What an excellent, succinct article that lays out the logic of the so-called 'zoonotic origin' theory, and the clear implausibility of the so-called 'lab leak' theory. We're currently in the midst of another zoonotic disease outbreak caused by Andes hantavirus, and despite the obvious pathway for exposure (birdwatchers having visited the countries where the wildlife reservoirs exist), already some are proposing it emerged from a lab. In fact, many recent zoonotic disease emergence events have led to allegations of lab leak (e.g. Ebola) or vaccine origin (e.g. HIV). It seems that these conspiracy theories strike a chord with some people and are put forward to help them cope with the seeming serendipity of nature.
Your assumptions about contact tracing always being successful are assumptions about capacity in this lab at the time of hypothesized emergence. They also conflict with reports that three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the autumn of 2019.
You also fail to mention the 2018 DEFUSE grant proposing to modify a bat SARS-related coronavirus in precisely the ways SARS-CoV-2 differs from its closest relatives, with a furin cleavage site not found in 1,000 years of branch length in the sarbecovirus evolutionary tree and an anomalous pattern of restriction endonuclease recognition sequences (and hotspots of exclusively silent mutations generating this pattern) consistent with the exact reverse genetic system methods included in that exact same grant, a grant whose drafts included order forms for the exact enzymes with the synthetic-consistent pattern. The grant proposed to do this work not in Hamilton nor Paris nor Buenos Aires, but in Wuhan.
Of all the workers in the Wuhan lab, what do you think the odds would be of one of the PIs listed on the aforementioned grant, and those most active in their coronavirus reverse genetic system lab work, being among the scientists who fell ill?
If a PI of the aforementioned grant did fall ill, especially the scientist listed as the primary lab worker for this project, then it’s obvious the 2018 proposal proceeded in some capacity, the virus leaked from a lab, and the Chinese government either lacked the contact tracing capabilities or sought to cover it up.
Speaking of cover up, are all the scientists involved in this work in China still alive? Did any die mysteriously?
Zhou Yusen, for example, is reported to have “fallen” off a roof suspiciously. Just another zoonotic roof fall in an authoritarian nation I guess
Once again, you do not respond to the specifics of the post.
But since you raise the issue of three respiratory infections, let's look at that issue.
Three out of ~1000 workers get respiratory infections during peak season for respiratory viruses. This is the expected number.
If they were the result of laboratory accidents, it would imply three separate accidents or a single major accident. Typically a single worker is working with samples at any given time. The probability of three separate accidents is low probability cubed.
If they were the result of an accident and the authorities tried to cover it up there would still be aggressive (perhaps even more aggressive) efforts to contact trace, isolate cases and quarantine contacts.
Please provide evidence of any of that.
As always, I am always happy for corrections of any errors in the actual post.
I did respond to the specifics of the post. You assume nobody relevant got unusual illnesses, especially unusual clusters of illness. You assume contact tracing was done around the homes and markets visited by researchers, and that such data, if evidence of a lab accident were found, would be released.
You’re relying entirely on assumptions unlikely to be true and on 100% trust of data and transparency provided by the Chinese government concerning an international accident that would implicate and potentially end the Chinese government.
Is anyone paying you to write these articles?
Because if so, that’s a COI that will be found out. If not, you should probably stick to oceanography.
You should probably know that there are two Robert Morris' at UW. One is an oceanographer. I'm an MD/PhD epidemiologist affiliated with the UW School of Public Health I have spent 15 years teaching epidemiology to physicians and public health students, I wrote a history of infectious disease epidemiology.
I mention this not to establish credentials but because your latest response relies on assumptions about data suppression and government opacity rather than epidemiological evidence. My piece addresses patterns in the historical record. If your argument requires assuming the Chinese government simultaneously recognized a lab leak, covered it up, failed to contain it, and suppressed all evidence, while a novel pandemic spread undetected globally, that's not epidemiology. It's speculation about government behavior.
I'm happy to discuss the epidemiology. But the epidemiology doesn't support your scenario.
The epidemiology relies on data that were provided to the world by the Chinese government.
That’s the problem with all analyses of case data in a lab accident for a government that covers up many things, even very large things like the cultural genocide of the Uighur people.
Your analysis ignores critical forensic data, such as the existence of a grant proposing to make a bat SARSr-CoV in Wuhan 1.5 years prior to SARS-CoV-2 emerged, anomalous among wild CoVs in exactly the ways it is consistent with the grant proposal. You also ignore contradictory evidence, including epidemiological evidence such as the illness of three researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology at exactly the time period of emergence estimated by phylogenetics.
You can support any theory if you ignore enough contradictory evidence. You’re making yourself and our field look terrible, especially in light of how much is known about the lab origin, information you don’t appear to be familiar with or seriously curious about.
I simply stated what one would expect to see epidemiologically. You are free to engage in whatever speculation you want about the absence of data. Don't expect me to join you.
Given that you think I'm an oceanographer, you might want to consider the possibility that I know more and have thought about this far more than you have previously imagined.
I thought the oceanographer explanation made the most sense given how little you appear to know based on your frequent commentary on this topic.
If you specialize in epidemiology, that’s even more disappointing. You’ve had an entire career to better understand the limits of data, from the patients who don’t seek care and PCR tests that don’t test positive to the data not shared by governments and the dog that didn’t bark, and yet you don’t demonstrate an understanding of these essential epistemological problems at the heart of disease surveillance and bioattribution.
A couple points. The persecution of some Uighers is well known. News of that has not been successfully suppressed.
Your discussion is ignoring the enthusiasm of conspiracy "theorists" for a lab leak hypothesis and also ignores that many lab leak hypotheses are mutually exclusive.
Nutpicking is not how sound assessments are made. There are lunatics and frauds proposing a zoonotic origin such as those saying a lab origin is “so friggin likely” in private convo while publishing a ghostwritten article claiming lab origin theories are “implausible” and “conspiracy theories”. The existence of such unethical scientists, however, is not the reason why a zoonotic origin is unlikely. The existence of overwhelming evidence pointing to the same DEFUSE-inspired lab origin scenario is.
i like your term "nutpicking". And of course i recognize that it is a form of ad hominin attacks. But i recall (am i correct here?) that you had mentioned that Anthony Blinken went to Bejing to iron out the conspiracy.... am i remembering correctly?
Yes - I’m actually a trusted expert on viral origins. Everyone is able to join the field so this isn’t a credentialistic dig at the oceanographer writing the article, it is an invitation to consider the state of the art methods used in this field.
Methods I’ve developed have been used by government officials around the world. There are reasons why smart people believe a lab origin is most likely even using only material in the public domain.
Dr. Morris doesn’t mention the DEFUSE grant nor the Academy of Military Medical Science research activities at the time of emergence, nor many additional pieces of evidence in the public domain that predict the viral genome using 2018 grant proposals better than natural evolutionary models can.
What an excellent, succinct article that lays out the logic of the so-called 'zoonotic origin' theory, and the clear implausibility of the so-called 'lab leak' theory. We're currently in the midst of another zoonotic disease outbreak caused by Andes hantavirus, and despite the obvious pathway for exposure (birdwatchers having visited the countries where the wildlife reservoirs exist), already some are proposing it emerged from a lab. In fact, many recent zoonotic disease emergence events have led to allegations of lab leak (e.g. Ebola) or vaccine origin (e.g. HIV). It seems that these conspiracy theories strike a chord with some people and are put forward to help them cope with the seeming serendipity of nature.
Robert, do you (through Eco Logic) have any current or former clients who have requested you to write on this topic?
Your assumptions about contact tracing always being successful are assumptions about capacity in this lab at the time of hypothesized emergence. They also conflict with reports that three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the autumn of 2019.
You also fail to mention the 2018 DEFUSE grant proposing to modify a bat SARS-related coronavirus in precisely the ways SARS-CoV-2 differs from its closest relatives, with a furin cleavage site not found in 1,000 years of branch length in the sarbecovirus evolutionary tree and an anomalous pattern of restriction endonuclease recognition sequences (and hotspots of exclusively silent mutations generating this pattern) consistent with the exact reverse genetic system methods included in that exact same grant, a grant whose drafts included order forms for the exact enzymes with the synthetic-consistent pattern. The grant proposed to do this work not in Hamilton nor Paris nor Buenos Aires, but in Wuhan.
Of all the workers in the Wuhan lab, what do you think the odds would be of one of the PIs listed on the aforementioned grant, and those most active in their coronavirus reverse genetic system lab work, being among the scientists who fell ill?
If a PI of the aforementioned grant did fall ill, especially the scientist listed as the primary lab worker for this project, then it’s obvious the 2018 proposal proceeded in some capacity, the virus leaked from a lab, and the Chinese government either lacked the contact tracing capabilities or sought to cover it up.
Speaking of cover up, are all the scientists involved in this work in China still alive? Did any die mysteriously?
Zhou Yusen, for example, is reported to have “fallen” off a roof suspiciously. Just another zoonotic roof fall in an authoritarian nation I guess
Once again, you do not respond to the specifics of the post.
But since you raise the issue of three respiratory infections, let's look at that issue.
Three out of ~1000 workers get respiratory infections during peak season for respiratory viruses. This is the expected number.
If they were the result of laboratory accidents, it would imply three separate accidents or a single major accident. Typically a single worker is working with samples at any given time. The probability of three separate accidents is low probability cubed.
If they were the result of an accident and the authorities tried to cover it up there would still be aggressive (perhaps even more aggressive) efforts to contact trace, isolate cases and quarantine contacts.
Please provide evidence of any of that.
As always, I am always happy for corrections of any errors in the actual post.
I did respond to the specifics of the post. You assume nobody relevant got unusual illnesses, especially unusual clusters of illness. You assume contact tracing was done around the homes and markets visited by researchers, and that such data, if evidence of a lab accident were found, would be released.
You’re relying entirely on assumptions unlikely to be true and on 100% trust of data and transparency provided by the Chinese government concerning an international accident that would implicate and potentially end the Chinese government.
Is anyone paying you to write these articles?
Because if so, that’s a COI that will be found out. If not, you should probably stick to oceanography.
You should probably know that there are two Robert Morris' at UW. One is an oceanographer. I'm an MD/PhD epidemiologist affiliated with the UW School of Public Health I have spent 15 years teaching epidemiology to physicians and public health students, I wrote a history of infectious disease epidemiology.
I mention this not to establish credentials but because your latest response relies on assumptions about data suppression and government opacity rather than epidemiological evidence. My piece addresses patterns in the historical record. If your argument requires assuming the Chinese government simultaneously recognized a lab leak, covered it up, failed to contain it, and suppressed all evidence, while a novel pandemic spread undetected globally, that's not epidemiology. It's speculation about government behavior.
I'm happy to discuss the epidemiology. But the epidemiology doesn't support your scenario.
The epidemiology relies on data that were provided to the world by the Chinese government.
That’s the problem with all analyses of case data in a lab accident for a government that covers up many things, even very large things like the cultural genocide of the Uighur people.
Your analysis ignores critical forensic data, such as the existence of a grant proposing to make a bat SARSr-CoV in Wuhan 1.5 years prior to SARS-CoV-2 emerged, anomalous among wild CoVs in exactly the ways it is consistent with the grant proposal. You also ignore contradictory evidence, including epidemiological evidence such as the illness of three researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology at exactly the time period of emergence estimated by phylogenetics.
You can support any theory if you ignore enough contradictory evidence. You’re making yourself and our field look terrible, especially in light of how much is known about the lab origin, information you don’t appear to be familiar with or seriously curious about.
I simply stated what one would expect to see epidemiologically. You are free to engage in whatever speculation you want about the absence of data. Don't expect me to join you.
Given that you think I'm an oceanographer, you might want to consider the possibility that I know more and have thought about this far more than you have previously imagined.
I thought the oceanographer explanation made the most sense given how little you appear to know based on your frequent commentary on this topic.
If you specialize in epidemiology, that’s even more disappointing. You’ve had an entire career to better understand the limits of data, from the patients who don’t seek care and PCR tests that don’t test positive to the data not shared by governments and the dog that didn’t bark, and yet you don’t demonstrate an understanding of these essential epistemological problems at the heart of disease surveillance and bioattribution.
A couple points. The persecution of some Uighers is well known. News of that has not been successfully suppressed.
Your discussion is ignoring the enthusiasm of conspiracy "theorists" for a lab leak hypothesis and also ignores that many lab leak hypotheses are mutually exclusive.
Nutpicking is not how sound assessments are made. There are lunatics and frauds proposing a zoonotic origin such as those saying a lab origin is “so friggin likely” in private convo while publishing a ghostwritten article claiming lab origin theories are “implausible” and “conspiracy theories”. The existence of such unethical scientists, however, is not the reason why a zoonotic origin is unlikely. The existence of overwhelming evidence pointing to the same DEFUSE-inspired lab origin scenario is.
i like your term "nutpicking". And of course i recognize that it is a form of ad hominin attacks. But i recall (am i correct here?) that you had mentioned that Anthony Blinken went to Bejing to iron out the conspiracy.... am i remembering correctly?
Counter-argument from a world expert who studied zoonotic viruses, pathogen origins, and bioattribution on a DARPA PREEMPT team pre-COVID
https://alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-totality-of-the-circumstances?r=11v5xs&utm_medium=ios
Which world expert, Washboard?
Washburne*
Yes - I’m actually a trusted expert on viral origins. Everyone is able to join the field so this isn’t a credentialistic dig at the oceanographer writing the article, it is an invitation to consider the state of the art methods used in this field.
Methods I’ve developed have been used by government officials around the world. There are reasons why smart people believe a lab origin is most likely even using only material in the public domain.
Dr. Morris doesn’t mention the DEFUSE grant nor the Academy of Military Medical Science research activities at the time of emergence, nor many additional pieces of evidence in the public domain that predict the viral genome using 2018 grant proposals better than natural evolutionary models can.