Did the Covid virus originate in Thailand?
A new WSJ article suggests that they are beginning to zero in on the origin of the Covid-19 virus:
At least four recent studies have identified coronaviruses closely related to the pandemic strain in bats and pangolins in Southeast Asia and Japan, a sign that these pathogens are more widespread than previously known and that there was ample opportunity for the virus to evolve.
Another new study suggests that a change in a single amino acid in a key component of the virus enabled or at least helped the virus become infectious in humans. Amino acids are organic compounds that form proteins.
Public-health officials say it is critical to identify the origin of the pandemic to take steps to avert future outbreaks, though it may take years to do so. These latest pieces of research add to evidence that the virus, called SARS-CoV-2, likely originated in bats and then evolved naturally to infect humans, possibly through an intermediary animal.
The studies also help explain why members of a WHO team that in February completed a four-week mission to Wuhan—the Chinese city where the first known cases of Covid-19 were found—advocate searching for the origin of the pandemic in other countries in addition to China, particularly those along its border in Southeast Asia. . . .
Using the test, he and a team of researchers found strong neutralizing antibodies that blocked SARS-CoV-2 in bats and a pangolin in Thailand. That likely means the animals were exposed to a coronavirus similar to the pandemic version, said Dr. Wang. The team also found a coronavirus closely resembling the pandemic strain in bats in a cave in eastern Thailand.
Certain nationalistic politicians tried to smear China by labelling Covid the “China virus” or the “Kung flu”, before all the evidence was in. If this new information is correct, should we now call it the Siam flu?
It seems increasingly unlikely that the virus came from a Chinese lab, although that hypothesis has certainly not been definitively ruled out. (The WHO team did not have access to all of the information it needed):
Chinese scientists reported soon after the pandemic began that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had a virus whose genome is a 96.2% match with that of the Covid-19 virus. But the difference between the two viruses would have been too great for researchers to successfully engineer the pandemic virus, said Dr. Wang, who is an expert in bat-borne viruses.
“It would explode your calculator,” he said of the difference. “If the best scientists all worked for me for the rest of my life, I would not be able to create it.”
Nor would it have been straightforward to figure out the mutation in the virus that Dr. Weger-Lucarelli and his colleagues found. “There is no literature, at least that no one has published, showing that this site in coronaviruses is very important for human infection,” Dr. Weger-Lucarelli said.
The newly found coronaviruses support the argument that “nature developed this virus without requiring any human intervention,” said Stanley Perlman, a University of Iowa virologist who has studied coronaviruses for four decades but wasn’t involved in the latest studies. He serves on the Lancet Covid-19 Commission set up to speed solutions to the pandemic.
This is from another recent WSJ article:
Robert Garry, a virologist at the Tulane University School of Medicine who was involved in that research, said he and other colleagues had initially considered the possibility of a leak or accident from a laboratory, but ultimately deemed it “nearly impossible.”
PS. A while back I linked to an excellent set of Phillip Lemoine posts on China’s role in the pandemic. Now he has produced a powerful critique of “lockdowns”. (I put the term ‘lockdown’ in quotes because it’s a rather vague concept, which covers both actual lockdowns and some milder interventions.) I’ve always felt that lockdowns should only be used under very extreme circumstances. In my view, our big policy mistakes were in the areas of masks, testing and especially vaccines. I’m happy for the British, but why couldn’t we have done the same?
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6. March 2021 at 14:04
“It seems increasingly unlikely that the virus came from a Chinese lab”
I’m guessing based on what follows that this is intended to mean “intentionally engineered in a Chinese lab” but if you could clarify I’d appreciate it. Because it’s going to be much harder to definitively know that the virus wasn’t studied at, and accidentally escaped from, a Chinese lab.
6. March 2021 at 14:49
Hh, Good point. But (AFAIK) if it was a naturally occurring virus that was being studied in a lab, it’s hard to see how any amount of detective work could establish that fact.
6. March 2021 at 15:52
Highly unlikely.
There were no reported cases in Thailand until February.
Intelligence officials claim the first cases of this virus were reported in Wuhan as early as October.
A wuhan medical doctor, in defiance of govt opposition, warned the rest of the world on social media at the end of December, so that is the first the world heard of this disease.
Thailand would never try to cover up a virus. Our medical research is phenomenal, and we are the number one medical tourist destination in Asia (might now be the world). Our entire medical industry has been built on trust, hence the millions of tourists who fly to our private hospitals for life saving treatment (believe me, nobody wants to go to the public ones).
Our politics is also neutral. If people were showing symptoms before Wuhan outbreak in Bangkok, we would have recognized the issue and reported to WHO immediately.
6. March 2021 at 17:02
The claim that the virus was engineered by Human action has long lacked substantiation, but we must be mindful that the most plausible connection to WIV is just poor safety practices in the handling of bat specimens collected and brought there.
Should the natural reservoir be found in Thailand, that isn’t enough to sensible challenge the presumption that the outbreak started from a bat or sample handled at WIV.
It would simply be an incredible coincidence that the one place in the world where there is a high volume of coronavirus research involving cultures and live animal specimen also just happened to be where the virus exploded into view.
6. March 2021 at 17:24
There’s an element of paranoia in how the Chinese government fought so desperately against SARS-COV-2 being attributed to China. I didn’t appreciate the paranoia until I saw how comfortable we all were attributing other variants such as the UK or, more precisely, the Kent variant and the South African variant to the places where they were first seen. You don’t hear the British and South Africans insisting that everyone call them the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants to avoid smearing their countries or people from Kent insisting that their variant actually originated in Sussex.
6. March 2021 at 17:50
Scott:
You’ve gone overbored on your sensitivity and objections to naming a disease from where it seems to have originated. Pushing back on racism — good. Attacking a reasonable, common disease naming convention via special pleading for the Chinese — bad.
6. March 2021 at 18:35
ankh, I agree with all that, but that doesn’t mean the virus did not originate in Thailand. No one denies that the epidemic first became widespread in China. But can you rule out the virus starting in Thailand, spreading to bats in China, then spreading to humans in China?
Also keep in mind that even after the outbreak was widespread all over the world, it was very rare in places like Laos, perhaps because of some natural immunity. It could have spread from northern Laos into southern China without anyone knowing it.
Laura, If it came from a live animal it most certainly could have come through the Wuhan live animal market, which was the original theory. In any case, if that’s the origin, it was only a matter of time.
I’m not saying that there’s no chance it came from the lab, I’d say there’s at least a 10% chance, despite that one scientist saying “impossible”. But if it’s found in the wild it’s going to mostly defuse theories of a Chinese lab origin, as the average person sees that theory in terms of an engineered virus.
Personally, I think the animal market theory reflects more poorly on China than the lab theory.
Carl, You said:
“There’s an element of paranoia in how the Chinese government fought so desperately against SARS-COV-2 being attributed to China.”
Yes, the Chinese government is despicable and dishonest. But it’s worth noting that their attitude was partly a response to despicable attacks by Trump. I’m not excusing their behavior, but our government’s hands are not clean either.
Scott, I have no objection to naming a disease from the place it came from, if it’s not done specifically to insult that country. In 1968, we had the Hong Kong flu, which is fine. I object to intentionally using names as an insult to an entire country, which Trump certainly did. If you don’t know the backstory of why Trump suddenly starting using terms like China virus and Kung flu, perhaps you should rely on a different media outlet for your news.
6. March 2021 at 19:17
There’s nothing here to suggest the virus didn’t originate in China. I’m sure there are furry animals living in Asia that have viruses closely resembling the China Bug. However, this bug came from the Wuhan lab.
6. March 2021 at 20:53
“It seems increasingly unlikely that the virus came from a Chinese lab, although that hypothesis has certainly not been definitively ruled out. (The WHO team did not have access to all of the information it needed)”
This restriction on access to information certainly deserves an explanation. This restriction certainly fuels the belief that the virus did escape from one of the labs in Wuhan. I simply do not understand the Party’s decision to place such restrictions on the WHO investigation. What do they gain by doing so? How much more valuable is what they gain than in what they lose by encouraging them the belief that the virus leaked from a lab? Do they want to fuel that belief?
I would like to hear Prof. Sumner’s speculations on what the Party is doing and why. That is one thing that reporting on the WHO investigation and investigation into the pandemic’s origins don’t dig into.
I think that the likeliest explanation is that someone panicked and destroyed evidence, and the Party doesn’t want that to come to light. I don’t even think that they necessarily knew if the virus came from the lab before destroying evidence either.
Perhaps the Party decided that it is better not to know, and to prevent anyone from ever having strong evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis, even if it means that the lab leak hypothesis is never disproven either. The Party I guess thinks that it can spin the uncertainty, and is taking a chance that it didn’t come from the lab and that will eventually be shown.
7. March 2021 at 07:41
I wish the lab-leak hypothesis would be more honestly dealt with in the media reports. Nicholson Baker’s excellent piece in New York Magazine in January explains the plausibility of a lab leak very well. For some reason, the majority of discussion of a lab leak continues to center on a false dichotomy: either the virus evolved naturally in animals or it was engineered in a lab.
As many scientists have rightly pointed out, virology is not advanced enough to engineer a virus like SARS-CoV2 from scratch. But recent virology research (known as “gain of function” research) involves harnessing the natural process of evolution to produce virus strains that are more infectious in humans. This type of research would produce viruses that are indistinguishable from viruses that have evolved in nature, since it harnesses evolution to coax viruses to become more infectious.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in gain-of-function research, as I understand it. And lab leaks have happened throughout the history of microbiological research. It seems completely plausible that a researcher could have been infected with a gain-of-function virus that was being studied in the lab and began spreading it in Wuhan. This theory seems at least as plausible as the virus jumping to humans in a live animal market.
An additional factor that leans in favor of the gain-of-function hypothesis is the virulence of this virus in humans. From the beginning, this virus was very well-adapted to spreading in the human population. It is theoretically possible for a virus that evolved in other animal populations to be virulent in humans, but I suspect it is more likely that initial variants that jump to humans would not be well-adapted to the human population. A case in point is the original SARS virus, which very likely jumped from animals to humans. SARS was far less contagious than SARS-CoV2 (although it was more deadly). A similar pattern existed in MERS (not very contagious, but very deadly).
7. March 2021 at 08:03
Thailand? Why not. Although it seems odd that the major breakout was in Wuhan. There are more viruses on earth than stars in the universe, says National Geographic. They also say there are an estimated 1.7mil viruses in birds and mammals which “could make the jump” to humans. Yet, NIH say there “only” 200 that humans can get—increasing at a rate of 3-4 a year. So, I would hypothesize we should not be surprised that a Covid comes along every once in a while.
My point is——-what difference does it make where it ultimately started? This one went world wide regardless of where it started. And if it take years to find out it “really” started in Thailand (or maybe it was on a food shipment from Argentina) how does that help us?
All inquiry is good. But my preference is figuring out how to respond as fast as possible. We learned a lot——we hope—-on how to create successful vaccines fast this past year, despite the worst president ever——imagine how fast it could be done when Harris becomes president.
7. March 2021 at 08:59
Lizard, You said:
“Perhaps the Party decided that it is better not to know, and to prevent anyone from ever having strong evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis, even if it means that the lab leak hypothesis is never disproven either. The Party I guess thinks that it can spin the uncertainty, and is taking a chance that it didn’t come from the lab and that will eventually be shown.”
That’s my best guess.
Marc, Perhaps, but what do you make of all the scientists who say it’s highly unlikely that the virus came from a lab? Presumably they are just as well-informed as Nicholson Baker (who is a novelist.) And Baker basically says we don’t know, there is no solid evidence either way.
Of course it’s possible that scientists are lying, and closing ranks to prevent the rest of society from closing down biomedical research into viruses. If true, then the US is just as guilty as China.
Michael, If it was created in a lab, we’d want to know. If it is a natural virus, it doesn’t make a lot of difference on which side of the border it originated.
7. March 2021 at 09:14
Marc, Check this out:
https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1346117198381797379?s=20
7. March 2021 at 11:31
Interesting article, but then again it’s also fine to call something one thing before you have all the facts. The freakout over calling it the “Wuhan virus” is kind of more of the same. Culture outrage porn over something immaterial while, for example, Asians remain massively discriminated against in the admission process of the major US Universities–something that’s hardly talked about. I know you can play this whatabouism game forever, but still..
Also, I can’t wait for the next “powerful critique” that focuses on mask mandates, and then testing. In fact, when you put Government Response Index data into a PCA, it ends up that those components are almost completely orthogonal to death-rates across the Western world. It’s quite surprising honestly, but there it is.
The big mistakes were in failed actions directly against the virus itself. Our steroid prescriptions for those with severe cases are still probably too small and too short. Or maybe not, but the point is this question *needs* to be answered definitely and *rapidly*. This is an economics problem. Likewise, ignoring/suppressing preventative therapeutics was a massive miss–practically unforgivable in my view. Ditto for non-immediate vaccine trials.
7. March 2021 at 13:28
” In my view, our big policy mistakes were in the areas of masks, testing and especially vaccines.”
I always hate to disagree (partly because it usually turns out I’m wrong, of course) but surely if you could go back in time and change a policy it would be in the area of travel restrictions (in the top three with vaccines and testing), not masks.
First of all people did end up wearing masks (and social distancing), regardless of the initial policy blunders, but to this day many if not most people seem to be almost completely unaware of issues involving eating, talking, ventilation and so on. I wonder if this hasn’t overall reduced some of the mask-wearing benefit anyway – so much mask-wearing that we observe if of very little value.
Meanwhile sensible travel restrictions would have obviously saved a ton of lives, in my view. (Could be wrong, to be sure).
I’m thinking taht if we got X% of the possible benefits of wearing masks, and got Y% of the possible benefits of travel restrictions, it’s possible Y << X.
7. March 2021 at 20:02
“our big policy mistakes were in the areas of masks, testing and especially vaccines”. True. I’d add that we totally biffed on ventilation. Masks are just a form of portable ventilation. We should have invested in filtration systems and CO2 meters to measure when indoor areas were approaching dangerous levels.
And to lessen the effects of future pandemics we should stop subsidizing sugar and other foods driving obesity. COVID was tough on the elderly but the most important factor in how well different countries handled the virus was the level of obesity in each country. See https://www.worldobesityday.org/assets/downloads/COVID-19-and-Obesity-The-2021-Atlas.pdf
7. March 2021 at 20:05
I meant to say masks are just a portable form of a “filtration” system.
7. March 2021 at 21:35
Click-bait article by Sumner noted. As Lizard Man says, and apparently Sumner admits, it’s possible that SARS-CoV-2 (the Covid-19 virus) originated in a lab, hence the coverup by Chinese officials refusing to allow the WHO team to investigate the WIV lab. Contrary to the cite by Sumner, some scientists say it would take about a month to reverse engineer the virus, not “many lifetimes”. In fact WIV’s Dr. Shi Zhengli was the first to provide the world with the virus DNA profile (probably because her lab made it) in a matter of weeks, and reverse engineering a virus is, these days with modern sequencing technology, a small step from a DNA sequencing (putting back together what you take apart). The Yuri Deigen Medium article is a good starting point on the chimeric nature of SARS-CoV-2.
Since I’ve emailed Sumner in the past on this topic, I guess my emails to Sumner are having an effect? Though I’m pretty sure even with irrefutable evidence Sumner will simply say something like the release of the virus was from a rogue employee or an unknown accident that the officials were unaware of, or a similar Quisling pronouncement. Cognitive dissonance.
8. March 2021 at 09:09
Thanks for the link to the twitter thread about Nicholson Baker’s piece, Scott. I read through it and found it informative. Overall, I can see why a majority of scientists believe SARS-CoV2 originated in nature. Most of the major pandemic viruses throughout history had natural origins. In light of that, the scientists who are actively researching bat viruses are trying to understand zoonotic spillover better. That all makes sense to me, and based on past pandemics, a natural origin seems like the default hypothesis.
Also, I agree with your point that the US is just as guilty as China if scientists are actively trying to bury the lab leak hypothesis. In fact, if the lab leak hypothesis is true, Nicholson Baker’s piece makes it clear that US scientists and the NIH were supporting the research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so this is not about blaming China.
It’s hard to know what happened. If I was in a betting market, I’d probably buy “lab leak” shares if the price was less than $0.20. The facts that make me suspicious are:
– The Chinese government’s active attempts to destroy evidence and hide data and silence Chinese scientists who are looking into the origins of SARS-CoV2
– The apparent lack of evidence that the seafood market was the source of the earliest cases.
– The original SARS virus has escaped labs in China more than once
– The virus seems so well-adapted to human transmission, unlike the original SARS virus (although I concede that this could arise naturally, and occasionally it does)
– If the virus originated naturally, what are the chances that it emerged in a major city and nowhere else? Wouldn’t it be more likely that farmers, hunters, or other rural workers would have come in contact with it and brought it into the city? But if that were true, the virus would have been transmitting among rural populations outside of Wuhan at the same time as the initial outbreak.
8. March 2021 at 10:14
Cartesian, See my reply to Scott. It’s find to use a country name in a disease, but it’s never OK to intentionally insult a country.
anon/portly, Travel restrictions would have been very useful if combined with measures taken to control Covid internally, as in Australia and New Zealand. Because we did not do that, travel restrictions would not have been very useful. Nonetheless, an immediate international travel ban in January would have been worth a shot.
Carl, You said:
“And to lessen the effects of future pandemics we should stop subsidizing sugar”
Yes, with or without Covid.
Ray, You said:
“Since I’ve emailed Sumner in the past on this topic, I guess my emails to Sumner are having an effect??
Given that I have not changed my views, perhaps not?
Marc, We are not far apart. I’ve generally thought it’s around 10%, but perhaps 20% is a better guess. I don’t feel I know enough about either the science or the sociology of scientists to have a very strong opinion.
8. March 2021 at 13:21
Scott,
Lemoine’s article is excellent. I don’t love his use of logarithmic graphs, and I don’t think Sweden is a great place to start the article. The truth is that Sweden still has more than ten times as many deaths as both Norway and Finland. But I think the rest of the data was compelling and many of his conclusions seem reasonable. I really hate the term lockdown, because I don’t think the term should apply to restrictions are not enforceable. Ultimately, it seems that a democratic government will not be successful imposing restrictions on the population unless the population is willing to comply. So messaging is king, which is what the experts were saying from day one. I’ll always wonder if unenforceable mask mandates did more to encourage people to wear masks or to resist being told what to do. A different pandemic could have different results, but I agree the narrative around lockdowns has been unhelpful and possibly harmful.
8. March 2021 at 16:01
“Because we did not do that, travel restrictions would not have been very useful.”
Strongly disagree. The virus spreads exponentially; travel restrictions and real quarantine of incoming travelers would have saved lives in isolation, just like how masks and various restrictions saved lives compared to the alternatives. Unless you would say that masks and isolation were useless without travel restrictions (since the US and Europe did the former without the latter.)
Canada had travel restrictions, including internally, and they were responsible for Canada having better results than the US and Europe, even if not Australia and New Zealand and Taiwan levels.
Travel restrictions alone would not have gotten us to Australia or New Zealand, but they would have slowed the spread and saved lives – well, assuming we can discount the problem of the FDA delaying vaccine approval in response due to a lack of deaths slowing down Phase III trials.
8. March 2021 at 16:51
As this article points out, experts thought it would be more likely that an epidemic would start in southern China (where the bats live) rather than central China (where Wuhan is):
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin-chaos-under-heaven-wuhan-lab-book-excerpt-474322
But bats with a coronavirus mutation that humans would be more vulnerable to were apparently being brought to Wuhan for research.
8. March 2021 at 19:47
If it did come from an accidental release from the lab in Wuhan, the research there on the possibility of viruses jumping to humans was funded by the US, heavily supported by Fauci; Obama didn’t want to fund it, but Trump gave in. There was research into exactly the possibility of a global pandemic from these viruses; would be ironic if poor lab safety in studying it led to a pandemic. (In other ironies, GWB was big into fighting pandemics and started BARDA, but the Obama and Trump Administrations kept raiding its money so long as there wasn’t a pandemic. Not that later Congresses stopped them.)
Travel restrictions, enforced, of any kind are quite useful, as useful as masks, because travel involves people mixing outside their usual sets of contacts. Even without anything else, travel restrictions (with actual quarantine hotels and applied to citizens as well) would have saved tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of lives.
9. March 2021 at 10:55
bb, You said:
“The truth is that Sweden still has more than ten times as many deaths as both Norway and Finland.”
Yes, that was my one criticism when I read the post. He compares Sweden to Europe, but the other Nordic countries are arguably a better comparison. Denmark is somewhere in the middle, and might be a good compromise.
John, Our basic policy was to twiddle our thumbs until X people were infected. Travel restrictions merely delay the date in which X were infected by a few days. Yes, they’d have some benefit, but not as much as you might assume.
If combined with an Australian style policy of control, then yes, they could have saved 500,000 lives. Don’t know if that would have been politically possible in the US.
TGGP, But the animal market is a plausible mechanism for Wuhan to be hit first.
16. March 2021 at 08:58
Thanks for linking to my article on lockdowns and other stringent restrictions. I agree “lockdown” is a vague term, but for better or worse, it has come to be used as a sort of umbrella term for the various restrictions that governments have put in place everywhere and it’s hard to avoid it.
On the comparison between Sweden and its neighbors, as I mention briefly in the piece, I think the argument that we should only compare Sweden to other Nordic countries misguided for both methodological and empirical reasons.
First, we don’t understand what factors drive between-country or even within-country differences in how quickly the virus spreads, so we are not in a position to assume that other Nordic countries provide the best counterfactual for Sweden if it had implemented a more restrictive policy and therefore it’s best on methodological grounds to compare it to a more diverse group of countries in my opinion.
In fact, I think we know, as a matter of empirical fact, that other Nordic countries don’t provide a good counterfactual. Indeed, as I explained in another post, it’s possible to show that, by the time Sweden’s neighbors locked down, the epidemic was already at a far more advanced stage in Sweden than in other Nordic countries, so even assuming that a lockdown would have made a dramatic difference (which in my view is extremely implausible), there would still have been far more deaths in Sweden because there were already more in the pipeline by the time governments intervened and people started to change their behavior and incidence would have taken longer to fall even at the same rate.
That is not to say that a more restrictive policy wouldn’t have reduced the disparity with other Nordic countries, but I think it’s clear that the number of COVID-19 deaths per capita in Sweden would still have been much greater than in other Nordic countries and people are wrong to ascribe to policy the bulk of the disparities.
We have also seen that after the first wave, because except for Denmark, other Nordic countries have actually been at least as open as Sweden and, in the case of Finland, far more open, yet they continued to have much better outcomes as far as COVID-19 deaths are concerned. It’s clear to me that something else is going on here, though I don’t know what it is.
In general I think people are way too quick to ascribe to policy between-country differences and to come up with just-so stories to explain away any recalcitrant data. I feel the same about the importance ascribed to contact tracing in East Asia, which as I argue in my essay doesn’t pass a basic smell test in my opinion and in any case is not supported by good evidence.
2. April 2021 at 05:10
“John, Our basic policy was to twiddle our thumbs until X people were infected. Travel restrictions merely delay the date in which X were infected by a few days. Yes, they’d have some benefit, but not as much as you might assume”
By much more than you assume they would have helped. Canada imposed travel restrictions and quarantine pretty late in the game, and still saw significantly better results than North American and European countries that never did. That’s without any sort of effective Australian style contact tracing.
Travel restrictions and quarantine for incoming travelers would have saved the lives of over 100,000 Americans, even not imposing them until summer 2020. It’s not just about delaying the time of getting infected, it’s reducing the number of new social contacts for people at a time in a period of time, which directly affects the reproduction rate of disease.