Since the publication on May 14th of the letter in Science calling for a new investigation into the origins of COVID-19, the lab leak theory has officially gone mainstream. Numerous articles testifying to its plausibility have been published, and President Biden ordered intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts to examine the virus’s origin.
One of the best articles that’s been published in recent weeks is a piece by Zeynep Tufekci in the New York Times. Although she doesn’t come down in favour of one theory or the other (lab leak versus natural origin), she does lay out much of the circumstantial evidence for a lab leak. And it’s not in short supply.
To begin with, you have the location of the first outbreak in Wuhan, China – home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (as well as the Wuhan C.D.C.). It would be a remarkable coincidence, many have observed, if the pandemic just happened to get started in a city that hosts one of the world’s major coronavirus research labs.
Some have countered that labs tend to be built where the viruses are. However, this simply isn’t true in the case of the Wuhan Institute, as Tufekci points out. The lab has “been where it is since 1956… It was upgraded and began to focus on coronavirus research only after SARS.” Even Dr. Shi (the “Batwoman”) has said she “never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan”.
Next, you have reports about the rather lax safety standards inside the Wuhan Institute. In 2016, for example, scientists ran experiments on a coronavirus capable of infecting human cells in a BSL-2 lab – a biosafety level that “has been compared with that of a dentist’s office”. And in 2017, a Chinese state-TV story about Dr. Shi’s research “showed researchers handling bats or bat feces with their bare hands”.
Then there is the fact that Dr. Shi, her colleagues and the Wuhan Institute, not to mention the Chinese authorities, have given misleading or incomplete accounts of key events, or have simply withheld information. Aside from the location’s first major outbreak, this is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence for a lab leak. If the virus’s origin is zoonotic, why wouldn’t you let other scientists look over your files?
On 3rd February, 2020, Dr. Shi and her colleagues “announced in Nature that they had found a virus in their database, RaTG13, whose genome sequence was 96.2% identical to SARS-CoV-2”. Internet sleuths then “combed through genomic databases and found that RaTG13 was an exact match for a bat coronavirus called 4991”, which had been implicated in an unexplained 2012 outbreak of pneumonia among miners in Yunnan. Neither the name change nor the previous outbreak were mentioned in Dr. Shi’s paper.
That same group of internet sleuths also discovered that “a genomic database maintained by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with information about thousands of bat samples… went offline in September 2019”. (The official explanation is that it had been “subjected to hacking”.)
On 10th December, Peter Daszak – organiser of the infamous Lancet letter, and a close collaborator of Dr. Shi’s – dismissed suggestions that there were live bats inside the Wuhan Institute. In a now-deleted tweet he wrote, “We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!” However, contrary evidence subsequently emerged.
As Tufekci notes, “The Chinese Academy of Sciences website has listed the Wuhan institute as having at least a dozen cages for bats, and in 2018 the institute applied for a patent for a bat cage. Dr. Shi has talked about monitoring antibodies in bats over time — which would not be done in a cave.”
Most suspicious of all, the Chinese authorities have straightforwardly “refused to share direct records from the lab”. After the publication of the Science letter earlier this year, Dr. Shi told a reporter, “It’s definitely not acceptable” for other experts to review her lab’s records…
Another piece of the puzzle is the genetic sequence of the virus itself, including the presence of a so-called “furin cleavage site” on the virus’s spike protein. This is something that Nicholas Wade discussed extensively in his essay back in May. Tufekci, though, isn’t convinced. She notes, “aspects of the virus that have made some suspect it was bioengineered could also be evidence that the virus evolved naturally”.
The fact that no intermediary host species has yet been identified arguably lends support to the lab leak theory. However, Tufekci raises the possibility that the virus passed straight from bats to humans. In that case, she says, “no intermediary animal is necessary, since it could have been any interaction with a bat – by a villager or a field researcher”.
Finally, there’s the frequency with which lab leaks have occurred in the past. Bayes theorem tell us that the probability of a hypothesis, given some evidence, is a function of the conditional probability of the evidence given the hypothesis, as well as the prior probability of the hypothesis.
If you take all of human history, the vast majority of pandemics have been caused by zoonotic spill-over – which would suggest the prior probability of a lab leak is quite low. However, sophisticated research labs have only been around for a few decades. (We can’t pin the Plague of Justinian on inadequate safety protocols.)
“A better period of comparison”, Tufekci notes, “is the time since the advent of molecular biology, when it became more likely for scientists to cause outbreaks.” In fact, nearly every case of SARS since the original outbreak in 2002 has been due to lab leaks. There have been “six incidents in three countries, including twice in a single month from a lab in Beijing”.
And such leaks are by no means confined to China. In 2007, foot-and-mouth disease “escaped from a drainage pipe leak at an English lab with the highest biosafety rating, BSL-4”. I’m not aware of what percentage of epidemics are caused by lab leaks, as opposed to zoonotic spill-over, but it’s probably larger than we’ve been led to believe.
Tufekci’s article contains a lot of valuable insights, and is worth reading in full.
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I find the analogy of Hitler invading Czechoslovakia and then Poland is used not just with the Ukraine but with many othe geopolitical situations primarily to warn of the perils of appeasement and advocate for military action.
It’s a hard argument to counter because it implies that the aggressor has the intention of going further. And that is materially impossible to disprove. You can’t ever prove to anyone that you’re not going to do something.
The fact that Russia has nukes isn’t a good counter. If anything it reinforces the argument that they intend to advance with impunity.
The argument that the west is economically much bigger doesnt help either. More reason to slap them back.
The Hitler analogy is the warmonger’s trump card.
There is nothing that the Ukrainians should negotiate.
Their territory has been invaded. Their citizens are being raped, maimed and killed. Ukrainians are being bombed out of their villages, towns and cities. Their natural resources are being destroyed. Russia encouraged and armed separatists in the east of the country, just as they did in Transnistria and as they did in South Ossetia.
As a matter of principle why should they negotiate anything that cedes to Russia even a single square inch of Ukrainian sovereign territory? There should be no reward for Russia’s actions and Putin’s now admitted imperialist ambitions.
The reason to negotiate would be to spare the population from being crushed by a war of attrition they can never win.
Sometimes there are no good choices, just crappy ones from which one can try to choose the least crappy.
Truss had a surreal idea of the role of Foreign Secretary seeking only to polarise matters even more and encouraging young people to out and fight. It ain’t what you do.
Despite all of the rhetoric of doing everything about the British mercenaries sentenced to death, no diplomatic contact has been made by the FO….
Despicable after urging British mercenaries to fight.
no.
While I agree with the thrust of this article, it does seem like pandering to gibberish. The most glaring fact for me is that we are clearly not talking about an expansionist power. There is no evidence whatsoever that Russia intends to seize new territory. You could at a stretch call Crimea a kind of land grab (which is patently absurd) and at an even greater stretch you could argue that by recognising the breakaway regions in Eastern Ukraine, the Russians have expanded their sphere of influence. That’s it. Putin’s been in power for 20 years and we see no evidence, either in words or actions that under his leadership, there is any intention to expand. And why would they? They already have the largest and arguably most resource rich country on earth. What exactly would be the benefit to Russia of risking annihilation in order to, I don’t know, seize a stretch of the Baltic coast?! Give me a break. I don’t think we should lower ourselves to the level of these daft ideas in the media and commentariat.
What exactly would be the benefit to Russia of risking annihilation in order to, I don’t know, seize a stretch of the Baltic coast?!
Just the most obvious ones: Ice-free harbour in the Baltic sea beyond Köngsberg, elimination of NATO miltiary presence close to the Russian capital, re-attach the Kaliningrad military base to the motherland. Putin is also on record for stating that he considers the Baltic statelets Russian territory Peter the Great rightfully reconquered from Sweden.
Koenigsberg. What happened to their German speakers again?
With generous American (and British, but mostly American) help, the Red Army essentially depopulated the complete area. What used to be the breadbasket of the Reich is now mostly wilderness (population density is less than half of that of Poland and Poland is already huge and mostly empty) and there’s a large, Russian military base.
Russian culture and civilization at it’s usual finest.
The Crimean population voted to become Russian it wasn’t annexed. The vote in favour was well over 90%
Same as the Donbass regions voted to be independent areas within Ukraine & have been under attack from Ukrainian forces ever since.
Russia went in after the number of artillery strikes had increased over the previous week to prevent loss of life. Article 51 was invoked at the UN. Their intervention is akin to a NATO Blue beret mission to save life.
The bigger the weaponry given to the Ukrainians, the further back their troops must be pushed to prevent them from shelling & killing the citizens of the Donbass.
Yep, I’m with you (I was being deliberately measured!) and was from the start of the whole crisis in 2014; except we’re not allowed to talk about that, we’ve all got to pretend that history started in February 2022, when Putin woke up one morning and decided to single-handedly restore the USSR.
As I’ve written a couple of times in the past already: Putin as Russian leader acting in what he believes to be the best interest of his country regardless of what the Atlantic Charter cooked up by Churchill and Roosevelt happens to say about wars would deserve some respect. But not Putin the whiney inventor of seriously thin pretexts for his actions. This deserves nothing but contempt.
…yes, when we talk about expansion, it’s always good to remember that Russia has between 12-36 military bases outside of Russia… China has about 8.
The Uk itself has around 145, while the USA has around 750 in 70+ foreign countries/territories.
In March of this year Biden was at a meeting of the Business Round Table when he said…”There’s going to be a New World Order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.”
Not much equivocation there….
This constant discussion of the second world war under the guise of any supposed topic starts to get pretty tiresome, especially when not even the most basic facts are right.
Poland was an state which had been artifically recreated by the Entente powers from German and Russian territory based on the usual motto of self-determination of the peoples unless they’re German and don’t count as people. As this was bound to cause trouble later on, both Britain and France had made so-called guarantees for the existence of the Polish state in its then-current form, ie, there were formal treaties stating that invasion of Poland would be a casus belli for both.
By that time, Germany and Russia were allies and they conducted joint invasion of Poland the outcome of which was a fourth Polish partition, ie, the territory of the former Polish state went to Germany and Russia. Despite this, neither Britain nor France did anything to help the Poles save declaring war on Germany. Neither of both powers considered declaring war on Russia (as far as I know).
How any of this could apply to the situation in Ukraine is anybody’s guess. As someone already pointed out, the negotiated solution is red herring. The correct term for what that’s supposed to mean would be Ukrainian surrender. That’s what Fearmongeringheimer and his associates want. And chances are that they just want this because it amount to sort-of a defeat for the current US government.
I don’t think so…after all Poland wasn’t being used by the USA as a proxy at that time to try to reduce the power of the Germans …as Ukraine is now being used to try to, in the words of LLoyd Austin the US Defence Secretary..”…to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kind of things it has done in Ukraine.” Which really means..we can’t let Russia..and our main problem China, ally with each other.
The US Government’s Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) holds a briefing today on the “moral and strategic” necessity of partitioning Russia.In other words they are having a discussion on the “need” to partition Russia (into little pieces) for “moral and strategic” reasons.
So Russia knows exactly where it stands, China knows they are next..
we are being taken into a war that the vast majority of people don’t want to maintain USA hegemony, and we don’t get a choice, (and Ukraine won’t survive either…)
That scenario is boody scary, sorry but I hope you are wrong but I fear you may be right.
Depressing times.
…we are lead by idiots unfortunately Judy…Liz (the village idiot) Truss keeps taking us one step closer to annihilation with tweets like this….
“The UK fully supports Lithuania stopping sanctioned goods from Russia travelling through their country. We must stay strong in the face of Russian aggression and challenge these unjustified threats”
(A blockade is an act of war that is regulated by international law—namely, by the 1856 Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law and by Articles 1–22 of the 1909 London Declaration Concerning the Laws of Naval War. It is important to distinguish between the terms blockade and embargo . An embargo is a type of economic sanction that may be adopted under the aegis of the UN or another international organization, to try to force a State to comply with a decision.
Regardless of whether the situation is a blockade or an embargo, humanitarian law clearly posits that States are under the obligation to allow the free passage of relief that is of an exclusively humanitarian and impartial nature and is indispensable to the survival of the civilian population (GCIV Art. 23, API Art. 70, and APII Art. 18.2).
Importantly….Whether or not a blockade was seen as lawful depended on the laws of the nations whose trade was influenced by the blockade.
For any reasonable assessment the West has undoubtedly been baiting Putin through Ukraine and particularly since 2014 – and questions have to be asked of the West’s larger design. Biden has talked of destroying Putin, others of weakening him. Ukraine is not a democracy and it has been persecuting ethnic Russians. None of this is seriously disputable. The war undoubtedly damaging Western security and its economy. It is actually daft.
It is all very ‘disputable’, particularly since you offer no references, evidence, in support of your assertions.
Nevertheless you are, in my view, correct to say that the war is damaging Western security.
That is why Sweden and Finland have now applied to join NATO and NATO members are radically increasing their defence budgets
And you are also correct in describing the invasion of Ukraine as daft.
On Monday (Z)elenskyy addressed the African Union in a virtual discussion…
only four Heads Of State attended..out of the 55 that could have….
The nonsensical, childish propaganda that passes for news in the UK has given people a ridiculous and uniformed idea of what is actually happening.
Follow the money:
‘Between 2001 and 2018, China loaned approximately $126 billion to African countries. Between 2001 and 2018, China invested $41 billion in FDI.’
‘China’s investment in Africa ensures that its investment results in greater global consensus around Chinese interests.’
Chinese Economic Engagement in Africa 24 Jan 22
Declaring war on Germany in 1939 turned out to be a disastrous mistake, so we should learn from that and take no further steps to extend or expand the war in Ukraine.
How do you work that out?
How can anyone comment on this circus? It is a
An analogy has a number of different meanings but one of them is:
‘a comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification’
And the appeasement of Germany over Czechoslovakia in 1938 then standing firm in 1939 after the invasion of Poland does explain our actions regarding Ukraine.
Negotiation/diplomacy failed after 2014 when we ignored our 1994 guarantee of Ukrainian territorial integrity.
Putin has several times made clear that he has further expansion in mind.
‘“Apparently, it also fell to us to return (what is Russia’s) and strengthen (the country).
“And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.”
“It’s impossible — Do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia.’
General Rustam Minnekayev, acting commander of Russia’s central military district, also told members of a defence industry forum that control over southern Ukraine would give Russia access to Transnistria in April 2022.
So the choice for this country and its allies is clear, but closer in analogy to our predicament over Czechoslovakia in 1938 than Poland n 1939.
We’ve been here before. We know what to do.
And the appeasement of Germany over Czechoslovakia in 1938 then standing firm in 1939 after the invasion of Poland does explain our actions regarding Ukraine.
ROTFLMAO. Great Britain stood firmly on the other side of the channel and let the Germans and Russians do whatever they wanted to do. They could easily have landed troops to support them instead as the German navy was absolutely no match for the Home Fleet and the straits were still under Danish control. For some reason someone will certainly know, they also never (as far as I know) objected to the Russian invasion of Poland. Coming to think of it, Not-so-Great Britain actually never objected to Russian communists invading anything or subjugating anyone. After all, those strange people in distant, east European countries one knows little of are not so important.
NB: There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that except that this blatant case of disingenious Realpolitik isn’t suitable for taking a moral high ground.
The idea that Britain could have intervened in Poland in 1939 is just plain silly.
To see some of the likely consequences, squared, why not study Britain’s intervention in Norway 1940?
All out war is a hugely destructive process and is an option of absolute last resort. The US would never have entered WW2 except for the attack on Pearl Harbour. How were Britain’s convinced they needed to go to war when Hitler was going after Russian Communists? The analogy is nothing at all similar. As long as small wars are happening in remote far away places people don’t really feel threatened and virtue signal all day long. Covid has shown how easy it is to control public opinion.
Or not really.
Germany and Russia signed a non aggression pact in 1939 which allowed both of those countries to invade and partition Poland.
The pact lasted until Germany invaded Russia in 1941, two years after Britain had declared war on Germany.
Chamberlain had told Parliament, representing the British people, on 31 March 1939, that Britain would support Poland in resisting any aggression against that country.
We said the same thing to Ukraine in 1994.