Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "COVID-19 lab leak theory" in English language version.
'One of the problems we have as scientists is our words are co-opted by people who have a political agenda,' says Rodrigo. 'What we say can become fodder for conspiracy theories. This is not an issue of a particular country's problem. If the lab leak hypothesis is plausible and is shown to be true then this is an issue into how we manage labs and research facilities. It is not about China. It is about research facilities and how we manage that everywhere.'
Zeng ... added that speculation that staff and graduate students at the lab had been infected and might have started the spread of the virus in the city was untrue.
There were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied, Anderson said... The Wuhan Institute of Virology is large enough that Anderson said she didn't know what everyone was working on at the end of 2019.
The more that laboratorians become aware of and adhere to recommended, science-based safety precautions, the lower the risk...incidents such as minor scrapes or cuts, insignificant spills, or unrecognized aerosols occur even more frequently and might not cause an exposure that results in an LAI. In this report, "laboratory exposures" refer to events that put employees at risk for an LAI and events that result in actual acquisition of LAIs...The first four routes [parenteral inoculations, spills and splashes onto skin, ingestion, animal bites and scratches] are relatively easy to detect, but they account for <20% of all reported LAIs
The IC [intelligence community] assesses that information indicating that several WIV researchers reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in autumn 2019 is not diagnostic of the pandemic's origins. Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of COVID-19 infection.
One of them is in the lab, and one of them, which is the more likely, ... is that it likely was below the radar screen in China, spreading in the community ... which allowed it, when it first got recognized clinically, to be pretty well adapted.
Under any laboratory escape scenario, SARS-CoV-2 would have to have been present in a laboratory prior to the pandemic, yet no evidence exists to support such a notion and no sequence has been identified that could have served as a precursor.
Most lab leak proponents don't mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. The Chinese government established these laboratories after multiple spillovers of the first SARS-CoV in 2002 through 2004
The origin of SARS-Cov-2 is still passionately debated since it makes ground for geopolitical confrontations and conspiracy theories besides scientific ones...The marginal conspiracy theory of a voluntary released of an engineered virus forwarded by the press, blogs and politicians is not supported by any data.
This analysis pushes human-to-human transmission back to mid-October to mid-November of 2019 in Hubei Province, China, with a likely short interval before epidemic transmission was initiated.
We predicted in 2007 that 'the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses ... together with the culture of eating exotic mammals ... is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories ... should not be ignored'.
Further studies in field epidemiology, laboratory infection, and receptor distribution and usage are being conducted to assess potential roles played by different bat species in SARS emergence.
Since the early days of the pandemic, politicians promoted the unsubstantiated hypothesis the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, referring to COVID-19 as 'foreign,' 'Chinese,' and 'the Kung Flu.' Use of such language led to an 800% increase of these racist terms on social media and news outlets, and redirected fear and anger in a manner that reinforced racism and xenophobia.
Health diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said that senior Chinese officials viewed the statements as an attempt to politicise the study.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)... this accomplished hardly anything to halt the proliferation of often paradoxical and, at times, completely absurd conspiracy theories that propagated more rapidly than the disease outbreak itself. For example, it has been claimed that SARS‐CoV‐2 was either the consequence of a laboratory error or was purposefully manufactured or it was produced for GoF investigations ...
The presence of two adjacent CGG codons for arginine in the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is similarly not indicative of genetic engineering. Although the CGG codon is rare in coronaviruses, it is observed in SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and other human coronaviruses at comparable frequencies (Maxmen and Mallapaty, 2021). Further, if low-fitness codons had been artificially inserted into the virus genome they would have been quickly selected against during SARS-CoV-2 evolution, yet both CGG codons are more than 99.8% conserved among the >2,300,000 near-complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes sequenced to date, indicative of strong functional constraints.
The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (containing the amino acid motif RRAR) does not match its canonical form (R-X-R/KR), is suboptimal compared to those of HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43, lacks either a P1 or P2 arginine (depending on the alignment), and was caused by an out-of-frame insertion...There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering...Further, there is no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.
Further, there is no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses...No published work indicates that other methods, including the generation of novel reverse genetics systems, were used at the WIV to propagate infectious SARSr-CoVs based on sequence data from bats. Gain-of-function research would be expected to utilize an established SARSr-CoV genomic backbone, or at a minimum a virus previously identified via sequencing.
The first, and most important, takeaway is that the IC is 'divided on the most likely origin' of the pandemic coronavirus and that both hypotheses are 'plausible.'
It is almost certain that the virus originated in bats and crossed species to humans either directly or indirectly via intermediary hosts.
The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade.
In 2004, SARS twice escaped a Beijing lab ... Chinese scientists have identified lax biosafety regulation as a concern even in high-level biosafety labs such as the Wuhan Institute.
BSL-2 facilities are usually used for work of only moderate risk, where researchers can experiment at open benches wearing only lab coats and gloves. 'If this work was happening, it should definitely not have been happening at BSL-2,' said Ebright. 'That is roughly equivalent to a standard dentist office.'
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Political voices in favor of the lab-leak theory, particularly from President Donald Trump, served to polarize the issue further and largely pushed the scientific community away from a willingness to consider the lab-leak theory.
Most lab leak proponents don't mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. The Chinese government established these laboratories after multiple spillovers of the first SARS-CoV in 2002 through 2004
The origin of SARS-Cov-2 is still passionately debated since it makes ground for geopolitical confrontations and conspiracy theories besides scientific ones...The marginal conspiracy theory of a voluntary released of an engineered virus forwarded by the press, blogs and politicians is not supported by any data.
This analysis pushes human-to-human transmission back to mid-October to mid-November of 2019 in Hubei Province, China, with a likely short interval before epidemic transmission was initiated.
Further studies in field epidemiology, laboratory infection, and receptor distribution and usage are being conducted to assess potential roles played by different bat species in SARS emergence.
The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade.
In 2018, Daszak, at EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with Shi, Baric, and Wang, had submitted a $14.2-million grant proposal to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)....Andersen emphasized that there is no evidence to suggest that any of the work described in the proposal was actually done...@TheSeeker268 is a member of drastic, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating covid-19, which formed on Twitter and has been among the most aggressive advocates of the lab-leak theory.
Under any laboratory escape scenario, SARS-CoV-2 would have to have been present in a laboratory prior to the pandemic, yet no evidence exists to support such a notion and no sequence has been identified that could have served as a precursor.
Most lab leak proponents don't mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. The Chinese government established these laboratories after multiple spillovers of the first SARS-CoV in 2002 through 2004
The origin of SARS-Cov-2 is still passionately debated since it makes ground for geopolitical confrontations and conspiracy theories besides scientific ones...The marginal conspiracy theory of a voluntary released of an engineered virus forwarded by the press, blogs and politicians is not supported by any data.
This analysis pushes human-to-human transmission back to mid-October to mid-November of 2019 in Hubei Province, China, with a likely short interval before epidemic transmission was initiated.
We predicted in 2007 that 'the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses ... together with the culture of eating exotic mammals ... is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories ... should not be ignored'.
Further studies in field epidemiology, laboratory infection, and receptor distribution and usage are being conducted to assess potential roles played by different bat species in SARS emergence.
Since the early days of the pandemic, politicians promoted the unsubstantiated hypothesis the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, referring to COVID-19 as 'foreign,' 'Chinese,' and 'the Kung Flu.' Use of such language led to an 800% increase of these racist terms on social media and news outlets, and redirected fear and anger in a manner that reinforced racism and xenophobia.
Health diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said that senior Chinese officials viewed the statements as an attempt to politicise the study.
... this accomplished hardly anything to halt the proliferation of often paradoxical and, at times, completely absurd conspiracy theories that propagated more rapidly than the disease outbreak itself. For example, it has been claimed that SARS‐CoV‐2 was either the consequence of a laboratory error or was purposefully manufactured or it was produced for GoF investigations ...
The presence of two adjacent CGG codons for arginine in the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is similarly not indicative of genetic engineering. Although the CGG codon is rare in coronaviruses, it is observed in SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and other human coronaviruses at comparable frequencies (Maxmen and Mallapaty, 2021). Further, if low-fitness codons had been artificially inserted into the virus genome they would have been quickly selected against during SARS-CoV-2 evolution, yet both CGG codons are more than 99.8% conserved among the >2,300,000 near-complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes sequenced to date, indicative of strong functional constraints.
The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (containing the amino acid motif RRAR) does not match its canonical form (R-X-R/KR), is suboptimal compared to those of HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43, lacks either a P1 or P2 arginine (depending on the alignment), and was caused by an out-of-frame insertion...There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering...Further, there is no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.
Further, there is no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses...No published work indicates that other methods, including the generation of novel reverse genetics systems, were used at the WIV to propagate infectious SARSr-CoVs based on sequence data from bats. Gain-of-function research would be expected to utilize an established SARSr-CoV genomic backbone, or at a minimum a virus previously identified via sequencing.
It is almost certain that the virus originated in bats and crossed species to humans either directly or indirectly via intermediary hosts.
The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade.
Under any laboratory escape scenario, SARS-CoV-2 would have to have been present in a laboratory prior to the pandemic, yet no evidence exists to support such a notion and no sequence has been identified that could have served as a precursor.
Most lab leak proponents don't mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. The Chinese government established these laboratories after multiple spillovers of the first SARS-CoV in 2002 through 2004
The origin of SARS-Cov-2 is still passionately debated since it makes ground for geopolitical confrontations and conspiracy theories besides scientific ones...The marginal conspiracy theory of a voluntary released of an engineered virus forwarded by the press, blogs and politicians is not supported by any data.
This analysis pushes human-to-human transmission back to mid-October to mid-November of 2019 in Hubei Province, China, with a likely short interval before epidemic transmission was initiated.
We predicted in 2007 that 'the presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses ... together with the culture of eating exotic mammals ... is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories ... should not be ignored'.
Since the early days of the pandemic, politicians promoted the unsubstantiated hypothesis the virus was developed in a laboratory in Wuhan, referring to COVID-19 as 'foreign,' 'Chinese,' and 'the Kung Flu.' Use of such language led to an 800% increase of these racist terms on social media and news outlets, and redirected fear and anger in a manner that reinforced racism and xenophobia.
Health diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said that senior Chinese officials viewed the statements as an attempt to politicise the study.
... this accomplished hardly anything to halt the proliferation of often paradoxical and, at times, completely absurd conspiracy theories that propagated more rapidly than the disease outbreak itself. For example, it has been claimed that SARS‐CoV‐2 was either the consequence of a laboratory error or was purposefully manufactured or it was produced for GoF investigations ...
The presence of two adjacent CGG codons for arginine in the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is similarly not indicative of genetic engineering. Although the CGG codon is rare in coronaviruses, it is observed in SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and other human coronaviruses at comparable frequencies (Maxmen and Mallapaty, 2021). Further, if low-fitness codons had been artificially inserted into the virus genome they would have been quickly selected against during SARS-CoV-2 evolution, yet both CGG codons are more than 99.8% conserved among the >2,300,000 near-complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes sequenced to date, indicative of strong functional constraints.
The SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site (containing the amino acid motif RRAR) does not match its canonical form (R-X-R/KR), is suboptimal compared to those of HCoV-HKU1 and HCoV-OC43, lacks either a P1 or P2 arginine (depending on the alignment), and was caused by an out-of-frame insertion...There is no logical reason why an engineered virus would utilize such a suboptimal furin cleavage site, which would entail such an unusual and needlessly complex feat of genetic engineering...Further, there is no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses.
Further, there is no evidence of prior research at the WIV involving the artificial insertion of complete furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses...No published work indicates that other methods, including the generation of novel reverse genetics systems, were used at the WIV to propagate infectious SARSr-CoVs based on sequence data from bats. Gain-of-function research would be expected to utilize an established SARSr-CoV genomic backbone, or at a minimum a virus previously identified via sequencing.
The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade.
Sorting out the balance of risks and benefits of the research has proved over the years to be immensely challenging. And now, the intensity of the politics and rhetoric over the lab leak theory threatens to push detailed science policy discussions to the sidelines. "It's just going to make it harder to get back to a serious debate," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has urged the government to be more transparent about its support of gain-of-function research.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)The first, and most important, takeaway is that the IC is 'divided on the most likely origin' of the pandemic coronavirus and that both hypotheses are 'plausible.'
The second [version of the lab leak] is the version that "reasonable" people consider plausible, but there is no good evidence for either version.
The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19 ... can be traced back to November 17, according to government data seen by the South China Morning Post.
Further studies in field epidemiology, laboratory infection, and receptor distribution and usage are being conducted to assess potential roles played by different bat species in SARS emergence.
Health diplomats speaking on condition of anonymity said that senior Chinese officials viewed the statements as an attempt to politicise the study.
The presence of two adjacent CGG codons for arginine in the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site is similarly not indicative of genetic engineering. Although the CGG codon is rare in coronaviruses, it is observed in SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and other human coronaviruses at comparable frequencies (Maxmen and Mallapaty, 2021). Further, if low-fitness codons had been artificially inserted into the virus genome they would have been quickly selected against during SARS-CoV-2 evolution, yet both CGG codons are more than 99.8% conserved among the >2,300,000 near-complete SARS-CoV-2 genomes sequenced to date, indicative of strong functional constraints.
The first, and most important, takeaway is that the IC is 'divided on the most likely origin' of the pandemic coronavirus and that both hypotheses are 'plausible.'
It is almost certain that the virus originated in bats and crossed species to humans either directly or indirectly via intermediary hosts.
The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade.
The debate has gotten extraordinarily heated, with proponents of each accusing the other side of motivated reasoning.
Ebright believes one factor at play was the cost and inconvenience of working in high-containment conditions. The Chinese lab's decision to work at BSL-2, he says, would have 'effectively increas[ed] rates of progress, all else being equal, by a factor of 10 to 20'.
The lab leak hypothesis has already become highly political. In the US, it has been embraced most loudly by Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures... The resulting polarization has had a chilling effect on scientists, some of whom have been reluctant to express their own concerns, says Relman.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)For the lab leak theory to be true, SARS-CoV-2 must have been present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic started. This would convince me. But the inconvenient truth is there's not a single piece of data suggesting this. There's no evidence for a genome sequence or isolate of a precursor virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not from gene sequence databases, scientific publications, annual reports, student theses, social media, or emails. Even the intelligence community has found nothing. Nothing. And there was no reason to keep any work on a SARS-CoV-2 ancestor secret before the pandemic.
The second [version of the lab leak] is the version that "reasonable" people consider plausible, but there is no good evidence for either version.
For the lab leak theory to be true, SARS-CoV-2 must have been present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the pandemic started. This would convince me. But the inconvenient truth is there's not a single piece of data suggesting this. There's no evidence for a genome sequence or isolate of a precursor virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not from gene sequence databases, scientific publications, annual reports, student theses, social media, or emails. Even the intelligence community has found nothing. Nothing. And there was no reason to keep any work on a SARS-CoV-2 ancestor secret before the pandemic.
Ebright believes one factor at play was the cost and inconvenience of working in high-containment conditions. The Chinese lab's decision to work at BSL-2, he says, would have 'effectively increas[ed] rates of progress, all else being equal, by a factor of 10 to 20'.
Zeng ... added that speculation that staff and graduate students at the lab had been infected and might have started the spread of the virus in the city was untrue.
The lab leak hypothesis has already become highly political. In the US, it has been embraced most loudly by Republican lawmakers and conservative media figures... The resulting polarization has had a chilling effect on scientists, some of whom have been reluctant to express their own concerns, says Relman.
BSL-2 facilities are usually used for work of only moderate risk, where researchers can experiment at open benches wearing only lab coats and gloves. 'If this work was happening, it should definitely not have been happening at BSL-2,' said Ebright. 'That is roughly equivalent to a standard dentist office.'
There were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied, Anderson said... The Wuhan Institute of Virology is large enough that Anderson said she didn't know what everyone was working on at the end of 2019.
The more that laboratorians become aware of and adhere to recommended, science-based safety precautions, the lower the risk...incidents such as minor scrapes or cuts, insignificant spills, or unrecognized aerosols occur even more frequently and might not cause an exposure that results in an LAI. In this report, "laboratory exposures" refer to events that put employees at risk for an LAI and events that result in actual acquisition of LAIs...The first four routes [parenteral inoculations, spills and splashes onto skin, ingestion, animal bites and scratches] are relatively easy to detect, but they account for <20% of all reported LAIs
One of them is in the lab, and one of them, which is the more likely, ... is that it likely was below the radar screen in China, spreading in the community ... which allowed it, when it first got recognized clinically, to be pretty well adapted.
In 2004, SARS twice escaped a Beijing lab ... Chinese scientists have identified lax biosafety regulation as a concern even in high-level biosafety labs such as the Wuhan Institute.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)In 2018, Daszak, at EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with Shi, Baric, and Wang, had submitted a $14.2-million grant proposal to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)....Andersen emphasized that there is no evidence to suggest that any of the work described in the proposal was actually done...@TheSeeker268 is a member of drastic, or Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating covid-19, which formed on Twitter and has been among the most aggressive advocates of the lab-leak theory.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)Sorting out the balance of risks and benefits of the research has proved over the years to be immensely challenging. And now, the intensity of the politics and rhetoric over the lab leak theory threatens to push detailed science policy discussions to the sidelines. "It's just going to make it harder to get back to a serious debate," said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who has urged the government to be more transparent about its support of gain-of-function research.
'One of the problems we have as scientists is our words are co-opted by people who have a political agenda,' says Rodrigo. 'What we say can become fodder for conspiracy theories. This is not an issue of a particular country's problem. If the lab leak hypothesis is plausible and is shown to be true then this is an issue into how we manage labs and research facilities. It is not about China. It is about research facilities and how we manage that everywhere.'
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)The first, and most important, takeaway is that the IC is 'divided on the most likely origin' of the pandemic coronavirus and that both hypotheses are 'plausible.'
The debate has gotten extraordinarily heated, with proponents of each accusing the other side of motivated reasoning.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)The first case of someone in China suffering from Covid-19 ... can be traced back to November 17, according to government data seen by the South China Morning Post.
The IC [intelligence community] assesses that information indicating that several WIV researchers reported symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in autumn 2019 is not diagnostic of the pandemic's origins. Even if confirmed, hospital admission alone would not be diagnostic of COVID-19 infection.
Political voices in favor of the lab-leak theory, particularly from President Donald Trump, served to polarize the issue further and largely pushed the scientific community away from a willingness to consider the lab-leak theory.
Most lab leak proponents don't mention that most major Chinese cities have one or more active coronavirus laboratories. The Chinese government established these laboratories after multiple spillovers of the first SARS-CoV in 2002 through 2004
It is almost certain that the virus originated in bats and crossed species to humans either directly or indirectly via intermediary hosts.
The increasing scientific evidence concerning the origins of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is most consistent with a zoonotic origin and a spillover pathway from wildlife to people via wildlife farming and the wildlife trade.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)