Two very shaky new studies about the origin of COVID-19 appeared recently as mere preprints, not yet published in a scientific journal. Discarding the principle of "wait until peer review and journal publication," the preprints were hailed in news stories on CNN, Newsweek and the New York Times. In the media's overenthusiastic coverage of these studies, we have fresh examples of how mainstream media sources are pushovers for any wobbly scientific work that fits in with whatever narratives the mainstream prefers to peddle.
The first study is entitled "The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence." The whole idea is to make us think that COVID-19 originated in the Huanan Market in Wuhan, China because most of the 2019 and January 2020 cases originated near there. Remarkably, the paper makes no mention of the two large Chinese virus study centers in Wuhan: the Wuhan Institute of Virology, less than nine miles away from the Huanan Market, and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, less than three miles away. Both are places where a lab leak could have been the source of COVID-19.
The Yangtze river flows between the east and west parts of Wuhan, with the Huanan Market on the west side and the Wuhan Institute of Virology on the east side. Supposedly there were more COVID-19 cases reported in 2019 and January 2020 on the west side of Wuhan (where the Huanan Market was) than on the east side of Wuhan (where the Wuhan Institute of Virology was). Does this suggest that the COVID-19 virus probably originated naturally in the Huanan Market rather than through some lab leak involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology? There are several reasons it does not:
(1) The area around the Huanan Market is far more populous, and the number of old people living there is about two or three times greater than the area around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a highly populated city, a very contagious virus rapidly spreads around throughout the city. If the virus tends to cause hospitalizations many times higher among older people, then the first hospitalizations will tend to come from whatever part of the city has the most old people, regardless of where in the city the first people were infected.
(2) Any data about exactly where the first cases arose in 2019 or January 2020 is highly suspect. Reports about where the first cases arose came from the Chinese government. If COVID-19 had originated as a lab leak, we can expect that the Chinese government would have maximized the reporting of cases around the Huanan Market and minimized the reporting of cases around the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as part of an effort to lead people to think that the virus had not originated as a lab leak. In fact, such a thing might have been done even if there was no lab leak, purely to minimize public suspicions that there was a lab leak.
(3) Most of the earliest cases in Wuhan were not causally linked to the Huanan Market. Below is part of a visual published in an article in the journal Science, one entitled "Dissecting the Early COVID-19 Cases in Wuhan." In that article the green dots are identified as cases with "no link to Huanan Market."
(4) The Huanan market did not sell bats, and bats were the animals that had a virus with the closest match to COVID-19. No plausible story has yet been written as to a path of natural transmission by which COVID-19 could have come from animals to humans. A great deal of scientific effort has been spent on looking for some intermediate animal link, but none has been found.
(5) Referring to the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), page 13 of the paper confesses that "some 457 samples from 188 individual animals corresponding to 18 mammals species were screened for active" COVID-19 infection "from 'within and outside Huanan Market', and no positive SARS-CoV-2 samples were identified," and that "on the order of 80,000 samples from mammals across China were tested for SARS-CoV-2, yielding no positive findings."
In light of such facts, it is quite ridiculous for the paper authors to be claiming in their abstract that "these analyses provide dispositive [i.e. definitive] evidence for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 via the live wildlife trade and identify the Huanan market as the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic." This is just another glaring example of what goes on in countless scientific papers these days: scientists boasting in their paper abstracts or paper titles that they have demonstrated some dramatic result, when no such thing has been demonstrated. I could provide a thousand other examples as glaring as the example here.
The second paper is a very speculative affair providing nothing in the way of solid evidence. The abstract of the paper does not claim terribly much, but the lead author of the paper (an evolutionary biologist) goes on record in a CNN story as claiming the paper proves some grand result it does not at all prove. We should always question news stories quoting the authors of studies saying grandiose things about their own work. We should also always remember that the very bad habit of most science journalists is to unthinkingly and uncritically parrot whatever grandiose claims the authors of a paper may make about their own work. The second paper gives us a "just so" story, of the type that evolutionary biologists love to tell. Many such "just so" stories told by evolutionary biologists are hard-to-believe tall tales. We should not be particularly impressed by the paper's use of some genomic data, as evolutionary biologists have a long history of using fragmentary or greatly insufficient genome data to prop up their speculative flights of fancy.
When considering stories such as these, we should always ask: who are the vested interests here, and what kind of biases might they have that might have clouded or distorted their judgments or statements or data processing? It is rather clear that the Chinese government had a motive to be pushing the "natural origin of COVID-19 at the Huanan Market" story line, so that people would not suspect that scientist error at some Wuhan virology lab caused COVID-19 to emerge. It is also rather obvious that scientists outside of China had a strong motive to be pushing such a story line. If people thought that COVID-19 had arisen from a lab leak, then distrust of scientists would increase, and experimental scientists involved in gene work all over the world would be subjected to much greater scrutiny and regulations, a hassle they would prefer to avoid for their convenience.
The origin of COVID-19 remains very much an unsolved problem, and the theory of purely natural origins of the virus is still very much in doubt. In the West we do not know how COVID-19 originated, and should not pretend to know something we do not know.
Postscript: When I published the post above, I had not read an article in Nature, which states the following (consistent with my thoughts above):
"Nevertheless, some virologists say that the new evidence pointing to the Huanan market doesn’t rule out an alternative hypothesis. They say that the market could just have been the location of a massive amplifying event, in which an infected person spread the virus to many other people, rather than the site of the original spillover."
The article makes clear that the "The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence" paper discussed above relies on a speculation that "raccoon dogs" were the source of COVID-19, using the words "speculate" or "speculation" three times to refer to this wild idea. COVID-19 was not found in any such animals, and the idea that COVID-19 came from such animals is groundless guessing.
Referring to the two studies mentioned in the title of this post, and writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, physician Laura H. Khan states this:
"Two recent papers, Worobey et al. and Pekar et al., present geospacial analysis of animal stalls in the Huanan market and viral phylogenetic analysis but do not provide convincing evidence of natural spillover. The data and analyses discussed by Worobey are equally consistent with both hypotheses: (1) that SARS-CoV-2 first entered humans at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, and (2) that SARS-CoV-2 first entered humans at another location and was subsequently brought to the market and then amplified in the market by humans. The authors’ assertion that the data and analyses support only the natural spillover hypothesis is false. Gao et al. reached a conclusion opposite to the claims of Worobey et al. and Peckar et al. Gao et al. reported that there were no positive animal samples at the Huanan market. They further reported that there was no correlation between the locations of the animal sellers in the market or the locations with the highest densities of humans and the locations of the positive environmental samples in the market. Based on these findings, Gao et al suggested that the market 'acted as an amplifier,' with infections being brought into the market by humans infected elsewhere. The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a laboratory-related spillover—for example, from a laboratory-acquired infection—remains a viable possibility....Premature, false declarations of 'dispositive evidence' or “proof” does not generate public trust in science and does not protect public health."
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