lab leak debunking #10000
June 3rd, 2024 12:11![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alibi_shopHere's something I bet you've heard about once a week for some time: "Was COVID from a lab? Just asking questions!"
Like most "just asking questions" things, this keeps getting brought up long after the questions have been answered. Sometimes that's because the goal wasn't really to ask questions but to push an agenda. Other times people just don't understand or don't trust the answers, or have followed some of the answers but then stopped updating their knowledge. I don't know which explanation is true for the latest fear-mongering op-ed in the New York Times by Alina Chan—which, like all such pieces, is presented so as to give a false impression that Dr. Chan either speaks for most researchers, or has put together evidence nobody else noticed.
This series of posts by Phillipp Markolin, summarizing a longer article that they link to, is the best I've seen lately about why most researchers don't think there's any real doubt about the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) having evolved and spread naturally. It's technical, and Markolin does a decent job of boiling it down some, but I think it's possible to make it a little easier to follow for laypeople—so I'll try to do that here. (Standard disclaimer: my credentials are only that I've read enough about molecular biology in school to understand the gist of what Markolin is saying, and to see that it's consistent with what other scientists are saying, and that Chan's arguments do not take it into account.)
The short version is that even when there are mysteries about how a given virus affects humans, science does know a great deal about the components of this type of viruses on a molecular/genetic level, and the ways those normally evolve as they're transmitted through different animal hosts. Some things that seemed mysterious early in the pandemic became less mysterious as researchers looked at a wider range of coronaviruses. Arguments like the ones in Dr. Chan's op-ed consist of throwing a wide variety of suspicious-sounding questions up in the air and ignoring the ways that they've already been answered or aren't relevant.
Evolution follows patterns that are recognizable. It creates features that are messy in ways that an engineer would have no reason to use (in Markolin's words: "odd, suboptimal, and self-defeating"). It shuffles things around in ways that aren't how human-made gene-editing tools work; labs do create chimeric viruses on purpose, but the results don't look like this. And if an evil genius, using unknown techniques, did manage to imitate evolution so well that they produced a virus looking just like it would if it evolved in the exact same wildlife found in Wuhan... then they would've been just reinventing the wheel, producing a thing nature would've produced anyway. Except they'd be doing it slower, because wildlife reservoirs are like a giant lab that's constantly doing millions of parallel experiments non-stop; we only notice the ones that "succeed" in ways we care about (which is why statements like "isn't it suspicious that the virus spreads so well?" are so aggravating).
As for the other, less extreme "lab leak" theory—the idea that it was a natural virus, but someone was studying it in a lab, and then it got released by accident and caused the pandemic—the answer is pretty much the same. The types of viruses that this one would've evolved from, and the wildlife it would've evolved in, and the animal/human contact that would allow it to spread, are already all there in the Wuhan area. If someone found it and decided to study it, and it was already in its current form that can infect humans, then what they found was already out there enough to start a pandemic. Again, nature is running a much bigger lab and it never stops. Humans affect this mostly in terms of where we choose to live and how we choose to interact with animals on a large scale.
The "virus got brought to the lab and then escaped" theory is like saying that if bubonic plague breaks out in Manhattan, and there are lots of rats with plague nearby in the Bronx, then the cause of the plague outbreak must be that someone caught a rat in the Bronx and brought it home with them to Manhattan; otherwise, surely the rats would've stayed where they were.
The "virus was designed in a lab" theory is like saying that if a wildfire starts in California, it's because an evil genius has cleverly sabotaged an old PG&E power line in a forest, so it would be able to throw sparks—in a way that looks just like how old PG&E power lines already break down and throw sparks. Of course, if people hadn't known the power lines were already there, or how badly they're maintained, or weren't sure how electricity worked, then they might reasonably be suspicious and ask questions. But not now.
(And when I say "now"... it's not as if this is very new news. This Scientific American article from 2022 covers a lot of the same stuff, just with less detail in some areas. So, even though I can't blame anyone for being confused if they've only heard bits and pieces at some point... if anyone claims to have been following this for years and is still saying the kinds of things in the Times piece, it's hard for me to assume good faith.)
Like most "just asking questions" things, this keeps getting brought up long after the questions have been answered. Sometimes that's because the goal wasn't really to ask questions but to push an agenda. Other times people just don't understand or don't trust the answers, or have followed some of the answers but then stopped updating their knowledge. I don't know which explanation is true for the latest fear-mongering op-ed in the New York Times by Alina Chan—which, like all such pieces, is presented so as to give a false impression that Dr. Chan either speaks for most researchers, or has put together evidence nobody else noticed.
This series of posts by Phillipp Markolin, summarizing a longer article that they link to, is the best I've seen lately about why most researchers don't think there's any real doubt about the COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) having evolved and spread naturally. It's technical, and Markolin does a decent job of boiling it down some, but I think it's possible to make it a little easier to follow for laypeople—so I'll try to do that here. (Standard disclaimer: my credentials are only that I've read enough about molecular biology in school to understand the gist of what Markolin is saying, and to see that it's consistent with what other scientists are saying, and that Chan's arguments do not take it into account.)
The short version is that even when there are mysteries about how a given virus affects humans, science does know a great deal about the components of this type of viruses on a molecular/genetic level, and the ways those normally evolve as they're transmitted through different animal hosts. Some things that seemed mysterious early in the pandemic became less mysterious as researchers looked at a wider range of coronaviruses. Arguments like the ones in Dr. Chan's op-ed consist of throwing a wide variety of suspicious-sounding questions up in the air and ignoring the ways that they've already been answered or aren't relevant.
Evolution follows patterns that are recognizable. It creates features that are messy in ways that an engineer would have no reason to use (in Markolin's words: "odd, suboptimal, and self-defeating"). It shuffles things around in ways that aren't how human-made gene-editing tools work; labs do create chimeric viruses on purpose, but the results don't look like this. And if an evil genius, using unknown techniques, did manage to imitate evolution so well that they produced a virus looking just like it would if it evolved in the exact same wildlife found in Wuhan... then they would've been just reinventing the wheel, producing a thing nature would've produced anyway. Except they'd be doing it slower, because wildlife reservoirs are like a giant lab that's constantly doing millions of parallel experiments non-stop; we only notice the ones that "succeed" in ways we care about (which is why statements like "isn't it suspicious that the virus spreads so well?" are so aggravating).
As for the other, less extreme "lab leak" theory—the idea that it was a natural virus, but someone was studying it in a lab, and then it got released by accident and caused the pandemic—the answer is pretty much the same. The types of viruses that this one would've evolved from, and the wildlife it would've evolved in, and the animal/human contact that would allow it to spread, are already all there in the Wuhan area. If someone found it and decided to study it, and it was already in its current form that can infect humans, then what they found was already out there enough to start a pandemic. Again, nature is running a much bigger lab and it never stops. Humans affect this mostly in terms of where we choose to live and how we choose to interact with animals on a large scale.
The "virus got brought to the lab and then escaped" theory is like saying that if bubonic plague breaks out in Manhattan, and there are lots of rats with plague nearby in the Bronx, then the cause of the plague outbreak must be that someone caught a rat in the Bronx and brought it home with them to Manhattan; otherwise, surely the rats would've stayed where they were.
The "virus was designed in a lab" theory is like saying that if a wildfire starts in California, it's because an evil genius has cleverly sabotaged an old PG&E power line in a forest, so it would be able to throw sparks—in a way that looks just like how old PG&E power lines already break down and throw sparks. Of course, if people hadn't known the power lines were already there, or how badly they're maintained, or weren't sure how electricity worked, then they might reasonably be suspicious and ask questions. But not now.
(And when I say "now"... it's not as if this is very new news. This Scientific American article from 2022 covers a lot of the same stuff, just with less detail in some areas. So, even though I can't blame anyone for being confused if they've only heard bits and pieces at some point... if anyone claims to have been following this for years and is still saying the kinds of things in the Times piece, it's hard for me to assume good faith.)
