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Here is a new article in The Lancet, arguing that the previous estimates on the likelihood of a lab leak are faulty, and that there is no direct support for a natural origin - Thereisnous ( talk) 08:36, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
In general, considering the rapidly evolving situation, I would suggest that all claims about the scientific consensus on the lab leak should be accompanied by a date. E.g. "Most scientists..." -> "As of February 2021, most scientists..." Thereisnous ( talk) 08:44, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
scientific community. They openly support Tedros's view (that
all hypotheses remained on the table including that of a laboratory leak) and reject Calisher and colleagues'.
the pangolin hypothesis has since been abandoned.9,10,11,12The real problem here is that we don't normally cite
correspondence. – Dervorguilla ( talk) 06:32, 20 September 2021 (UTC) 07:12, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
piece of correspondencespeaks (rather plainly) for itself:
simply waitfor more pangolin papers — or cold-chain papers. We can treat this letter's
cardinalpoints as significant-minority viewpoints (mostly contradicting the lab-leak proposition). – Dervorguilla ( talk) 20:03, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
a significant minority viewpoint. The only one (so far presented) that did suggest so was a piece of correspondence in the OP's post, and the quality of the piece I have provided which arrives at cardinally different conclusions (MEDRS-wise) is about the same. You can assert a lot of things in correspondence, just like in NYT editorials (which we may or may not agree with), and that's exactly the reason we have reviews to hopefully sieve out the bias those who write these letters have, or, if these are unavailable, wait for citations to accrue and see if the piece of correspondence is important enough to merit mention (too little time has passed since the publication, so we can't yet use this substitute for review). Szmenderowiecki ( talk) 20:48, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
More scientists concur with their view, they implytopic. This has been a somewhat consistent undercurrent since the start, namely how much politicization and personal belief/interests affected the willingness of lab origins being discussed. We touch on this briefly with the "chilling effect" discussed in First appearance and the Daszak COI in Renewed media attention. This letter wouldn't be a reliable source to suggest an actual "silent majority", but it may be worth including as part of these claims being made. Bakkster Man ( talk) 13:23, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
prominentsources in the mainstream scientific community still believe that China really is offering "unreserved accurate data" about the lab.) I can therefore freely support Thereisnous's proposal that
claims about the scientific consensus on the lab leak . . . be accompanied by a date. – Dervorguilla ( talk) 21:53, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
It was originally suggested that the virus might have originated from bats or pangolins sold at the market.)
As of 2008, construction is expected to ... cost US$28 billion.
However, the prevailing scientific view is that while an accidental leak is possible, it is extremely unlikely.– Dervorguilla ( talk) 04:03, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
The consensus in the mainstream media (which is the relevant media for this, rather than MEDRS sources, as it is a social/geopolitical question, as opposed to a medical question) seems to me to have shifted from "This is highly unlikely, and only conspiracy theorists are pushing this narrative" to "This is one of the plausible hypotheses".
Although considerable evidence supports the natural origins of other outbreaks (eg, Nipah, MERS, and the 2002–04 SARS outbreak) direct evidence for a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 is missing. After 19 months of investigations, the proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 is still lacking. Neither the host pathway from bats to humans, nor the geographical route from Yunnan (where the viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been sampled) to Wuhan (where the pandemic emerged) have been identified. More than 80 000 samples collected from Chinese wildlife sites and animal farms all proved negative. In addition, the international research community has no access to the sites, samples, or raw data. Although the Joint WHO-China Study concluded that the laboratory origin was “extremely unlikely”,WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that all hypotheses remained on the table including that of a laboratory leak.
Stonkaments is insisting on adding what appears to be redundant repetition to the final paragraph of the lead. This seems to me to be bringing both issues of WP:UNDUE and of poor writing (repeating the same information in successive sentences is poor writing) into account. RandomCanadian ( talk / contribs) 13:34, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Most say that the virus is very likely natural and that theories around the Wuhan Institute of Virology are a possible explanation, but they’re unlikely.[4] The lead currently fails to accurately convey this information—it mentions that some scientists argue the lab leak theory should be investigated further, but nowhere states that most scientists say it is a possible explanation. This seems especially important to get right given earlier attempts in the scientific community (described as "scientific propaganda and thuggery") to dismiss the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory. Stonkaments ( talk) 13:42, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Some scientists agree that the possibility of a lab leak...
This
edit request to
COVID-19 lab leak theory has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
This statement is false -- "Some versions (particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome) are based on speculation, misinformation, or misrepresentations of scientific evidence."
This is exactly what Wuhan and Peter Daszak said they were doing -- inserting spike proteins into bat coronaviruses to make them pathogenic to humans in order to develop vaccines. How could you not know that?
https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2021/06/09/daszak-you-insert-the-spike-proteins-from-those-viruses-see-if-they-bind-to-human-cells 2600:1700:F040:8160:21F7:74A4:B998:8C7A ( talk) 16:56, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
some versions (...) are based on speculation, misinformation, or misrepresentations of scientific evidence.
reasonablespeculation. Notice an unflattering reference to the Institute's operating procedures:
Some versions are based on reasonable speculation; some (particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome), on misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence.
reasonable speculation." Otherwise I think the change is fine. — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 08:51, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
speculationbased on the published
operating procedures at the facilityand
the large collections of bat virome samples stored in labsthere? – Dervorguilla ( talk) 10:13, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
much of the animal work was done at other facilities." What you heard: "The animal work was only done at other facilities." I refer to the grant proposals and RSes interpreting those proposals (Intercept, others) which show that animal work was conducted at either Ralph Baric's Lab or at The University of Wuhan in most cases. It didn't happen at the WIV for the most part. — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 18:24, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
We have a situation with the article, which uses a lot the "extremely unlikely" likelihood assigned to the lab leak hypothesis by the WHO mission. Here are the issues:
We should not put too much focus on the wording. We were looking at different options. At some point we were thinking: Should we use a ranking, with one being the most unlikely, five the most likely, or should we use colors, or should we find another scale? We ended up with a five-phrase scale: "extremely unlikely," "unlikely," "possible," "likely," and "very likely." It's more an illustration of where these hypotheses are to help us organize our planning of future studies.. Then, in a danish documentary released in August 2021, Embarek allegedly said that Chinese officials pressured investigation to drop lab-leak hypothesis and label it very unfavorably, thus the "extremely unlikely" assesment. Asked to comment on the veracity of this allegations, Ben Embarek
initially said the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. “It is a wrong translation from a Danish article,” he wrote. So, overall, the "extremely unlikely" label was not the strongest point of the WHO report regarding clarity of communication.
Although the possibility of a laboratory accident cannot be entirely dismissed, and may be near impossible to falsify, this conduit for emergence is highly unlikely relative to the numerous and repeated humananimal contacts that occur routinely in the wildlife trade. WP:MEDRS does tell us to give more weight to new reviews, so in my opinion Holmes et al is in this regard a superior source than the WHO report
The suggestion is that we look for the many instances in which we use "extremely unlikely" and replace some of them, where appropiate, with the Holmes et al (2021) more charitable "highly unlikely". Forich ( talk) 12:36, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
Not yet peer-reviewed, so probably not ready for inclusion. But keep an eye on this, it will probably be a good thing to include at some point: [5]
Choice quotes:
Particularly concerning is that the new viruses contain receptor binding domains that are almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2, and can therefore infect human cells. The receptor binding domain allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells to enter them.
“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says. “I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
— Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 20:32, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Viruses swap chunks of RNA with one another through a process called recombination, and one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago, says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow. “These viruses recombine so much that different bits of the genome have different evolutionary histories,” he says.
In August 2021, the results of a US intelligence community probe ordered by president Joe Biden were declassified.
This sentence is false. We do not know which of "the results' were unclassified, and which remain classified. 2.96.240.198 ( talk) 18:13, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
an executive summary" if you like. — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 18:27, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
The intelligence community plans to review the report with an eye to releasing a declassified version at some future date, Assistant Director of National Intelligence Timothy Barrett said Friday.Statement worded as-is fails verification. Maybe some of the four at the end of the paragraph verify but I'm not going to go hunting on a whim if the citations aren't properly placed. It goes back to my earlier concern about verifiability. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 14:38, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
Article is here [8]. Should anything be added to the article? The authors' takeaway:
The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
And our friend Alina Chan gets mentioned again:
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
Stonkaments ( talk) 11:37, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses--one not previously disclosed publicly--was more pathogenic to humanized mice that the starting virus from which it was constructed and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.He went on to say
The documents make it clear that assertions made by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.None of that appears in any RS yet though. Mr Ernie ( talk) 13:42, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed.— Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 19:19, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
Is this statement in the wiki's lead paragraph still true? "Some versions of the theory, particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, are based on misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence." 70.191.102.240 ( talk) 20:40, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
particularly some of those involving human intervention...." But my argument (and that of many of our sources) is that there is no evidence of any human intervention in the genome whatsoever, and most experts agree it is extremely unlikely. Verging on the impossible. And we now have viruses in nature which contain all the features necessary to evolve SARS-CoV-2. So on one hand, we have a very plausible evolutionary origin with evidence from extant viruses in nature and known mechanisms of recombination and crossover, and on the other hand, we have an extremely implausible artificial genetic engineering explanation with no evidence... — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 23:52, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
WSJ reporting disbandment of task force bc of ties to ecohealth. Doesnt report much on lab leak details, not sure where this belongs or if at all here. I'll just note that EcoHealth Alliance is only mentioned once on this wikipedia article, even though it is now at the ceneter of many theories. And has directly disrupted this panel's work to find the origins of sars2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-panel-of-scientists-investigating-origins-of-virus-is-disbanded-11632571202 2600:1700:8660:E180:69CE:BC4:C894:5E63 ( talk) 08:15, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
newsabout apparent
conflicts of interest ... influencing ... the maintenance of this article?
Experience has shown that misusing Wikipedia to perpetuate legal, political, social, literary, scholarly, or other disputes is harmful ... to Wikipedia itself. Therefore, an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual ... should not edit ... material about that person, given the potential conflict of interest.
– Dervorguilla ( talk) 02:01, 27 September 2021 (UTC) 04:34, 27 September 2021 (UTC)Example: Editors have an apparent COI if they edit an article about a business, and for some reason they appear to be in communication with the business owner, although they may actually have no such connection. Apparent COI raises concern within the community and should be resolved through discussion...
Having a grantis OK; you do need to disclose it in your manuscript, though:
In all scientific disciplines ... authors must disclose activities and relationships that, if known to others, might be viewed as potential conflicts of interest—for example, financial agreements ... with ... any ... service ... discussed in [their] paper.APA, Publication Manual, 7th ed.
– Dervorguilla ( talk) 02:38, 27 September 2021 (UTC)In ... scientific disciplines, professional communications are presumed to be based on ... unbiased interpretations of fact. An author’s economic and commercial interests ... may color such objectivity ... The integrity of the field requires disclosure of the possibilities of such potentially distorting influences ...
Holdings in a company through a mutual fund are not ordinarily sufficient to warrant disclosure, whereas salaries, research grants, [and] consulting fees ... would be.
authors with no known conflict of interest must state this explicitly.(APA, "Disclosure".) And Daszak did explicitly state just that, says the Lancet. It ultimately had him "re-evaluate [his] competing interests" — whereupon he made a fuller disclosure:
EcoHealth Alliance's work in China ... includes the production of a small number of recombinant bat coronaviruses to analyse cell entry...
risked perception of bias, he told the Journal ( McKay). Cf. APA Publication Manual:
The integrity of the field ... requires ... [that] an author ... disclose ... activities and relationships that, if known to others, might be viewed as a conflict of interest, even if the author does not believe that any conflict or bias exists.
safest ... course of actionhere is to disclose Daszak's
possible influences that mighthave led him
to support certain findings. Our encyclopedia can thereby carry out its (minor) part in maintaining the
integrityof that field. – Dervorguilla ( talk) 08:04, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said he has disbanded a task force of scientists probing the origins of Covid-19 in favor of wider biosafety research.
Dr. Sachs, chairman of a Covid-19 commission affiliated with the Lancet scientific journals, said he closed the task force because he was concerned about its links to EcoHealth Alliance. The New York-based nonprofit has been under scrutiny from some scientists, members of Congress and other officials since 2020 for using U.S. funds for studies on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility...
EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June...
An expert on searching for emerging viruses in animals that could threaten humans, Dr. Daszak has been a vocal opponent of the hypothesis that the virus might have spread from a laboratory accident. He was a member of a World Health Organization-led team that visited Wuhan earlier this year and concluded that a laboratory leak was extremely unlikely.
Five task-force members joined Dr. Daszak in signing letters in the Lancet in February 2020 denouncing what they called conspiracy theories that the new coronavirus had been bioengineered and in July 2021 saying more evidence supported a natural origin of the virus...
References
SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: What Really Happened in Wuhan, Sky News Australia I think this is a valid external link, they having all the information there. China lied about having bats at the lab, video footage shows they had plenty of bats there. Various other things. Should this not be in the article? Also claiming a news source is unreliable simply because you don't like it, is pointless. The covid investigation page had most agreeing it was a reliable source. /info/en/?search=Talk:Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19/Archive_2 Dream Focus 00:27, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
This [13] is extremely informative, can anything be used in this article?
Few important things ( David Relman says the following regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2):
We know very little about its origins. The virus’s closest known relatives were discovered in bats in Yunnan Province, China, yet the first known cases of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan (about 1,000 miles away).
Maybe someone became infected after contact with an infected animal in or near Yunnan, and moved on to Wuhan. But then, because of the high transmissibility of this virus, you’d have expected to see other infected people at or near the site of this initial encounter, whether through similar animal exposure or because of transmission from this person.
All scientists need to acknowledge a simple fact: Humans are fallible, and laboratory accidents happen — far more often than we care to admit. Several years ago, an investigative reporter uncovered evidence of hundreds of lab accidents across the United States involving dangerous, disease-causing microbes in academic institutions and government centers of excellence alike — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. SARS-CoV-2 might have been lurking in a sample collected from a bat or other infected animal, brought to a laboratory, perhaps stored in a freezer, then propagated in the laboratory as part of an effort to resurrect and study bat-associated viruses. The materials might have been discarded as a failed experiment. Or SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through commonly used laboratory techniques to study novel viruses, starting with closely related coronaviruses that have not yet been revealed to the public. Either way, SARS-CoV-2 could have easily infected an unsuspecting lab worker and then caused a mild or asymptomatic infection that was carried out of the laboratory.
There’s a glaring paucity of data. The SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence, and those of a handful of not-so-closely-related bat coronaviruses, have been analyzed ad nauseam. But the near ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 remain missing in action. Absent that knowledge, it’s impossible to discern the origins of this virus from its genome sequence alone. SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t been reliably detected anywhere prior to the first reported cases of disease in humans in Wuhan at the end of 2019. The whole enterprise has been made even more difficult by the Chinese national authorities’ efforts to control and limit the release of public health records and data pertaining to laboratory research on coronaviruses.
The recently released final report from the WHO concluded — despite the absence of dispositive evidence for either scenario — that a natural origin was “likely to very likely” and a laboratory accident “extremely unlikely.” The report dedicated only 4 of its 313 pages to the possibility of a laboratory scenario, much of it under a header entitled “conspiracy theories.” Multiple statements by one of the investigators lambasted any discussion of a laboratory origin as the work of dark conspiracy theorists. Notably, that investigator — Peter Daszak — has a pronounced conflict of interest.
Yodabyte ( talk) 08:21, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
This
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In the Chronology section that should be removed is: "with Mikovits going further and stating, in Plandemic, a 2020 conspiracy theory film, that the virus was both deliberately engineered and deliberately released." The statement is incorrect since Dr. Mikovits did not say in Plandemic that it was deliberately released -- the author David Gorski (from the reference) misrepresented what was said. What was actually stated by Dr. Mikovits, taken from the transcript of Plandemic http://stateofthenation.co/?p=13864, is: "It’s very clear this virus was manipulated, this family of viruses was manipulated, and studied in a laboratory where the animals were taken into the laboratory, and this is what was released whether deliberate or not." Viktorikona ( talk) 19:10, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
It seems a lot of people changed their views after this meeting. Might be interesting to mention improtant people like Kristian Anderson that changed their mind following it. [14] 2600:1700:8660:E180:DDAB:3CAE:89A4:5D33 ( talk) 15:18, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
In the first paragraph of the wiki article "Some versions of the theory, particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, are based on misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence". 2600:1700:8660:E180:FDA6:EC45:77B0:7390 ( talk) 07:19, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
In any narrative of events, Andersen would figure prominently in the text: "Dr. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab." Gorman, James; Zimmer, Carl (June 14, 2021). "Scientist Opens Up About His Early Email to Fauci on Virus Origins". The New York Times. fiveby( zero) 16:02, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
Not sure what to do with this. Argument for lab leak in WSJ opinion section. Mentions Kristian Anderson twice, kind of interesting. Dont feel like it would be considered for inclusion in the wiki article except for the fact that it is in itself a "theory".
In an influential March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and co-authors implied that a host animal for SARS-CoV-2 would soon be found. If the virus had been cooked up in a lab, of course, there would be no host animal to find.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-lab-leak-virology-origins-pandemic-11633462827 2600:8804:6600:C4:3960:5A22:2350:25AC ( talk) 21:04, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
The Correspondence section provides a forum for discussion or to present a point of view on issues that are of interest to the readership of Nature Medicine. Correspondences should not contain new research data, nor should serve as a venue for technical comments on peer-reviewed research papers, which would be considered Matters Arising. A Correspondence is generally 800-1000 words; it is limited to one display item and up to 10 references. Article titles are omitted from the reference list. Correspondences are initially screened for general interest, and may be returned to the authors if the topic, angle or content is deemed not to be of high interest to the journal’s readership or when the topic has already been covered in other pieces. Nature Medicine receives a very high volume of correspondence and the editorial team reserves the right to return submissions to authors without further feedback. After screening, correspondences are edited for concision and clarity, and additional changes may be requested from the authors. Correspondences may be peer-reviewed at editorial discretion.It's a POV of a particular set of scientists, and not due in my view. Hemiauchenia ( talk) 22:09, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
that attracted the most buzz on social media(almost as much as a 2005 paper suggesting that chloroquine inhibited SARS). – Dervorguilla ( talk) 07:34, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Should we be lumping these two separate theories together in the same subsection? They are two very different claims, and as far as I can tell, sources treat the two theories very differently—accidental release is seen as plausible (albeit unlikely) and generally worthy of further investigation, whereas deliberate release (aka bioweapon) is seen as a completely unfounded conspiracy theory that nobody in the mainstream views as deserving serious consideration. Lumping them together gives the false impression that both theories are equally discredited, especially because only the first paragraph in the section covers claims of deliberate release ("Plandemic" and Li-Meng Yan). I propose restoring my recent edit, which separated the bioweapon theory into its own subsection, with a link to COVID-19 misinformation#Bio-weapon which covers it in more detail. Stonkaments ( talk) 17:43, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
Can we please spend less time arguing about whether a comment is a personal attack or off-topic, or whether it should be redacted or collapsed? It's not productive. There's no harm in occasional ill-judged comments—just let it be. I'm not sure whether Dervorguilla meant to remove the comment that had been collapsed—please don't tell me. Yes, the comment is not appropriate on article talk but being drawn into a battle over occasional suboptimal commentary is a mistake. The path to wiki-success is to focus on actionable proposals based on appropriate sources, regardless of what others are doing. Of course if it becomes frequent, something needs to occur—start with a polite and template-free explanation at the user's talk. Then ping me or another admin if there are multiple bad comments, or if a single comment is an attack rather than just inappropriate. Johnuniq ( talk) 06:09, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 4 | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | → | Archive 10 |
Here is a new article in The Lancet, arguing that the previous estimates on the likelihood of a lab leak are faulty, and that there is no direct support for a natural origin - Thereisnous ( talk) 08:36, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
In general, considering the rapidly evolving situation, I would suggest that all claims about the scientific consensus on the lab leak should be accompanied by a date. E.g. "Most scientists..." -> "As of February 2021, most scientists..." Thereisnous ( talk) 08:44, 19 September 2021 (UTC)
scientific community. They openly support Tedros's view (that
all hypotheses remained on the table including that of a laboratory leak) and reject Calisher and colleagues'.
the pangolin hypothesis has since been abandoned.9,10,11,12The real problem here is that we don't normally cite
correspondence. – Dervorguilla ( talk) 06:32, 20 September 2021 (UTC) 07:12, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
piece of correspondencespeaks (rather plainly) for itself:
simply waitfor more pangolin papers — or cold-chain papers. We can treat this letter's
cardinalpoints as significant-minority viewpoints (mostly contradicting the lab-leak proposition). – Dervorguilla ( talk) 20:03, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
a significant minority viewpoint. The only one (so far presented) that did suggest so was a piece of correspondence in the OP's post, and the quality of the piece I have provided which arrives at cardinally different conclusions (MEDRS-wise) is about the same. You can assert a lot of things in correspondence, just like in NYT editorials (which we may or may not agree with), and that's exactly the reason we have reviews to hopefully sieve out the bias those who write these letters have, or, if these are unavailable, wait for citations to accrue and see if the piece of correspondence is important enough to merit mention (too little time has passed since the publication, so we can't yet use this substitute for review). Szmenderowiecki ( talk) 20:48, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
More scientists concur with their view, they implytopic. This has been a somewhat consistent undercurrent since the start, namely how much politicization and personal belief/interests affected the willingness of lab origins being discussed. We touch on this briefly with the "chilling effect" discussed in First appearance and the Daszak COI in Renewed media attention. This letter wouldn't be a reliable source to suggest an actual "silent majority", but it may be worth including as part of these claims being made. Bakkster Man ( talk) 13:23, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
prominentsources in the mainstream scientific community still believe that China really is offering "unreserved accurate data" about the lab.) I can therefore freely support Thereisnous's proposal that
claims about the scientific consensus on the lab leak . . . be accompanied by a date. – Dervorguilla ( talk) 21:53, 20 September 2021 (UTC)
It was originally suggested that the virus might have originated from bats or pangolins sold at the market.)
As of 2008, construction is expected to ... cost US$28 billion.
However, the prevailing scientific view is that while an accidental leak is possible, it is extremely unlikely.– Dervorguilla ( talk) 04:03, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
The consensus in the mainstream media (which is the relevant media for this, rather than MEDRS sources, as it is a social/geopolitical question, as opposed to a medical question) seems to me to have shifted from "This is highly unlikely, and only conspiracy theorists are pushing this narrative" to "This is one of the plausible hypotheses".
Although considerable evidence supports the natural origins of other outbreaks (eg, Nipah, MERS, and the 2002–04 SARS outbreak) direct evidence for a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 is missing. After 19 months of investigations, the proximal progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 is still lacking. Neither the host pathway from bats to humans, nor the geographical route from Yunnan (where the viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been sampled) to Wuhan (where the pandemic emerged) have been identified. More than 80 000 samples collected from Chinese wildlife sites and animal farms all proved negative. In addition, the international research community has no access to the sites, samples, or raw data. Although the Joint WHO-China Study concluded that the laboratory origin was “extremely unlikely”,WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that all hypotheses remained on the table including that of a laboratory leak.
Stonkaments is insisting on adding what appears to be redundant repetition to the final paragraph of the lead. This seems to me to be bringing both issues of WP:UNDUE and of poor writing (repeating the same information in successive sentences is poor writing) into account. RandomCanadian ( talk / contribs) 13:34, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Most say that the virus is very likely natural and that theories around the Wuhan Institute of Virology are a possible explanation, but they’re unlikely.[4] The lead currently fails to accurately convey this information—it mentions that some scientists argue the lab leak theory should be investigated further, but nowhere states that most scientists say it is a possible explanation. This seems especially important to get right given earlier attempts in the scientific community (described as "scientific propaganda and thuggery") to dismiss the lab leak theory as a conspiracy theory. Stonkaments ( talk) 13:42, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Some scientists agree that the possibility of a lab leak...
This
edit request to
COVID-19 lab leak theory has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
This statement is false -- "Some versions (particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome) are based on speculation, misinformation, or misrepresentations of scientific evidence."
This is exactly what Wuhan and Peter Daszak said they were doing -- inserting spike proteins into bat coronaviruses to make them pathogenic to humans in order to develop vaccines. How could you not know that?
https://www.algora.com/Algora_blog/2021/06/09/daszak-you-insert-the-spike-proteins-from-those-viruses-see-if-they-bind-to-human-cells 2600:1700:F040:8160:21F7:74A4:B998:8C7A ( talk) 16:56, 21 September 2021 (UTC)
some versions (...) are based on speculation, misinformation, or misrepresentations of scientific evidence.
reasonablespeculation. Notice an unflattering reference to the Institute's operating procedures:
Some versions are based on reasonable speculation; some (particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome), on misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence.
reasonable speculation." Otherwise I think the change is fine. — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 08:51, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
speculationbased on the published
operating procedures at the facilityand
the large collections of bat virome samples stored in labsthere? – Dervorguilla ( talk) 10:13, 23 September 2021 (UTC)
much of the animal work was done at other facilities." What you heard: "The animal work was only done at other facilities." I refer to the grant proposals and RSes interpreting those proposals (Intercept, others) which show that animal work was conducted at either Ralph Baric's Lab or at The University of Wuhan in most cases. It didn't happen at the WIV for the most part. — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 18:24, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
We have a situation with the article, which uses a lot the "extremely unlikely" likelihood assigned to the lab leak hypothesis by the WHO mission. Here are the issues:
We should not put too much focus on the wording. We were looking at different options. At some point we were thinking: Should we use a ranking, with one being the most unlikely, five the most likely, or should we use colors, or should we find another scale? We ended up with a five-phrase scale: "extremely unlikely," "unlikely," "possible," "likely," and "very likely." It's more an illustration of where these hypotheses are to help us organize our planning of future studies.. Then, in a danish documentary released in August 2021, Embarek allegedly said that Chinese officials pressured investigation to drop lab-leak hypothesis and label it very unfavorably, thus the "extremely unlikely" assesment. Asked to comment on the veracity of this allegations, Ben Embarek
initially said the interview had been mistranslated in English-language media coverage. “It is a wrong translation from a Danish article,” he wrote. So, overall, the "extremely unlikely" label was not the strongest point of the WHO report regarding clarity of communication.
Although the possibility of a laboratory accident cannot be entirely dismissed, and may be near impossible to falsify, this conduit for emergence is highly unlikely relative to the numerous and repeated humananimal contacts that occur routinely in the wildlife trade. WP:MEDRS does tell us to give more weight to new reviews, so in my opinion Holmes et al is in this regard a superior source than the WHO report
The suggestion is that we look for the many instances in which we use "extremely unlikely" and replace some of them, where appropiate, with the Holmes et al (2021) more charitable "highly unlikely". Forich ( talk) 12:36, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
Not yet peer-reviewed, so probably not ready for inclusion. But keep an eye on this, it will probably be a good thing to include at some point: [5]
Choice quotes:
Particularly concerning is that the new viruses contain receptor binding domains that are almost identical to that of SARS-CoV-2, and can therefore infect human cells. The receptor binding domain allows SARS-CoV-2 to attach to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of human cells to enter them.
“When SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced, the receptor binding domain didn’t really look like anything we’d seen before,” says Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney in Australia. This caused some people to speculate that the virus had been created in a laboratory. But the Laos coronaviruses confirm these parts of SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, he says. “I am more convinced than ever that SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin,” agrees Linfa Wang, a virologist at Duke–NUS Medical School in Singapore.
— Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 20:32, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
Viruses swap chunks of RNA with one another through a process called recombination, and one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago, says Spyros Lytras, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Glasgow. “These viruses recombine so much that different bits of the genome have different evolutionary histories,” he says.
In August 2021, the results of a US intelligence community probe ordered by president Joe Biden were declassified.
This sentence is false. We do not know which of "the results' were unclassified, and which remain classified. 2.96.240.198 ( talk) 18:13, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
an executive summary" if you like. — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 18:27, 25 September 2021 (UTC)
The intelligence community plans to review the report with an eye to releasing a declassified version at some future date, Assistant Director of National Intelligence Timothy Barrett said Friday.Statement worded as-is fails verification. Maybe some of the four at the end of the paragraph verify but I'm not going to go hunting on a whim if the citations aren't properly placed. It goes back to my earlier concern about verifiability. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 14:38, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
Article is here [8]. Should anything be added to the article? The authors' takeaway:
The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
And our friend Alina Chan gets mentioned again:
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?”
Stonkaments ( talk) 11:37, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses--one not previously disclosed publicly--was more pathogenic to humanized mice that the starting virus from which it was constructed and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.He went on to say
The documents make it clear that assertions made by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.None of that appears in any RS yet though. Mr Ernie ( talk) 13:42, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed.— Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 19:19, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
Is this statement in the wiki's lead paragraph still true? "Some versions of the theory, particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, are based on misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence." 70.191.102.240 ( talk) 20:40, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
particularly some of those involving human intervention...." But my argument (and that of many of our sources) is that there is no evidence of any human intervention in the genome whatsoever, and most experts agree it is extremely unlikely. Verging on the impossible. And we now have viruses in nature which contain all the features necessary to evolve SARS-CoV-2. So on one hand, we have a very plausible evolutionary origin with evidence from extant viruses in nature and known mechanisms of recombination and crossover, and on the other hand, we have an extremely implausible artificial genetic engineering explanation with no evidence... — Shibbolethink ( ♔ ♕) 23:52, 27 September 2021 (UTC)
WSJ reporting disbandment of task force bc of ties to ecohealth. Doesnt report much on lab leak details, not sure where this belongs or if at all here. I'll just note that EcoHealth Alliance is only mentioned once on this wikipedia article, even though it is now at the ceneter of many theories. And has directly disrupted this panel's work to find the origins of sars2. https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-panel-of-scientists-investigating-origins-of-virus-is-disbanded-11632571202 2600:1700:8660:E180:69CE:BC4:C894:5E63 ( talk) 08:15, 26 September 2021 (UTC)
newsabout apparent
conflicts of interest ... influencing ... the maintenance of this article?
Experience has shown that misusing Wikipedia to perpetuate legal, political, social, literary, scholarly, or other disputes is harmful ... to Wikipedia itself. Therefore, an editor who is involved in a significant controversy or dispute with another individual ... should not edit ... material about that person, given the potential conflict of interest.
– Dervorguilla ( talk) 02:01, 27 September 2021 (UTC) 04:34, 27 September 2021 (UTC)Example: Editors have an apparent COI if they edit an article about a business, and for some reason they appear to be in communication with the business owner, although they may actually have no such connection. Apparent COI raises concern within the community and should be resolved through discussion...
Having a grantis OK; you do need to disclose it in your manuscript, though:
In all scientific disciplines ... authors must disclose activities and relationships that, if known to others, might be viewed as potential conflicts of interest—for example, financial agreements ... with ... any ... service ... discussed in [their] paper.APA, Publication Manual, 7th ed.
– Dervorguilla ( talk) 02:38, 27 September 2021 (UTC)In ... scientific disciplines, professional communications are presumed to be based on ... unbiased interpretations of fact. An author’s economic and commercial interests ... may color such objectivity ... The integrity of the field requires disclosure of the possibilities of such potentially distorting influences ...
Holdings in a company through a mutual fund are not ordinarily sufficient to warrant disclosure, whereas salaries, research grants, [and] consulting fees ... would be.
authors with no known conflict of interest must state this explicitly.(APA, "Disclosure".) And Daszak did explicitly state just that, says the Lancet. It ultimately had him "re-evaluate [his] competing interests" — whereupon he made a fuller disclosure:
EcoHealth Alliance's work in China ... includes the production of a small number of recombinant bat coronaviruses to analyse cell entry...
risked perception of bias, he told the Journal ( McKay). Cf. APA Publication Manual:
The integrity of the field ... requires ... [that] an author ... disclose ... activities and relationships that, if known to others, might be viewed as a conflict of interest, even if the author does not believe that any conflict or bias exists.
safest ... course of actionhere is to disclose Daszak's
possible influences that mighthave led him
to support certain findings. Our encyclopedia can thereby carry out its (minor) part in maintaining the
integrityof that field. – Dervorguilla ( talk) 08:04, 28 September 2021 (UTC)
Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs said he has disbanded a task force of scientists probing the origins of Covid-19 in favor of wider biosafety research.
Dr. Sachs, chairman of a Covid-19 commission affiliated with the Lancet scientific journals, said he closed the task force because he was concerned about its links to EcoHealth Alliance. The New York-based nonprofit has been under scrutiny from some scientists, members of Congress and other officials since 2020 for using U.S. funds for studies on bat coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility...
EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, led the task force until recusing himself from that role in June...
An expert on searching for emerging viruses in animals that could threaten humans, Dr. Daszak has been a vocal opponent of the hypothesis that the virus might have spread from a laboratory accident. He was a member of a World Health Organization-led team that visited Wuhan earlier this year and concluded that a laboratory leak was extremely unlikely.
Five task-force members joined Dr. Daszak in signing letters in the Lancet in February 2020 denouncing what they called conspiracy theories that the new coronavirus had been bioengineered and in July 2021 saying more evidence supported a natural origin of the virus...
References
SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: What Really Happened in Wuhan, Sky News Australia I think this is a valid external link, they having all the information there. China lied about having bats at the lab, video footage shows they had plenty of bats there. Various other things. Should this not be in the article? Also claiming a news source is unreliable simply because you don't like it, is pointless. The covid investigation page had most agreeing it was a reliable source. /info/en/?search=Talk:Investigations_into_the_origin_of_COVID-19/Archive_2 Dream Focus 00:27, 29 September 2021 (UTC)
This [13] is extremely informative, can anything be used in this article?
Few important things ( David Relman says the following regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2):
We know very little about its origins. The virus’s closest known relatives were discovered in bats in Yunnan Province, China, yet the first known cases of COVID-19 were detected in Wuhan (about 1,000 miles away).
Maybe someone became infected after contact with an infected animal in or near Yunnan, and moved on to Wuhan. But then, because of the high transmissibility of this virus, you’d have expected to see other infected people at or near the site of this initial encounter, whether through similar animal exposure or because of transmission from this person.
All scientists need to acknowledge a simple fact: Humans are fallible, and laboratory accidents happen — far more often than we care to admit. Several years ago, an investigative reporter uncovered evidence of hundreds of lab accidents across the United States involving dangerous, disease-causing microbes in academic institutions and government centers of excellence alike — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. SARS-CoV-2 might have been lurking in a sample collected from a bat or other infected animal, brought to a laboratory, perhaps stored in a freezer, then propagated in the laboratory as part of an effort to resurrect and study bat-associated viruses. The materials might have been discarded as a failed experiment. Or SARS-CoV-2 could have been created through commonly used laboratory techniques to study novel viruses, starting with closely related coronaviruses that have not yet been revealed to the public. Either way, SARS-CoV-2 could have easily infected an unsuspecting lab worker and then caused a mild or asymptomatic infection that was carried out of the laboratory.
There’s a glaring paucity of data. The SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence, and those of a handful of not-so-closely-related bat coronaviruses, have been analyzed ad nauseam. But the near ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 remain missing in action. Absent that knowledge, it’s impossible to discern the origins of this virus from its genome sequence alone. SARS-CoV-2 hasn’t been reliably detected anywhere prior to the first reported cases of disease in humans in Wuhan at the end of 2019. The whole enterprise has been made even more difficult by the Chinese national authorities’ efforts to control and limit the release of public health records and data pertaining to laboratory research on coronaviruses.
The recently released final report from the WHO concluded — despite the absence of dispositive evidence for either scenario — that a natural origin was “likely to very likely” and a laboratory accident “extremely unlikely.” The report dedicated only 4 of its 313 pages to the possibility of a laboratory scenario, much of it under a header entitled “conspiracy theories.” Multiple statements by one of the investigators lambasted any discussion of a laboratory origin as the work of dark conspiracy theorists. Notably, that investigator — Peter Daszak — has a pronounced conflict of interest.
Yodabyte ( talk) 08:21, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
This
edit request to
COVID-19 lab leak theory has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
In the Chronology section that should be removed is: "with Mikovits going further and stating, in Plandemic, a 2020 conspiracy theory film, that the virus was both deliberately engineered and deliberately released." The statement is incorrect since Dr. Mikovits did not say in Plandemic that it was deliberately released -- the author David Gorski (from the reference) misrepresented what was said. What was actually stated by Dr. Mikovits, taken from the transcript of Plandemic http://stateofthenation.co/?p=13864, is: "It’s very clear this virus was manipulated, this family of viruses was manipulated, and studied in a laboratory where the animals were taken into the laboratory, and this is what was released whether deliberate or not." Viktorikona ( talk) 19:10, 30 September 2021 (UTC)
It seems a lot of people changed their views after this meeting. Might be interesting to mention improtant people like Kristian Anderson that changed their mind following it. [14] 2600:1700:8660:E180:DDAB:3CAE:89A4:5D33 ( talk) 15:18, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
In the first paragraph of the wiki article "Some versions of the theory, particularly those alleging human intervention in the SARS-CoV-2 genome, are based on misinformation or misrepresentations of scientific evidence". 2600:1700:8660:E180:FDA6:EC45:77B0:7390 ( talk) 07:19, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
In any narrative of events, Andersen would figure prominently in the text: "Dr. Andersen has reiterated this point of view in interviews and on Twitter over the past year, putting him at the center of the continuing controversy over whether the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab." Gorman, James; Zimmer, Carl (June 14, 2021). "Scientist Opens Up About His Early Email to Fauci on Virus Origins". The New York Times. fiveby( zero) 16:02, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
Not sure what to do with this. Argument for lab leak in WSJ opinion section. Mentions Kristian Anderson twice, kind of interesting. Dont feel like it would be considered for inclusion in the wiki article except for the fact that it is in itself a "theory".
In an influential March 2020 paper in Nature Medicine, Kristian Andersen and co-authors implied that a host animal for SARS-CoV-2 would soon be found. If the virus had been cooked up in a lab, of course, there would be no host animal to find.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-lab-leak-virology-origins-pandemic-11633462827 2600:8804:6600:C4:3960:5A22:2350:25AC ( talk) 21:04, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
The Correspondence section provides a forum for discussion or to present a point of view on issues that are of interest to the readership of Nature Medicine. Correspondences should not contain new research data, nor should serve as a venue for technical comments on peer-reviewed research papers, which would be considered Matters Arising. A Correspondence is generally 800-1000 words; it is limited to one display item and up to 10 references. Article titles are omitted from the reference list. Correspondences are initially screened for general interest, and may be returned to the authors if the topic, angle or content is deemed not to be of high interest to the journal’s readership or when the topic has already been covered in other pieces. Nature Medicine receives a very high volume of correspondence and the editorial team reserves the right to return submissions to authors without further feedback. After screening, correspondences are edited for concision and clarity, and additional changes may be requested from the authors. Correspondences may be peer-reviewed at editorial discretion.It's a POV of a particular set of scientists, and not due in my view. Hemiauchenia ( talk) 22:09, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
that attracted the most buzz on social media(almost as much as a 2005 paper suggesting that chloroquine inhibited SARS). – Dervorguilla ( talk) 07:34, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
Should we be lumping these two separate theories together in the same subsection? They are two very different claims, and as far as I can tell, sources treat the two theories very differently—accidental release is seen as plausible (albeit unlikely) and generally worthy of further investigation, whereas deliberate release (aka bioweapon) is seen as a completely unfounded conspiracy theory that nobody in the mainstream views as deserving serious consideration. Lumping them together gives the false impression that both theories are equally discredited, especially because only the first paragraph in the section covers claims of deliberate release ("Plandemic" and Li-Meng Yan). I propose restoring my recent edit, which separated the bioweapon theory into its own subsection, with a link to COVID-19 misinformation#Bio-weapon which covers it in more detail. Stonkaments ( talk) 17:43, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
Can we please spend less time arguing about whether a comment is a personal attack or off-topic, or whether it should be redacted or collapsed? It's not productive. There's no harm in occasional ill-judged comments—just let it be. I'm not sure whether Dervorguilla meant to remove the comment that had been collapsed—please don't tell me. Yes, the comment is not appropriate on article talk but being drawn into a battle over occasional suboptimal commentary is a mistake. The path to wiki-success is to focus on actionable proposals based on appropriate sources, regardless of what others are doing. Of course if it becomes frequent, something needs to occur—start with a polite and template-free explanation at the user's talk. Then ping me or another admin if there are multiple bad comments, or if a single comment is an attack rather than just inappropriate. Johnuniq ( talk) 06:09, 31 October 2021 (UTC)