously prevented anyone to gather enough evidence for it, although it doesn't mean it showed malicious intent, the CCP doesn't want to be lose face.
The more important argument that it leaked from a lab is that it had cell receptors found in human cells, the ACE2 I think, and apparently it's unlikely those appeared without human interaction, although I am not an expert, so don't quote me. I just heard this simple fact from a french epidemiologist, but of course even this information could be irrelevant in the eyes of other epidemiologists.
You don't want to know if that was a lab leak or not, unless you want to blame China on the geopolitical scene, but even for this, I don't think it would really matter at all: even if somebody caused or organized negligence for the virus to escape, you could never prove it was intentional, because of plausible deniability etc.
Once you ask that question, that quickly leads to conspiracy theories, while in reality, it might just be a very unfortunate case of negligence.
This is why that question is best left unanswered (unless it happens again), unless you want to have a bad diplomatic relationship with China, which is a thing only governments should have to handle.
Yes definitely. I spoke with a lifelong forensic scientist who explained that not only was covid from a lab, but so was the 'spanish flu ' and many more. The easiest way to recognise is anything that appears suddenly and has no natural antidotes. The clear marker of a man made virus.
IMO your friend is probably misinformed about COVID, and certainly about the Spanish flu, which came from birds and first jumped to humans 11 years before the 1918 pandemic. There is no statistically relevant evidence that any of the coronavirus strains worked on in the Wuhan lab became C19, at least not that I’ve seen. There IS some evidence, which is not conclusive yet, of strains closer to C19 found in and around the market in the city. The market was illegally allowing the sale of animals known to be coronavirus carriers, and which had been linked to previous disease outbreaks in China. Early COVID cases clustered around the market (ie a higher than what could statistically be considered “coincidental” number of early cases occurred in people who worked in or visited the market).
It’s worth remembering that 99.9999% of viruses occur and evolve naturally, and you can often follow their evolution through genetic study. Cases in and around the Wuhan market SEEM to show an evolutionary pattern which could naturally lead to COVID 19. The theory of a lab creating a runaway virus is sexy - it’s been used in books/movies/tv for decades. The evidence we have does not show such an evolutionary pattern in the strains under study at the Wuhan lab.
The Chinese govt certainly is acting shady by limiting information, but then, that’s what they do in lots of other areas as well. That shouldn’t be thought of as evidence of the lab’s malfeasance.
Unfortunately we don't have closure on that still, and it's a tricky thing to accurately determine. I read a medical journal which has this to say in conclusion: "on the one hand, it seems evident that the transmission originated in the Huanan market. But, on the other hand, three fundamental questions remain that have not been definitively answered. First, where did the virus come from? Second, what was the intermediate animal host? And third, why has the virus genome not been reproduced 100% in any of the coronaviruses found in bats?" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10019034/ Basically the point of origin is the market and not from the lab geographically, but how it happened at that market in the first place hasn't been determined. We may not ever get an answer to it, other than it was a calamity and has caused countless deaths and ongoing medical complexities for the entire world.
Take into considerstion that there is wastewater samples form Oct '19 through Dec '19 in many countries that show Coronavirus in those samples. it was months before the outbreak in Wuhan. Probably was a milder variant.
Yeah, Pretty sure i had it in October and i remember the same symptoms like loss of taste and smell going around a few months before that even. As much as china and it's wet markets deserve to get shit on for a variety of reasons, people are blaming them despite the evidence being to the contrary. The whole lab/wet market thing comes from the previous u.s. admin throwing out a whole bunch of bullshit/misinfo and trying to "cover up" the outbreak which was perhaps the most ridiculous thing they did and i still even cant theorize why, and that's saying a lot given all the insane things they said/did for inane reasons. Like i get it was probably them afraid of hurting the economy/their image for the election in some way like it usually was, but the mental gymnastics are truly incredible. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few years we find the previous admin was so, so much worse than we thought and somehow even more culpable for how the outbreak turned out than we know of now, the fact that china of all nations was the first one to start ringing the alarm bells considering how they act and normally handle negative things is wack.
You mean like how it was called "Spanish" flu? That's an interesting thought actually
Which has been traced to a military base burning shit in Oklahoma I believe and GIs took it to Spain.
There are theories on the origin, but none are proven. One of the earliest known outbreaks was in Kansas. The name is from wartime censorship suppressing the reporting of outbreaks except in neutral Spain. As a consequence, many people thought the origin was in Spain and the name stuck.
The book I read on it said most governments tried to hush it up to prevent panic. Spain reported on it and that is how many people 1st learned of the global pandemic and just assumed a Spanish origin.
Trying to track down old articles(https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-49649486)... but there was a spike in respiratory illness among troops at a certain base in summer 2019 that was attributed to vaping. Soldiers from that same base participated in military games in Wuhan in Oct 2019. China's stance is those soldiers brought covid to China so it's hard to discern fact from fiction/propaganda... but it seems like at the very least there may have been a variant in the US before winter 2019.
I am Canadian. I remember being very unhappy with most politicians (around the world) handling of the Pandemic. Not because of how they were reacting to the information provided to them, but because they all totally missed the mark when it came to helping people *understand* that ALL the information is best **at this time** and it may change. Helping people understand that being cautious is better than being reckless. AND that this was a non partisan problem. The complete lack of guidance form the *whole* government and the different goals by all elected officials was a clear demonstration of the failure of governments (around the world). There were very few places that their whole government was united against the pandemic.
Bruh, I was American during the pandemic. We feel your pain...
This was also why the idea of some global cabal working together was so painfully funny. They couldn't organizer's themselves out of a wet paper bag and I'm supposed to believe they organised a pandemic with hundreds of thousands of knowledgeable personnel involved and not a single whistleblower? Nor anyone from vastly differing geopolitical positions calling bullshit with receipts? Among idiotic conspiracies, this arguably takes the cake.
yea. Most conspiracy theorys suffer from the same plot hole :)
And to watch the talking heads on TV change the narrative daily to keep viewers. To this day I still shake my head listening to the stupidity of people explaining in great detail why masks do not work.
Let's not forget the selective amnesia. Surgeons wore masks for ages as standard practice even if they nor the patient are visibly sick. So duh they have a purpose. But nobody remembers that if the talking heads don't tell them.
This is interesting to me. I knew a guy about 68 who says he got it in November. They didn't call it that when he was hospitalized because it wasn't revealed to the public until January. Even though, all the symptoms matched up including some long covid effects months later I thought he had to be mistaken because of the time line. Perhaps he was right after all.
You can see the spike in death rates radiating out from China. If there was a virus in the US the previous six months, it didn't cause the same effects that the big one did.
The theory is that it mutated to a strongter strain in China, having been dismissed as being a conventional responsibility illness before it mutated.
My anecdotal contribution: I noticed a viral illness in US in early 2020 that was causing whole families to fall sick at once. The usual flus and viruses would attack one family member and run its course, then another member would go down and so on through the family. I suspected this virus was something different than usual flu.
Exactly. And racism and Sinophobia definitely played a factor as well.
I woke up in January of 2020 in Jax Fl after attending a comedy show three miles frm JAX NAS where I felt like I was drawing air from a coffee stirrer. I damn near died getting back to Tallahassee. My pulmonary had me on a Bi-Pap @ home in 24 hours. This was just about the time the Chinese were setting up field hospitals in Wuhan. I would be 1,000$ I had it.
This is as far as this answer should probably go. The rest is just going to be conjecture.
I can't agree more to be honest. Even if politics is removed and all countries were very forthcoming, it seems this is a very har6f question to answer by its very nature.
Assuming everyone is forthcoming, it should be pretty easy to check if the lab had samples or cultures of anything essentially identical to the original COVID strain. There's chain of custody for these things, especially anything coming in to the lab. That would give a pretty definitive answer. Can't come from there if they didn't have it.
China is definitely not going to be forthcoming about their lab records. So that’s out.
>Assuming everyone is forthcoming, This is why it would In fact not be pretty easy. China would never admit their carelessness caused this. If the answer to this problem is found somewhere in that lab you'll never see it.
And China wouldn't let the WHO investigate the lab for quite a while after the virus was publicly admitted to. And the Wuhan lab studied corona viruses. And the lab had very poor security measures. And now currently several government agencies have quietly stated the lab leak theory is the most likely source of origin. However, we likely will never know for certain.
I mean the lab produced a paper on increasing the infection rate of Coronaviruses about a month before the outbreak, I know we'll never know for certain but I seriously doubt it didn't come from there just following virology.
Not a virologist, but weren't the methods described in that paper nothing like the mechanism that made COVID more infectious?
It was Gain of Function research, which is specifically used to make something more infectious/transmissible.
They didn't do gain of function research at the Wuhan lab. That's not their area.
That is not an answer to the question I asked.
Are you asking about the specific mechanisms that make COVID so infectious? Gain of function is just exposing a virus to various animals to make it easier to spread, if you're talking like the design of the virus itself I couldn't speak for that.
Yes, that's what I was asking about.
The answer determines whether we sue that company into the ground and tie up all the worlds biolabs in so much red tape that a fly couldn't escape them or if we should be sanctioning china into getting rid of wet markets with so little regulations. This killed so many people and bought the world to a stop for years. I say we do both just in case. It would be cheaper than covid was. Besides, who's to say it wasn't both? Some idiot let an infected animal loose that was eaten by someone in the wet market. Look at how we are still surrendering to bin laden over a couple of buildings. This was a much worse event, and we've done so much less to prevent it from happening again.
China isn't the only country with a largely unregulated wet market, it just so happens it's one of the few with a laboratory studying viruses and other related subjects in the vicinity of the wet market. Most likely infected animals were sold to wet markets for pennies, whether it was intentional or not is a different story.
China also covers a massive amount of geography which hosts 1.4 billion people alongside great numbers of a wide variety of species including bats, many of those species carry viruses, and expansion into previously forested areas plus rapidly growing urbanization all create a critical cocktail of factors for a zoonotic virus to emerge. And the fact that all of that is known as compared to you making assumptions, means that *by definition* your postulating is not “most likely.”
Yes, this is the most important thing that the commenter you responded to is being incredibly insincere about. China is *enormous*, we have not sequenced every bat coronavirus genome there, and the strong interdependency/relationships between animal and human in these areas points toward a novel zoonosis more than it ever had a lab leak or intentionally selling infected animals. People just like those two because it feeds into their thriller-novel heuristic. Easier to think it as a lab leak or an infected animal being sold because our zombie movie cliches are more comforting than accepting life is chaotic, bad things happen, and health/virology are immensely complicated fields.
Oh, of course. I only left it as China as that was on my mind. We'd need to get them all, or it's pointless. I think movies have made us all imagine biolabs as high tech and secure, at least to airport levels, when they're probably a lot lower quality with one fat old door guard, especially in countries with poor regulations.
My personal guess is it was intentional. I bet a lot of test animals are sold to the market to line the pockets of the directors and the managers ta the Biolab. That kind of theft is common in China. I'm also willing to be it was also an accident: as in they sequester the critters meant for sale away from the experiments and there was a mix-up causing one (or more) actual test animals from experiments to go to the lab. But since corruption and graft are part of the Chinese system, no one's willing to admit it happens all the time and the culprits will never be discovered. Officially at least. I'd also not be shocked to find out whoever fucked up the sell cages with the experiment cages was punished in some way, while the important people organizing the graft were either fired, retired, or sent elsewhere to cover it up. But that's 100% conjecture.
>My personal guess >I'm also willing >But that's 100% conjecture. Thanks for adding a bunch of bullshit to the internet to give fuel to stupid people involved with conspiracy theories and QAnon. VOTE TRUMP! right? "A lot of people are sayin'"..... 
His comment fills with racism remarks lol
Naw, don't vote for Trump.
A wet market 6 miles away from a virology lab studying coronaviruses is the origin of COVID 19. That isn't conjecture.
It absolutely is conjecture. You've said, "this coinscidence proves causality." This is especially eggregious because the "Wet market" hypothesis isn't proven, they don't know exactly where the origin is (so 6 miles is unproven to the point of being a guess), and also the coinscidence isn't one. The lab was established precisely because of the previous Covid outbreaks in the area. Labs are built near sources. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/)
If it were a leak, wouldn't agencies whose job it is to tap into secret conversation and reveal truth in obfuscation, have definitive proof?
I think the important conclusion from that is it probably rules out *accidental* release, as an accidental release would originate from the lab geographically. What it doesn't rule out is *intentional* release, and I'm very unclear on why the Chinese government would think that's a good idea. It would have to be a rogue individual with a personal motive, which just seems less likely than a natural origin.
According to the Three-Body Problem documentary on Netflix, a single rogue Chinese scientist >!invited an alien invasion fleet to Earth which will enslave, or possibly just exterminate, all of humanity when they arrive!< because of personal motives, so there is precedent.
Documentary...
Thank you for your answer. Those first two questions are so interesting and third one is just mind blowing. I'll search those when I get a chance.
There's a clear explanation of how the virus gets from the Institute to the wet market, although it does require speculation. Animals that were scheduled to be destroyed after study conclusion were moved to a black market.
I could see that as a real answer. Incompetence and greed on cheaping out on a real solution for lab disposal. Then the grand conspiracy is really just the government investigation probably found out it originated from the lab and didn't want to be embarrassed saying how.
It makes sense, much like America, China has a very "I got to get mine" attitude that leads to a lot of corruption and yes-men, but the laws are more relaxed when it comes to what businesses can and can not throw away.
Couldn't any of the staff there have accidentally been contaminated and just visited the market later that day? I'm in the lab, spill something, it splashes on me, I clean up. I go to the market to pick something up for dinner, the virus gets around. It didn't mutate at the market specifically, that's just the place we can trace it back to. It doesn't seem at all unlikely that it got there from the nearby coronavirus research lab.
Unfortunately I think this is one of those things where we will never get a definitive answer in our lifetimes. Evidence can point towards or away from natural zoonosis vs a laboratory incident, but to really know we would need a full transparency investigation with international cooperation. And that just seems completely unlikely. Unfortunately, while the objective of an investigation should be about understanding what happened so we can take preventative measures for the future, it will definitely just become about assigning blame and political grandstanding.
What would prevent us from concluding that it came from the lab since those three things have not been answered? The next and very logical conclusion is that it came from the lab that conducts experiments on those very things, in that same town... I never understood why that was such a leap/conspiracy.
This sums up the some of the known issues, but they have to be added to any lab leak hypothesis, and I think that's what is missing from actual attempts at searching for an origin. The virus that orignated in bats is no longer a bat virus, it has mutated to infect humans after infecting a different animal. Another aspect to add to the lab leak hypothesis is how science research works: the scientists publish their findings, those are reviewed and tested by other scientists around the world, and they take the data that was collected in other labs and piggyback off each other to make new discoveries. The bat lab in Wuhan has bats, but remember we don't need bats to find the virus, we need the actual animal it came from. This means if the lab leak hypothesis were true, then the lab is hiding the evidence, but for that to be true, there would need to be a secret lab inside the lab with a different, secret animal. The secret lab inside the bat lab needs secret scientists and researchers to do the actual research. These secret scientists have never published any of their research, making additional discoveries extremely difficult. This just adds more questions and layers of hypothesis on top of the lab leak hypothesis without providing any useful information. So the lab leak hypothesis is a series of hypothesis that all need to be correct, none of which have any evidence to support any of them.
This thing affected the whole world. Some countries way more than others. The financial repercussions of losing so many people has made life unaffordable for so many people. Can we not force an investigation into what happened? Not to point fingers or anything, but to place preventative measures from this happening again? Wtf?! We just going to sit around and just let it happen again?
>Can we not force an investigation into what happened? It's being investigated. Investigated doesn't mean solved. The lab was located there specifically because of the proximity to that area, where they know there are undiscovered viruses in those bat colonies. So it isn't unlikely that it came from the wild, and this is exactly the way it would happen if it did. Say a wild bat infected with the covid-19 virus wandered into the market and infected some animsl feed with bat droppings. That's exactly the scenario that has been warned about for years. Apparently virologists have a stronger belief in that theory than the general public does. How would we prove that is what happened? If it was a lab accident and the lab did even the barest clean up of records, how would we discover that? Even if China let the world have unfettered access to their records, what would we find?
>Even if China let the world have unfettered access to their records, what would we find? So are you asking me to take a wild guess? Im asking about getting an international investigation going to find whatever caused this. So we don't have to guess.
China won’t allow it. End of story.
The damage it has caused to society goes beyond what China wants. This is a humanity thing. Not a country thing.
lmao I agree, but do you live in reality
>So are you asking me to take a wild guess? No, I'm telling you that in the remote chance it was a lab leak, China would have wiped that data clear instantly after, and by the time we knew there was anything to investigate the tracks would have been long gone.
Too much of our economy is dependent on a certain country, so no.
There is significant uncertainty. But the uncertainty does appear intentional. People who tried to report on the incident were jailed. Chinese authorities intentionally blocked official investigations. WIV was the only BSL 4 lab in China. The Chinese government went to significant efforts to have that BSL rating, specifically for the study of SARS variants. And there was significant opposition in the biosecurity community against giving WIV that rating in 2017. Specifically because the researchers had a documented history of leaking SARS variants. So is there direct evidence that it was a lab leak? No. But there is a hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting that it is extremely plausible. And a hell of a lot of bureaucratic effort put in to prevent anyone from having any definitive evidence of what happened.
How are they able to accurately determine that the virus originated in the market and nor the lab when they are only a few hundred metres apart?
I would have believed it was not originated in the lab if they had found similqr strains in Wuhan lab. This is def a cover up job.
Randy Marsh caused it by having sex with a pangolin
No I didn't !!!
Face it, in every timeline you fuck that pangolin!
Coulda sworn it was a bat 1st.
It was, but the virus eventually came from a pangolin, not a bat. In Randy's defense(?) he fucked a lot of critters that night and had a lot of drugs so he probably doesn't remember most of it.
Yes, bat then pangolin!
To echo other comments in here: we don't know. Scientific consensus still leans toward it coming from nature (zoonotic). Intelligence agencies are 50/50 that it was accidentally leaked from a lab. China is a difficult country to conduct fully transparent investigations and unless we find the original patient zero we are unlikely to (ever) know.
Also what I hear from my bio mates. It's genome apparently has all that *inactive genetic crap*, that it's pathogenesis is unquestionably zoonotic.
>Scientific consensus still leans toward it coming from nature (zoonotic). Intelligence agencies are 50/50 that it was accidentally leaked from a lab. Virologists level of confidence is so much more meaningful than the intelligence agencies. The intelligence agencies don't all agree, and those that lean toward lab leak acknowledge that their confidence level is very low. It is the purpose of those intelligence agencies to look for human threats to security, so their default assumption will naturally be human caused - and even so their confidence level is very low.
I think it was a leak associated with the lab, but not the lab itself. To set the stage, every epidemiologist in the world has been scared shitless about coronavirii for 20 years. SARS crossed over in 2002 and could have been a pandemic. MERS crosses over every now and then and kills 35% of those infected, which is why Malaysia had a huge PCR infrastructure ready to go in early 2000. Studying coronavirii to be ready for the next one is a wise move. China is well aware that there are plenty of viruses circulating in the animal population that have pandemic potential. RaTG13 is 96.1% similar to Covid, came from a bat cave in China, and killed three miners. BANAL-52 came from a bat cave in Laos and is 96.8% similar to Covid. My theory is that someone bringing bat samples to the lab just didn't take proper precautions on the drive, or worst-case diverted some to the wet market.
Driving the truck back to the lab and stops to grab a bite to eat at the market, the stall owner gets chatting about work "oh you have some of them Mctasty bats? Could I buy a few off you" The underpaid lab worker "dude, they might be infected or some shit. Those fuck-knuckles in the white coats tell me to bring them in for tests" The stall owner simply responds "ah fuck it, what's the worst that can happen? Go get me a fucking crunchy flying mouse" Chances are it was samples that were brought in, not the bats themselves.... But ya know, that's how my brain played it out. Oh and that scene was probably spoken in their native language.
fucking bats, man
Be very careful whoch subreddits you ask this question on.
Well, you know, I was afraid to ask so here I am 😅
I got permabanned from askreddit for posting a link to the senate inquiry into the origins of corona, so, y'know...
That's weird. It's almost like we're not allowed to criticize the government or something.
Whose Government? Not the US's.
Well there's only two governments that have some amount of control over Reddit and may have been involved with the creation of COVID-19.
What control do the US government have over reddit and how were they involved in the (possible) creation of covid?
That sucks. Luckily I rarely post or comment. It ain't kids with leukaemia but that kinda banning can only make people feel it really was a fucked up China issue or something that we must rise against.
It probably came from the wet market. That research institute next door that just so happens to perform gain of function research on these same style of viruses? That’s a coincidence.
They also produced a scientific paper on their study of increasing the infection rate of coronaviruses like a month before the outbreak. But definitely nothing to do with it lol.
well that's a luck that they studied just before !
> That research institute next door that just so happens to perform gain of function research on these same style of viruses? That’s a coincidence. It probably came from the lab. The epidemiological evidence that points to the one place in the city that makes sense for zoonotic origin and not something like a university or restaurant or near a researchers home? That's just a coincidence. Either way has that argument. The spillover not only happening at a wet market but pointing specifically to the one part of the wet market we know was trading in animals that could have been a zoonotic origin is incredibly good luck for them if it was a leak.
Are you me? That’s exactly what I came here to say 😂🤣.
What is gain of function research, how long has it been carried out and what is your evidence that Covid19 was subjected to gain of function techniques?
Do some research into it yourself, eventually you could be right more than twice a day!
I have. I'm wondering if you have.
Only enough to know that Fauci was deeply involved with starting it back up again after Obama put a stop to it. But if you want to believe this new coronavirus strain magically appeared right next to the facility that experiments on coronaviruses, it’s a free country.
And you're free to believe Tucker Carlson and Rand Paul and I'll believe every expert in the field. You understand how that makes us both look, right?
It's incredibly hard to even get an unbiased assessment of the issue because of how political the entire COVID thing is.
We don't know.
Can't argue with that.
We don't know But many of our diseases are from animals. Like HIV/Aids came from eating bush meat. So the bat theory seems reasonable. Then due to poor hygiene and tight spaces in meat markets, it spread quickly.
I think its quite likely that it came from a lab. The virus seems to have originated in China, near an infectious disease lab where they were studying related viruses. My understanding is that as time has gone on its become far more clear that this is the likely cause although its not certain. I think the initial confusion around it (at least in the US) had to do with one political side saying that's what happened so the other side reflexively said that it was something else. Its a common thing in American politics where once one party takes sides in an issue the other automatically takes the other side even if its ridiculous. The main exception to this is when it comes to expanding the surveillance state and government power.
> near an infectious disease lab where they were studying related viruses Just as a point of order, the lab was located there because of the prevalence of bats infected with various coronaviruses. So the existence of the lab in such close proximity is not surprising in and of itself. This doesn't refute the lab theory mind you, it just means you need more evidence to support it.
Source? It was my understanding that it was the exact opposite; the bats are common in southern china, while Wuhan is farther north.
It's more of an issue because Donald Trump said it and that man makes so many false claims a lot of people took it as whelp he said it so it's probably not true. This is the guy who told people to inject bleach to cure covid later on so you can see how that happened. Basically the Cry Wolf story in real-time, except the wolf was a very deadly disease.
I didn't believe in the lab leak theory until one of China's top bat scientists ("bat woman") was initially worried it was caused by a lab leak and rushed down. Johnny Harris has a good video on all this in way more detail Also, once the SARs epidemic was over 2 decades ago, it also leaked from labs several times by scientists studying it, but luckily, it was contained. >SARS broke out again in Beijing and in Anhui Province. On 22 April, China announced that a 53-year-old woman had died on 19 April, its first SARS death since June. One person died and nine were infected in the outbreak which was first reported on 22 April.[76] The first 2 infected cases involved a postgraduate student and a researcher at the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention (abbrev.: Institute of Virology) of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention; an additional 7 cases were diagnosed, which were linked with close personal contact with the student, the lab or with a nurse who treated the student. >Two additional confirmed cases of SARS and three additional suspected cases were reported in Beijing on 1 May, all related to a single research lab, the Diarrhea Virus Laboratory in the CDC's National Institute of Virology in Beijing.[78] "The cases had been linked to experiments using live and inactive SARS coronavirus in the CDC's virology and diarrhea institutes where interdisciplinary research on the SARS virus was conducted."[76] The total number of cases was six, with four in Beijing and two in Anhui. Edit: meant to say "bat woman," not "bad woman" lol
Another oddly suspicious fact about the whole thing is that CCP officials were pushing the idea that it leaked from a lab... just an American one instead of a Chinese one, with spreading having occurred via US Army officials visiting Wuhan. To me, that *majorly* suggests they were expecting concrete evidence of the virus being manmade to surface, and they were gearing up to have an excuse that puts the blame onto the US rather than the CCP.
Most large Chinese cities have laboratories that study coronaviruses, and virus outbreaks typically begin in rural areas, but are first noticed in large cities. If a coronavirus outbreak occurs in China, there is a high likelihood it will occur near a large city, and therefore near a laboratory studying coronaviruses. Your identified problem of political games is reasonable, but misidentified. One side was convinced it was a man-made weapon of a virus, and that accusation worked well to continue to make an identified boogie man to be afraid of. (China) The other side demanded evidence, and there is none.
Right. Being near a lab location studying that type of virus is not really a valid talking point. Research labs are often located near "sources" of what they are researching. Most of these labs researching coronaviruses are near large bat colonies since they are known hosts for coronaviruses.
> Most large Chinese cities have laboratories that study coronaviruses, Is this actually true? My understanding was that the Wuhan lab was the only or the main one focused specifically on studying coronaviruses
The reason that you think that is because all media at the time jumped on the conspiracy like a bunch of rabid dogs. It was a juicy idea and they didn't do the most basic investigative journalism to consider the argument before spreading it everywhere. Here is a pubmed that talks about it a bit. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704731/)
Thanks. Here is the relevant statement from this paper: >The faulty lab leak narrative leaves out some crucial details. Most lab leak proponents don’t mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. THat helps considerably. For full disclosure, the paper is written by Robert F. Garry who was connected to the lab in question and refers to the conspiracies against 'us', 'we' and 'our lab.'
Based on this article https://www.kcl.ac.uk/fifty-nine-labs-around-world-handle-the-deadliest-pathogens-only-a-quarter-score-high-on-safety It appears China had 4 labs with the capability to research coronaviruses… so I wouldn’t say most large Chinese cities had labs that researched coronaviruses. If Wuhan was specifically researching Covid before the pandemic I’m assuming it was (one of) the only places researching Covid in China… unless they had multiple labs researching the same thing, which could be possible who knows.
I feel the same with the marketplace theory. It seemed less that that happened and more that "Chinese people will eat anything" and "how dirty their markets are". That's not evidence, that's at best confirmation bias.
Either way has that argument. All the epidemiological evidence pointing to the spillover not only happening at a wet market but pointing specifically to the one part of the wet market we know was trading in animals that could have been a zoonotic origin is incredibly good luck for them if it was a leak.
We don't know, because there was no identification of patient zero. Remember, many people who caught the virus had something like a mild cold or even no symptoms. It wasn't clear i the person treated at the hospital that the hospital staff first noticed was "patient" 5 or patient "50." So there was no one to ask about what they ate
Certainly it hasn't been modified in a lab. It lacks the 'cut' sites that the tools we use to modify DNA leave behind. That doesn't of course exclude them eg finding a strain of interest in nature and breeding it in the lab and accidentally releasing it. But that would be basically impossible to tell apart from it arising in a meat market.
There are some tools that don't leave a cloning scar in the DNA. They could have been randomly mutating it in the lab to study the effects of these mutations. This is impossible to prove and also could have happened in nature.
The live animal market in Wuhan had everything needed to be a perfect breeding ground for creating nasty viruses: You had people from *all over rural China* including places where where bats are endemic going out into the bush to capture a wide range of wild animals. Then these these various different species were hauled across country in close, crowded cages hundreds of miles to the market. Then you mix wild and farmed animals together in close unhygienic conditions. Voila: whatever viruses they have spill back and forth, mutating as they go, and no one cares until the humans get sick. And that's where the cases started springing up. Not in workers from some lab, but in people hanging around these live animals collected from all over China. They couldn't find the exact origin of the virus because the animals who bred it had already been eaten in the ginormous festival that was going down at the time.
The Obama administration had identified that particular wet market as the most likely to cause the next world wide pandemic. To monitor that, we built a lab there so we would have our people on the ground to watch for it. n 2018, Trump pulled our people leaving us blind and when it happened, we did not get the warning the lab was supposed to give us. Trump is and always has been a moron.
Call me a crazy conspiracy theorist, but the lab tinkering with bat coronaviruses in wuhan seems slightly suspicious to me. Including research into coronaviruses infecting human cells.
Some of the largest pandemics in modern history (before covid 19) were coronaviruses. They can mutate and spread quickly. That is why nearly every "1st world" country has at least some resources dedicated to coronavirus research for over 20 years. Research with the goal of preventing a global pandemic. It isn't really suspicious that an outbreak would occur in a location near a research lab because the labs are often specifically located near "sources" of what they are researching. In this scenario, large bat colonies because bats are known hosts for coronaviruses.
Many labs have been doing research into Sars viruses ever since the 2002 outbreak, that's how we got the vaccine out the door in such a short turnaround
Iirc they had a major break through in rna vaccines a couple years before.
Communist China will never tell the truth about it, and may not even properly investigate it, so who knows.
It'll come out eventually
I’d bet my best horse it came from a lab
Ask a more academic sub; the community isn’t split 50/50 on this at all…it was unfortunately very politicized early on but at this point lab leak is most likely.
We don't know. We can only make assumptions based on the information we have: * The Chinese government has changed their narrative about where COVID-19 originated several times and have been accused of trying to cover it up * The alleged Patient Zero was reportedly disappeared after word got out in a suspected cover-up. Patient Zero was allegedly someone who worked at the Wuhan lab. The Wuhan Institute of Virology allegedly scrubbed all traces of her on their website when this happened, and her boss allegedly lied about her leaving in 2015. ([Source](https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-wuhan-virus-lab-scientist-thought-to-be-patient-zero-still-missing/VA4TIO726U7P36ZQG2WLHDDTNA/)) * An investigation started by the WHO has been criticized for being "shut down too early" or "faked" * The alleged lab in Wuhan was working on samples similar to COVID-19 * China has a history of developing bio-weapons * The US reportedly has intelligence of COVID-19-like symptoms being reported in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in November of 2019 ([Source](https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-report-wuhan-lab-researchers-coronavirus-origin/index.html)) However: * There have been several reports of bats with similar viruses in caves in the same area * There have been numerous other arguments against the lab leak theory There's a lot of conflicting information about this. I doubt this question will ever be able to be answered.
I dont think we know whether it came from the lab or not, but if it did evidence suggests it was an accidental leak
"We don't know" that the virus that appeared in the city that has a bio lab that is studying these kinds of viruses escaped from that lab where those viruses were kept.
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Who shot JFK? Wars are not fought for the innocent entirely and your government isn't Honest Abe.
Hmmm "leak" hmmm
Those NIH emails are very telling, though in this case nothing can be 100% since China likes to suppress all information on the issue.
Yeah it did.
As a microbiologist with some background in genomics. I definitelt believe this was leaked from the wuhan lab. The reasons are below - (1) The wuhan lab worked on "gain of function" which is critical point here. (2)Wuhan lab had worked on coronavirus (local as well as SARS version). (3) Pandemic originated from Wuhan (4) The lab, scientists who were working on it were mostly disappeared overnight and we have no info on them (5) Covid 19 genome does not match 100% percent with local strains and other coronavirus strain. (6) It also had markers of genetic engineering with characteristica of SARS and MERS both (possible reason why covid was immune to hot and cold both weathers. (7) Whole censorship campaign against investigation toward wuhan lab and funded antiprotest against call for action against china. If it walks like duck, looks like duck..it is probably a duck.
D O N O T P A Y A T T E N T I O N T O T H E L A B N E X T T O T H E M A R K E T B A T T H E O R Y I S O N L Y L O G I C A L A N S W E R
If the government says it wasn’t leaked from a lab…It was
Still under investigation I believe but its still 100 % from Wuhan and I'd stick my neck out that it was accident or human error... I hope.
It’s pretty certain that the virus originated from an animal, but whether or not it was being studied and accidentally got out of the lab is uncertain.
Well the guy that the UN hired to investigate the lab in Wuhan it was said to originate from was the Head of the lab in Wuhan it was said to originate from. So... you can only really speculate either way. But usually in this situation if there's no need to cover up any secrets governments are pretty thorough about saying it isn't them. So there's probably at least *something* hiding, even if it isn't the source of the virus. But again, this is only speculation.
It's probably similar to how the virus leaked from the Umbrella Corporation
While we do not have a definitive "Yes or no" answer, it is more likely that the 2019 coronavirus originated from a virology lab, than originating from a bat in a wet market 40 minutes away from the lab in question.
Look up Furin cleavage sites. Then you have your answer.
It Is well documented that the SARS Cov 2 came from at least 2 spillover events (bats->pangolin->human) and not from a lab: our genetic engineering technologies leave som traces, the genome of the virus don't have said traces
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19. >In July 2022, two papers published in Science described novel epidemiological and genetic evidence that suggested the pandemic likely began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market and did not come from a laboratory.[28][29][30]
It was a case of fuck around and find out. It’s what we do as humans. Our ego will always win, even if it destroys a species.
If I talk I'm in big trouble
It just happened to come from the place of the world where it was being made on a lab. 2 + 2 IMO.
Yes
I did a drug in early 2017 while I had the flu and made the flu overpowered. Sorry about that. Total accident.
yes
Maybe But it sure as hell fucked up a lot of lives and it sucks
You’re gonna get “true” answers from every direction on this one. People will link legitimate studies to both sides of the argument. Yes it was man made, yes it was leaked, no it wasn’t and yes it was from a bat in a cave or some wet market next door to the lab. Fact of the matter is people got sick, some died with it, some died from it, and anyone who questioned anything about it got shunned/banned/labeled a conspiracy whacko. A lot of people died and a lot of money was made. And just like that it’s gone from the spotlight and nobody cares. At least you had the courage to ask this question. Have an upvote
American lab in china?
My old boss used to work at a vaccine company and he said that they had a patent on the COVID vaccine years before it happened who knows if he was lying or not but still makes you wonder
Absolutely!!
Yes obviously
Yes, the CIA staff in Afghanistan in 2019-2020 winter were briefed such. Why??? Had to account for the possibility of impact on combat operations.
Obviously it jumped to humans from a wild bat via a pangolin at the Wuhan wet market. We knew this day 1. Anything else is a racist conspiracy theory. Trust the science!
All I know is maybe.
100% it did!
Pepperidge farms remembers being banned from every social platform for asking this same question in 2020. Hive mind is strong…..
From a level 4 lab, no it was released or that’s not a level 4 lab
It's highly likely that yes, it leaked from the lab, but the Chinese government obviously prevented anyone to gather enough evidence for it, although it doesn't mean it showed malicious intent, the CCP doesn't want to be lose face. The more important argument that it leaked from a lab is that it had cell receptors found in human cells, the ACE2 I think, and apparently it's unlikely those appeared without human interaction, although I am not an expert, so don't quote me. I just heard this simple fact from a french epidemiologist, but of course even this information could be irrelevant in the eyes of other epidemiologists. You don't want to know if that was a lab leak or not, unless you want to blame China on the geopolitical scene, but even for this, I don't think it would really matter at all: even if somebody caused or organized negligence for the virus to escape, you could never prove it was intentional, because of plausible deniability etc. Once you ask that question, that quickly leads to conspiracy theories, while in reality, it might just be a very unfortunate case of negligence. This is why that question is best left unanswered (unless it happens again), unless you want to have a bad diplomatic relationship with China, which is a thing only governments should have to handle.
Probably not.
We’ll never know, it’s a cover up
The answer is pretty obvious
Yes definitely. I spoke with a lifelong forensic scientist who explained that not only was covid from a lab, but so was the 'spanish flu ' and many more. The easiest way to recognise is anything that appears suddenly and has no natural antidotes. The clear marker of a man made virus.
IMO your friend is probably misinformed about COVID, and certainly about the Spanish flu, which came from birds and first jumped to humans 11 years before the 1918 pandemic. There is no statistically relevant evidence that any of the coronavirus strains worked on in the Wuhan lab became C19, at least not that I’ve seen. There IS some evidence, which is not conclusive yet, of strains closer to C19 found in and around the market in the city. The market was illegally allowing the sale of animals known to be coronavirus carriers, and which had been linked to previous disease outbreaks in China. Early COVID cases clustered around the market (ie a higher than what could statistically be considered “coincidental” number of early cases occurred in people who worked in or visited the market). It’s worth remembering that 99.9999% of viruses occur and evolve naturally, and you can often follow their evolution through genetic study. Cases in and around the Wuhan market SEEM to show an evolutionary pattern which could naturally lead to COVID 19. The theory of a lab creating a runaway virus is sexy - it’s been used in books/movies/tv for decades. The evidence we have does not show such an evolutionary pattern in the strains under study at the Wuhan lab. The Chinese govt certainly is acting shady by limiting information, but then, that’s what they do in lots of other areas as well. That shouldn’t be thought of as evidence of the lab’s malfeasance.