Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says

[Hutan]

For those keen on the theory, this piece from ProPublica gives a good background on how it could have happened.
COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab (Oct 22)

That's a good article. It mentions Worobey - the arguments against the market origin include the fact that environmental swabs were positive from the plant and seafood sections of the market, not the meat section (although I guess the meat section may have been disinfected) and that there were early cases (in December) that have not been linked to the market.

There's an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal that says the FBI thinks the virus came from the lab.

The Journal scoop Sunday that the U.S. Department of Energy has concluded that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, doesn’t mean the case is definitive. But it is more evidence that the media and public-health groupthink about Covid was mistaken and destructive.

The salient detail is that DOE’s judgment is based on “new” but still secret intelligence. Yet DOE’s new judgment is nonetheless made with “low confidence.” The FBI has concluded that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the “likely” origin of the virus, but other U.S. intelligence agencies either don’t believe they have enough evidence or believe it had a natural origin.

It almost doesn't matter whether the virus came from the lab. The plausibility that it could have should be enough to guide national policies aimed at reducing the risks of future pandemics. Some information I found earlier re the safety controls at the Wuhan lab and the ease with which pathogens can leak:
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/06/scicheck-the-facts-and-gaps-on-the-origin-of-the-coronavirus/

The lab has made chimeric virusesthat mix and match different elements to better understand what’s required to infect human cells — which some people consider to be gain-of-function experiments, although Shi does not. As we’ve written, there is no single definition of gain-of-function, but in this context it typically refers to modifications that aim to make a virus more dangerous or infectious to study potential disease pathways.

Shi told Science that some of her coronavirus research was conducted at biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) — a basic lab safety level that some say is inadequate; this information has also been publicly available in the methods sections of published papers.

Evidence of coronavirus leaks even under the higher biosecurity level 3, a 2004 account. A student was working on West Nile virus in Singapore but contracted SARS-CoV-1 in a lab that does work with that virus also, even though he had no intended or observed contact with SARS-CoV-1.

 

[CRG]

Couple of articles adding perspective and nuance ?

i news Stop blindly believing or dismissing the Covid lab-leak theory – focus on the evidence

Stuart Ritchie

"How do you make your mind up on controversial scientific questions? The debate around the origins of the Covid virus offers a nice lesson in how not to do it.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that the US Department of Energy currently believes that it’s more likely that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, was leaked from a lab in China than that it evolved naturally. Three days later, the director of the FBI announced that his agency concurred.

For a lot of participants in the debate, this settled it. The establishment, they argued, had been lying to us: we were told that only conspiracy theorists believed in a lab-leak Covid origin, but now that had been spectacularly overturned."

npr What does the science say about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic?

Michaeleen Doucleff

"Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.

The Wall Street Journal added to that debate this week when they reported that the U.S. Department of Energy has shifted its stance on the origin of COVID. It now concludes, with "low confidence," that the pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

The agency based its conclusion on classified evidence that isn't available to the public. According to the federal government, "low confidence" means "the information used in the analysis is scant, questionable, fragmented, or that solid analytical conclusions cannot be inferred from the information."

Edit: first link now pointing to the right article !!