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Alina Chan is credible

Posted on by Razib Khan

A question from long-time reader Riordan:

Razib,

I’ve been seeing this Twitter thread being passed around my Facebook circles yesterday:

You’ve been tracking the pandemic deeply for quite some time. How plausible do you regard the theory from Alina Chan that COVID19 originated as a accidental/criminally incompetent lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

“Tracking the pandemic” is a big job, and really you can only focus on a small subset of what’s going on. In mid-November 2020 we know a lot, but there’s a lot we don’t know. In fact, to be frank, we know a lot less than I would have thought in the spring of 2020. I haven’t been focusing much personally on the various ideas related to the origin of the current coronavirus that’s responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. So I will pass on a few things:

– As early as late February a friend who has done work in evolutionary genetics and pathogens mentioned that both they and their mentor suspected the Chinese were covering something up, perhaps lab escape, on a Zoom call with a few others and myself. This person was told to not even bring up such views by others at the time.

– Another friend, whose own area of expertise is molecular genetics, arrived at the same conclusion independently (lab escape) and devoted some time in the late spring to the topic and queried me about my own opinions (unfortunately I had far less clear or informed views than they did, though I did tell them that others had come to the same conclusion).

– A contact of mine who is well-connected in D.C. political circles told me at about the same time that there was worry that the Chinese were covering things up, but that the PRC has a track record of “going after” people with credibility that came after them, so many people were wary of sticking their necks out (obviously no one cares about Alex Jones’ opinion,  so he can say whatever he wants).

– Finally, I think I can say that there are many people who find Alina Chan’s critiques and concerns quite credible within science (e.g., people who have spoken positively about her courage and views privately to me who work in academia or industry). I am included in that number. This does not mean she is correct. But, it does mean that the time has come to evaluate various possibilities in a calm and objective manner. It looks plausible that we will have a vaccine in 2021, and COVID-19 will be in the rear-view mirror. We need to take stock and examine what happened in January once we have the spare bandwidth.

I am by no means a Sinophobe. On the contrary. But the behavior of the PRC as a whole needs to be examined with clarity, rather than hopefulness. China deserves accolades for its ability to contain and crush COVID-19, but that doesn’t mean that their record is unblemished. At a minimum, the PRC was using WHO as its mouthpiece in January. But, it is not out of the realm of possibility that elements within the PRC are engaging in disinformation to cover-up their own culpability.

Note: Here’s a Boston Magazine profile of Chan and her ideas. If you don’t follow her on Twitter, I would suggest you do so.

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46 thoughts on “Alina Chan is credible”

  2. An accidental release cover up, if that’s what happened, isn’t terribly honorable, but is understandable and really doesn’t change much of anything about what should be done, short of a call for scolding the PRC for the coverup. Even more likely, the Chinese didn’t know the source, it could have been an accidental release, it could have been something else, and they discouraged looking into the question.

    The notion that this was intentionally released as a bioweapon, on the other hand, is batshit crazy.

  4. Unz thinks bioweapon, but his conjecture is the US deep state did it to get the Chinese and the Iranians with no plan for what comes after. Seems nutty to me.

    Whatever the source and accidental from the Wuhan lab seems a good bet, the lesson we should be taking is just how deep US government (CDC) and manufacturing failure is. Even at this late we are back to mask shortages with the current surge. Same but lesser for testing.

    https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-coronavirus-catastrophe-as-biowarfare-blowback/

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/face-masks-are-again-in-short-supply-as-covid-19-cases-surge-11604499588

    https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiENaDBr5aAV4iddAtQcg4QzcqGAgEKg8IACoHCAow1tzJATDnyxUww8rPBg?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen

  5. I’m sure you’ve read Phillip Lemoine’s argument saying very unlikely to be accidental Wuhan lab release. I re-read it in light of what’s in the Alina Chan profile, and think Lemoine wins this.

    For instance Chan correctly points out the four pangolin papers have a lot of copy/paste of the same data, but….is it a shock this happens in science, esp in China? And Chan’s argument that the virus was well adapted to humans plausibly hurts her argument, not helps it. At best it’s neutral. If naturally evolved, then the virus would be rare and non-detected until it became perfectly adapted, at which point it would suddenly burst forth with exponential growth. Which is what happened. Whereas if bioengineered, we have to assume the scientists were not gods, so couldn’t predict the perfect sequence. In which case….they’d have to infect (and kill) quite a number of people to get it to evolved into the form that was optimized.

    I’m still open if Chan finds more evidence, or maybe I missed something. But right now I don’t see how you can reconcile Lemoine’s arguments with hers. I think Lemoine wins. But of course I could be wrong.

    Anyway, let me quote a bit from Lemoine, just as a reminder:
    https://quillette.com/2020/09/02/the-china-syndrome-part-iii-wet-markets-and-biolabs/

    quotes:
    “the fact that RaTG13-CoV had already been sequenced before 2020 gives us no reason to think that SARS-CoV-2 was artificially created by replacing the RBD of a bat coronavirus with that of a pangolin coronavirus. Indeed, as I’ve already explained, even if SARS-CoV-2 was created in that way, RaTG13-CoV was almost certainly not used as a backbone. In order to believe that SARS-CoV-2 was bioengineered, we would need to assume that researchers at the WIV had previously discovered a bat coronavirus closely related to SARS-CoV-2 (though almost certainly not RaTG13-CoV), and also pangolin coronaviruses almost identical in the RBD to those discovered by researchers at other institutions (who didn’t report this discovery until February of this year). They then replaced the RBD of the former with that of the latter to create a chimera (not just a pseudovirus that can’t replicate after infecting a cell, as most of the studies mentioned by Deigin and the people behind “Project Evidence” did, but a fully infectious virus), without any researcher anywhere else in the world having ever heard anything about any of this.”

  6. Oh. Forgot to add one more point. The style of argument where you list one odd thing, then another odd thing, then another odd thing, and then you keep searching for odd things that match your hypothesis has a name in science. It’s called p hacking.

    I mean, to be clear, I have nothing against Alina Chan who seems a brave and sharp scientist. If she’s right, then she has done the world a great service, and I’ll be happy to congratulate her. I’m just saying the style of argument on this topic reminds me of p hacking.

    One more quote:
    “Nor is there any evidence that anyone has discovered a bat coronavirus more closely related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13-CoV. Furthermore, structural analyses would apparently have predicted that the RBD of the pangolin coronavirus was not especially well suited to binding human ACE2, so it is highly unlikely researchers would have used it to create a chimera for this purpose. This is not necessarily dispositive; researchers may have wished to create this chimera for some other reason, but we’re now adrift in a world of ad hoc hypotheses and idle speculation. Besides which, as far as we know, nobody at the WIV even knew about these pangolin coronaviruses until February of this year, when a team of researchers at other institutions realised that they were very similar to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD and uploaded the genomes to public databases.”

  7. I went back down the rabbit hole with this today and am now fully convinced that a lab leak occurred around September 2019. There are multiple lines of evidence showing emergency tenders, sewage plant shutdowns etc around the facility at that time – see https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1313858771064512517

    More interesting to me is the evidence showing that RaTG13, the CoV strain most closely related to SARS-CoV2 and supposedly rediscovered as part of the Nature paper describing SARS-CoV2 in January 2020, is another name for a strain deposited with NCBI in 2016 by the Wuhan lab, BtCoV/4991. This strain was collected in 2013 in the same mine in Mojiang, Yunnan where a fatal outbreak of a SARS-like illness had occurred in 2012. These patients were shown to have coronavirus IgM antibodies but no live virus was ever reported as being found. This sequence of events is not at all clear unless you follow the sources very carefully.
    See https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.581569/full for a review of this line of evidence.

    Sure enough, it seems that the RaTG13/BtCoV/4991 sample was accessed within the Wuhan lab in September 2019 as part of a project investigating novel viruses with pandemic potential, covered in the twitter thread above.

    Interestingly (haven’t seen this discussed anywhere else yet), it seems strange that the SARS-like outbreak in Yunnan in 2012 (putatively due to RaTG13 / BtCoV/4991 ) seems to have been quite lethal with 3/6 known cases being fatal, with two cases men in their 40s and one in his 60s. According to the master’s thesis which described the outbreak they were quickly admitted to a well-equipped hospital. This is not at all consistent with the clinical spectrum of COVID-19.

    Alina Chan’s other very interesting paper (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.01.073262v1) shows a lack of observed mutations in SARS-CoV2 since the pandemic began, compared to SARS-CoV over the same period of time. This seems to strongly imply that the virus was pre-adapted to human ACE2 when the pandemic began. I wonder if SARS-CoV2’s significantly higher infectivity and lower mortality is consistent with pre-adaption to human cells.

    All very interesting! I am a clinician with no real experience of phylogenetics, so I am very interesting in hearing others’ views.

  8. ohwilleke: “The notion that this was intentionally released as a bioweapon, on the other hand, is batshit crazy.”

    Razib: “i think bioweapon is really really unlikely.”

    My take is that we better pray the Chinese are not that far ahead of the rest of the world in bio-technology. I doubt that they are.

    OTOH: Negligent management of a lab. That they can do, and probably did.

    I am also extraordinarily skeptical that they have really figured out how to crush the epidemic and have implemented the plan successfully.

    I think the Chinese regime decided that since the virus mostly killed old folks, people who are well beyond their productive years, there is no reason to do anything about it. So, they stopped counting. It is a partial solution to the social problems they have because of a ballooning population of old people and a lack of social programs like pensions and medicare.

    I would also hazard that this virus has cross immunity with other coronaviruses that have circulated in rural china for years.

  9. ohwilleke: “really doesn’t change much of anything about what should be done, short of a call for scolding the PRC for the coverup.”

    It makes a difference if someone wants to scold the PRC for what actually happened. IIRC the Australian PM was annoyed with Trump for spreading conspiracy theories on this issue because it damaged an opportunity for the international community to pressure China to shut down its wet markets.

    Of course, maybe there is no international community, at least one that could pressure China, or maybe the wet markets are still a bigger threat than lab accidents, so the truth is inconvenient. I don’t know.

  13. The most believable theory, I read is that:

    Sometime in sep/oct 2019, China had a security drill/audit of Wuhan bio-lab facilities.

    As part of this drill the virus sample was taken out for audit & it must have been during this process that the virus “escaped”

  14. Walter Sobchak: “I think the Chinese regime decided that since the virus mostly killed old folks, people who are well beyond their productive years, there is no reason to do anything about it. So, they stopped counting.”

    Unlikely. I’m pretty sure, they don’t have it as much under control as they make public, but there are no outbreaks as in the US or Europe now. More probably there are smaller local outbreaks which are covered up by local authorities, usually even before the central government gets wind of them.
    Even the CCP wouldn’t be able to cover up the mass mortality we would see if the Wuhan virus were out of control.

  16. Re; China, going by the Oxford Government Stringency Response calculation (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-stringency-index) and all its subindicators (https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus#4-policy-responses-to-limit-the-spread-of-the-disease),

    On this index at least China pretty much seems to have been “high stringency” for most of 2020, and hasn’t really relaxed any of the measures.

    Stay-at-home requirements still in place, school closures in place, workplaces closed, travel bans in place.

    Though note that may overstate things as based on the highest subnational indicator (and China is very large with many subregions).

    I mean, I’m a bit unsure about “Oh, it’s over with through policy and life is back to normal, and they basically don’t need to do anything”. Maybe it is in some places and not others. And agree it’s possible that there could be some kind of pre-existing immunity that means that at least some East Asian countries haven’t needed to be that effective – What’s up with Thailand? Why is Japan the country that is always threatened but never seems to break out? Why has nothing ever happened in Mongolia? Further research needed on that (specifically see what’s up with fatality rates among recent migrants from region in high fatality countries). It seems weird that there is little attention on this – the claim often seems to be that the CJK countries must have stopped the infection due to “competence” while the Thais and Vietnamese merely benefited from the environment, but that seems pretty open to question… Maybe there’s some common factor identified in government response and at some point it’ll be obvious that 90% of what China or wherever was doing was pointless.

    But on the face value look like China have pretty much suppressed in a fairly heavy handed way and have never really stopped…. So it’s plausible it’s not really taken off that much?

  17. “Stay-at-home requirements still in place, school closures in place, workplaces closed, travel bans in place.”

    No, they are not. That is an almost unbelievably stupid thing to say. Ask any of the British or American expats who are now back and working in situ in Mainland China. The Chinese economy could not have recovered the way it has if any of that were true. But of course no one here believes that either.

    Reading comments here from my perspective of LIVING IN CHINA, many people come across as if they are living in some parallel universe.

    But I have given up commenting about it, because it is a waste of time.

    People dissing Thailand and Vietnam – Thailand has an excellent public health system, I dare say a lot better than the USA and UK and certainly a lot cheaper, and they have controlled it through competence. Ditto Vietnam – they shut everything down early. I guess it’s hard for Brits and Americans to admit that their countries have been hopelessly incompetent, when ‘inferior’ E/SE Asian countries have done so much better. So the obvious explanation *must* be that they have some kind of pre-existing immunity.

    In case no one here has noticed, New Zealand crushed it, and Australia has now crushed it, and they did it over the southern hemisphere winter. My home state of Western Australia has not had a case in more than 6 months – it is inhabited mostly by whites and is not run by the Chinese Communist Party.

  18. John, not just Brits and Americans but every single European country from Poland to Germany to France to Spain must be “incompetent” under your explanation…

  19. I’m not just picking on Europeans; Russia has done worse than it should have.

    Hong Kong’s management hasn’t been brilliant, and I predict we are just about to embark on our 4th wave, introduced by residents returning from Nepal and not tested a second time before being released from quarantine, which is infuriatingly stupid, given we have more than ample testing capacity. That was the second piece of stupidity – the first piece was to allow them to leave to travel to Nepal in the first place, when it is known to be a high risk destination. That’s what the government gets for trying to be too nice to stupid people.

  20. OK, understood re; European. Anyway, look my main points were meant to be:

    1) China is still doing stuff to suppress the virus, so it’s not like they are ever going to achieve a point where they simply can’t do anything… I acknowledged originally that these could be pretty localized, and an indicator by country is difficult for China. but I think it is worth looking at an indicator based on policies rather than *just* “What do Western businessmen say about life in city X or Y?”. I don’t think it’s crazily dumb or anything. a subnational province level indicator would be more useful for China (provinces having much larger populations than most world countries), and really shouldn’t be beyond the capacity of Western data providers to do (but it seems that it is!).

    2) but within doing lots of stuff also a lot of countries in that region who’ve completed policies with different levels of “stringency” all seem to have succeeded fairly well. there does not seem to me to be any one way to policy success.

    perhaps that’s because countries from Mongolia to Malaysia have all done whatever differently they did very well and early, while countries from Switzerland to Malta have all done whatever they did “incompetently” and late. “competence” is the shared factor.

    maybe so, but this wouldn’t have much to do with any previous expert rated judgments of state competency / public health capacity.

    I don’t think an immunity factor is necessarily that persuasive, but there are things that can be done to look at it and exclude it. we know age-adjusted rate of death for Asian-Americans is a little higher than White Americans for’ex, which suggests no (https://www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race) but it may be that after adjustment for spatial distribution and disaggregation into different groups from Asian countries there is some effect for East Asia. even a relatively small level of population immunity might make measures quite a bit more effective. I doubt it but don’t exclude it.

    other dynamics could be that there is simply a lot of random initial distribution in effect, connective dynamics, etc.

  21. My daughter can tell me what’s happening in Guangdong Province, and she’s not a Western businessman, she’s a hybrid biologist of the female variety. I also have good Chinese friends and colleagues in the Mainland who tell me what’s happening there, directly by phone, so no censorship of anything. My point about that is that I can try to tell certain people here that they have things wrong until I am blue in the face, and it makes not the slightest impression on them. I am not going to keep doing it.

    For your benefit, I will say that what Mainland China is doing now is remaining highly vigilant and fire-fighting when they get an outbreak, jumping on it fast and hard, and still learning as they go along, e.g. they have now started disinfecting the external packaging of frozen food imports because of the outbreak in Qingdao. They are currently fighting an outbreak in Kashgar, and they previously crushed one that they had in Beijing – they actually completely locked down Beijing again until they had eliminated it there.

    Yes, there is no ‘one way’. If there is a common factor that I can see, it is what Jacinda Ardern said – go hard and go early, with whatever you are going to do. The big mistake is to be reactive, because this thing moves so fast that it is way too late.

    So, my best guess at the commonality for success: early, and pro-active.

    I would not say that Malaysia has done well, and Singapore fucked up big time because they forgot that they have a huge number of foreign contract workers living in crowded, substandard dormitories, although they seem to have it controlled now.

    “this wouldn’t have much to do with any previous expert rated judgments of state competency / public health capacity.” – YES!!! EXACTLY!!! To me, that is probably the single best thing you have said. Look at Africa, outside of South Africa.

  22. Matt, the other thing I can tell you is that during the ‘golden week’ holiday in China in October, domestic air travel within China reached 88.3% (50.32 million people) of what it was during the same period in 2019 – not quite back to full ‘old normal’, but close. And that’s just air travel, not counting travel by China’s very extensive high speed rail network. That’s just from the local news, and certainly not beyond Western data providers. I suspect it’s maybe a case that they simply don’t believe any news coming out of China, even when they could easily fact check it. Me, I’m sick of that attitude. I’ve had enough.

    So anyway, no, they’re not staying home.

  23. 9 deaths per million in Malaysia (in total!) seems like done really well to me! That’s pretty tiny in an absolute sense!

    I do think there’s a circularity in going “coronavirus cases are low because good and competent public health, and we know these countries must have competent public health because the coronavirus cases were low”.

    Re; go hard and early, early yes, hard maybe not – Japan didn’t seem to really go particularly hard for’ex but did act early… anyway, post-mortems on performance and quality vs various forms of luck will probably get better by the end of 2021…

  24. John Massey,

    Since you’ve popped in here, and you seem to have some detailed experience with China, I do wonder if you have any thoughts on the allegations (and I guess insinuations) made by Alina Chan regarding the possibility of a lab leak from Wuhan.

  25. Is anyone else concerned about this MRNA vaccine? Seems like gene therapy rather than a vaccine. Totally different from traditional vaccine and not widely tested. Maybe there’s more for me to learn on this. Would appreciate any guidance.

  26. Riordan – This paragraph from the piece in Boston Magazine set alarm bells ringing for me:

    “Maybe the virus had been circulating undetected in humans for months, working out the kinks, and nobody had noticed. Also unlikely. China’s health officials would not have missed it, and even if they had, they’d be able to go back now through stored samples to find the trail of earlier versions. And they weren’t coming up with anything.”

    This paragraph is blatantly ridiculous. Who were these omnipotent health officials who were supposed to have picked up on sporadic cases of atypical pneumonia and connected all of the dots, in a huge chaotic country of 1.4 billion people? Ultimately that should rest with the Chinese CDC in Beijing, but such cases would probably not even be reported, and not regarded as remarkable if they were. And if any samples were taken, they would have been tested, nothing found, and discarded, because they wouldn’t have known what they were looking for – there are no stored samples to go back and look at again.

    China’s health care system is lousy and its bureacracy is labyrinthine, and to expect it to be seamlessly networked in a country that size is just bizarre. People get pneumonia from all manner of sources, and in most cases the ‘initiating agent’ is never detected, and the samples discarded. It’s a normal occurrence; it happens all the time in this part of the world. It happened to me in June 2019, completely out of the blue – no prior respiratory infection, just suddenly bang! pneumonia and a week in hospital (and I don’t know that wasn’t Covid-19 – my lungs have taken a very long time to recover from it; they still haven’t fully recovered, and might never). But pneumonia can be caused by a lot of different viruses, bacteria and fungi. In my case they never did identify any ‘initiating agent’, but they told me that is what happens in the majority of cases – they can’t find what causes it. And of course back then they were not looking for SARS-COV-2; they sure are now – I have to have a test before I can go for a routine health check. Hong Kong’s public health system is as good as the Mainland’s is bad – Mainlanders come to HK to get medical treatment, or did before they closed the border due to the pandemic.

    That paragraph in the Boston Magazine looks to me like it has been crafted to make the most likely explanation sound unlikely, or at the very least it is stupidly dismissive. If that is coming from Alina Chan, she either knows nothing about China (quite likely) and is frankly dumb outside of her specialization (not unheard of), or she is being duplicitous.

    I think Nathan Taylor is right. The coronavirus was silently circulating at low level for months or even years before it suddenly exploded where and when it did. Alina Chan is p hacking – she has fixated on her ‘discovery’, and now she is setting about finding any bit of evidence that appears to corroborate it, having discarded out of hand the most obvious explanation, when the reasons for discarding it are nonsense. I prefer not to suspect her of duplicity, but I do think she is fixated and not entertaining other possibilities.

    The head of the WIV has stated publicly that the lab was not holding any samples of the suspect bat coronavirus at the time. She came across to me as a very genuine person – she is famous in China as the “bat lady”, she has been going all over China for a lot of years looking for coronaviruses in bat shit that could pose a risk to humans. At least she deserves a bit of respect and credibility. But who knows? Humans are complicated.

    Having said that, anything is possible in China, and I won’t say I’m 100% convinced Alina Chan is wrong. But as things stand, I am very far from convinced she is right. I will continue to entertain it as a possibility, but not the most likely. If I am subsequently proven to be wrong, I will concede gracefully. Not to over-emphasize, but the source of the coronavirus is still not known, the intermediate ‘host’ animal (if there is one) has still not been identified, and the suspect bat coronavirus is still not a certainty. I want the source to be identified as much as anyone, but it hasn’t been yet, and might never be.

    On that point, Alina Chan’s recall of the SARS epidemic in 2003 is imperfect; not surprising, she was a teenager in Singapore, on the periphery, whereas it exploded in Hong Kong, and the CFR here was 17%; it was killing doctors and nurses and people of all ages, no one understood very well how it was being transmitted, and the population were traumatised by it. Two of my work colleagues were infected by it, and my tennis doubles partner was a local doctor who was treating SARS patients – I stuck by him out of friendship when others were treating him like a leper, and I can tell you that he was scared, and he wasn’t a guy who got scared easily. I will certainly never forget that time. Once it had subsided, no one was willing to come back to HK until the government got the Rolling Stones to come here to put on a concert, which to their credit they did do, and once that happened then people figured it must be OK to come back here again. They never did nail the intermediate host animal as civets with complete certainty, or at least it looked like there was another intermediate host animal between bats and civets, but they were unable to identify the other animal. It’s too late now, SARS has gone. The process of figuring out where it came from was certainly not the fast slam dunk she has made it out to be. Maybe it seemed so to her at the time, but it was not.

    Something else – very recently, some researchers in Thailand reported that they found a different coronavirus in bat droppings very close to SARS-CoV-2, so it is even possible that it did not originate in China, although I think it is most likely that it did. But then, bats don’t carry passports – not the ones I see flying around here at night, and I see a lot of them.

  27. But I will now keep following Alina Chan on Twitter, although I have never used it myself.

    Gratuitous observation – it’s high time people stopped wearing mink coats.

  28. Pangolins are a red herring – I get the concern about the data, and I picked up myself that there was something screwy going on with the data when those papers came out, despite being just a civil engineer. It was really very obvious.

    But pangolins are not the intermediate host animal in the coronavirus jumping from bats to humans. Not.

  29. “Can a truly independent investigation look into where these samples came from, the smugglers, co-smuggled animals to corroborate the story?”

    That’s it for me – she might well be an excellent research scientist and very smart in her field, but she is out of touch with reality in the real world; certainly in this part of the real world. No, that is not going to happen. Look into the smugglers and the co-smuggled animals? Now? How? Does she think illegal wild animal smugglers carry cargo manifests of the illegal species they are smuggling? She’s nuts.

    She’s all over the place – mentally hyperactive, and with a very unrealistic world view.

  30. @John Massey

    Your last two comments indicate that you haven’t read enough yet to understand the points Chan is making. The pangolin samples are being used to reconstruct the virus’ phylogeny. See here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

    The entire subgenus is highly recombinant, so it really does matter whether or not those pangolins got the RNA segments from humans, either from a related or precursor strain or from SARS-CoV-2 itself. If it can’t be known as you argue, then a lot of widely accepted arguments are wrong. Which is exactly her point, as is the idea that the pangolins are a red herring, the question is whether or not they are deliberately so.

  33. I am old enough that I was an adult while the Soviet Union and Communist East Germany were going concerns. And I remember all of the fanciful stories that academic leftists told me about those regimes.

    I do not believe a word of what the Chinese Regime says, nor do I believe anything that people under its watchful eye say. I do not hold the ordinary people responsible, they have a gun to their heads. The regime is a different story.

  34. Labayu – It seems like you have not read or understood the paper you are telling me to read. What does it say, as clearly as it possibly could? “While there is involvement of other mammalian species—specifically pangolins for SARS-CoV-2—as a plausible conduit for transmission to humans, there is no evidence that pangolins are facilitating adaptation to humans.” And: “Current sampling of pangolins does not implicate them as an intermediate host.” What did I say? “pangolins are not the intermediate host animal in the coronavirus jumping from bats to humans.” Be fair, that’s actually not bad for a civil engineer.

    It might be interesting to see what the same authors would have to say about minks. The Danish government has just voted not to kill all of theirs, because it would adversely affect the livelihoods of people closely related to the Danish prime minister. China has mink farms too, but they say their minks are not infected – given the current atmosphere of oppressive (but necessary) disease surveillance in China, I’m willing to believe them, but my choice would be to kill them all anyway, and not get any more. No one actually needs a mink coat, except for a mink.

    Marees – Oh *now* she is saying this? Having apparently dismissed possibility 2 as unlikely (I’m inferring that she actually said that, and that the writer was not putting words into her mouth)? What she is missing about that is a) everyone lives around bats, whether they know it or not, or more correctly in most cases the bats live around them and b) once the coronavirus has infected some humans and the ability to infect human to human is there once it mutates enough, there is no longer any need for the bats – it’s the infected humans who are moving around as the disease vector. Wuhan is a major transport hub, for both domestic air travel and travel by high speed rail. Everything goes through Wuhan – that is what makes it special. If you were intending to infect the whole Chinese population with a disease, you would take it to Wuhan and let it rip. On that point, and given that lab leaks happen, the WIV is poorly sited – it would be a lot better to move it somewhere else.

    If you want to know how I know about bats, I play tennis at night under lights, and the bats come to get the moths attracted to the lights. Do that and you will see bats all right, lots of them, and you can hear them too when they are using echo location to zero in on a moth to attack it, and I live in one of the most densely populated regions on earth. If people here knew just how many bats there are flying around just above them in the dark, a lot of them would probably freak. I don’t, I worry more about the very venomous bamboo snakes that slither out onto the court while I’m playing – green snake on a green background, and keeping my eye on the ball while keeping the snake in my peripheral vision so I don’t tread on it, that gets me twitchy. Doesn’t stop me playing though.

    Alina Chan says some other dumb things, e.g. the WHO team can’t visit the Huanan seafood market because it’s gone; it’s not there any more – they killed and burned all of the animals, disinfected the whole place and then shut it down, very soon after the first outbreak there. There is nothing necessarily sinister in that, it is an obvious instinctive reaction by lay people if they think they have an infectious disease outbreak caused by something in the market. It’s unfortunate – a scientist would prefer to ring fence it so it could be thoroughly investigated, but that opportunity was lost a long time ago.

    Note: I am *not* going after Alina Chan, and I don’t have a problem with what she is doing, good luck to her (being a post-doc/lab monkey in her field sucks, I know it does, and she needs to do whatever she can to stand out from the crowd and advance her career [you should see what BGI pay their lab techs and how they treat them – it’s not a career path I would recommend to anyone]), but she could really do with someone living in the real world to advise her, outside of the echo chamber she’s in. I would even be willing to volunteer.

    Sobchak – I have trouble believing you are real. Your country just had an election in which 48% of voters voted for one of the most blatant and frequent liars in a position of great power in history, if not the most, and you had mobs of angry looking people walking around carrying military assault rifles surrounding vote counting centres and hammering incessantly on the windows, and to you that’s OK, that’s normal, that’s proof that democracy is working just fine and serving the people. But you try to maintain the easily disproven ridiculous fiction that the Chinese are not controlling the coronavirus and just letting all of the old people die. I’m not the one with a gun to my head – I criticize things about China, and I have done in this thread. I assume you can’t read what people say on Weibo – they criticize the government all the time and don’t get shot for it. I try not to comment on American politics because they’re not my business, but you need to get a grip on reality. Seriously.

  35. Twitter user __ice9 has gone all in on lab leak from a chimera virus

    I have no knowledge on these matters. Maybe @razib can comment if this is a feasible scenario or a conspiracy theory…

    ice9 (@__ice9) Tweeted:

    But overall, this investigation changed my view.

    The simplest theory is that SARS-CoV-2 arose in bat CoV gain-of-function research at WIV, exiting via an infected human.

    It explains location, timing, deviation from reported sequences, and oddly combined human-relevant features.

    https://twitter.com/__ice9/status/1305989605993390080?s=20

  37. He’s quoting Yan Li-Meng, who is a nutcase.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Meng_Yan

    Keiji Fukuda and Malik Peiris are very serious, senior, ethical people at Hong Kong University, which is highly ranked internationally. Fukuda was with the WHO during the SARS1 epidemic, and Peiris was one of the key people who investigated SARS1 during the epidemic in Hong Kong, and he was very helpful in communicating to the public about how to protect themselves from infection – he got everyone calmed down, and was really solid. He’s a good man, and very reliable, and so is Fukuda.

    I will state emphatically that I do not believe either of them would have anything to do with any ‘cover-up’.

    “Tech Times cited Yan in an October 6 article, who said that the Chinese Communist Party and the world’s scientific community collaborated to hide the truth behind SARS-CoV-2.”

    Yeah, the world’s scientific community collaborated with the CCP. She’s clearly nuts.

    I kind of feel sorry for her, because it’s evident that she’s not mentally OK.

  38. “There are no bats in Wuhan” – LOL! Yeah, all of the bats in Hubei Province (which has lots of bats, just like everywhere else – you can easily look this stuff up) carefully steer clear of the Wuhan municipal boundary.

    Sorry, but this stuff is cracking me up.

  39. Marees, if you read the Wikipedia piece on Yan carefully, you will see that Alina Chan was one of the scientists who helped to debunk one of Yan’s claims in March this year.

    Alina Chan = solid scientist, who just needs a bit of ‘ground truthing’ on some of the things she says or asks about in a part of the world she has evidently never been to.

    Yan Li-Meng = mentally not OK conspiracy theorist who has published non-peer reviewed, politically motivated crap which has been debunked by any number of competent scientists in many different parts of the world.

    The two of them are worlds apart – anyone quoting Yan should be regarded with suspicion.

  40. @John Massey

    What indicated to me that you didn’t understand Chan’s point is that you think pangolins not being the intermediate host is relevant to what you quoted her saying, which it isn’t. Nobody is really arguing anymore that the pangolins are the intermediate host.

    According to the widely accepted reconstruction of the subgenus, SARS-CoV-2 is part of a clade which includes RaTG13, Pangolin Guangxi 2017, and Pangolin Guangdong 2019. This leads to the view that SARS-CoV-2 is one of several closely related viruses that have been circulating widely across several species. However, it is very difficult to reconstruct the phylogeny because whenever two strains of this subgenus infect the same organism, they have a tendency to recombine with each other, so that particular strands of RNA can jump laterally between different lineages. If any of the data is wrong, it quite possibly means the best fit reconstruction of the phylogeny is also wrong.

    It would also change interpretations if it turned out that the pangolins had acquired the virus from other animals they were smuggled with or from the smugglers themselves, or if the RNA in the pangolin sample that is the same as SARS-CoV-2 was actually acquired from a recombination with SARS-CoV-2 and thus isn’t an independent lineage at all. Every one of these scenarios supports a different origin hypothesis. This is what Chan was referring to.

    At this point, it should be noted that of all these viruses within the supposed clade, none other than SARS-CoV-2 has been independently verified and studied by anyone not under the supervision of the Chinese government. So after some suspicious behavior, questionable excuses, and a report of Chinese scientists being forced to destroy samples, there is cause to be concerned about the validity of the data as it has been reported. The editors at both Nature and PLoS Pathogens have acknowledged some of these concerns and two of the relevant papers are now under investigation. Assuming the scientists at WIV aren’t being forced to cover anything up, it would be better for everyone if they’d show their work, so to speak.

  43. This from the South China Morning Post (HK’s foremost English language news medium, which is apolitical – it is not some government mouth-piece) dated March 2020:

    “The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, can be traced back to November 17, according to [Mainland] government data seen by the South China Morning Post.

    Chinese [i.e. Mainland] authorities have so far identified at least 266 people who were infected last year, all of whom came under medical surveillance at some point.

    Some of the cases were likely backdated after health authorities had tested specimens taken from suspected patients.

    Interviews with whistle-blowers from the medical community suggest Chinese doctors only realised they were dealing with a new disease in late December.” So, this was HK journalists seeking out and talking to whistle-blowers in the medical community in Wuhan/Hubei.

    The first two known cases on Covid-19 in HK were detected on January 23, in two people from the Mainland who had traveled to HK, and they are suspected to have brought it to HK. But really, who knows? It could have been here before then, just silent, or cases of ‘atypical pneumonia’ not recognized as Covid-19.

    Quite funny – in English, HK Chinese people refer to the Mainland as China, despite HK being a part of China, just a different legal jurisdiction with special status. But in Cantonese they refer to the Mainland as ‘daai luk’, which means literally ‘big country’.

  45. Got it.

    What I do know is that there are a lot of Mainland Chinese people working in the textile industry in northern Italy, apparently a lot of them illegally.

    Italy closed down direct flights from China to Italy after they got initial outbreaks, so those folks just traveled there via a third country instead.

    So there was a ‘fast route’ for the disease to get from China to northern Italy in sizeable numbers, but those data don’t convincingly support that it was that early.

  46. Northern Italy is rich and industrialised but very old, so they need to import younger workers.

    Not too much at the moment, I guess.

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