[HN Gopher] Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed
___________________________________________________________________
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed
Author : ruaraidh
Score : 470 points
Date : 2021-03-22 13:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (eu.usatoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (eu.usatoday.com)
| beervirus wrote:
| Anybody who thinks it _should_ be dismissed has an unwarranted
| amount of faith in the CCP.
| midrus wrote:
| My conspiracy theory is that, if the virus intentionally or
| unintentionally escaped from that lab, and the CDC,CIA, whatever,
| etc already know this, probably everyone prefers to shut up and
| deny it, because otherwise it might lead to a war with china and
| it would be a lot worse for everyone.
| robin21 wrote:
| The only war with China is a trade war and that is only fought
| by convincing the public to endure the pain. I think everyone
| would welcome the ability to cut China out of the global supply
| chain if they could, it's just about getting the people to go
| along with it.
| airhead969 wrote:
| It seems like more Western MSM yellow journalism hating on China
| with FUD.
| duxup wrote:
| Outside of some noteworthy scummy politicians and a few
| partisan media outlets. I really haven't seen much in the way
| of MSM media pushing that theory as fact.
| airhead969 wrote:
| It doesn't matter if they're pushing this far-fetched
| hypothesis as "fact" or not, they're pushing it by
| continuously regurgitating such speculative FUD _without
| evidence._
| duxup wrote:
| Not everything reported has to be a proven fact. Theories,
| ideas, there's room for all sorts of things in life that
| aren't certain.
| airhead969 wrote:
| Conspiracy theories aren't helpful.
| duxup wrote:
| Outside noteworthy scummy politicians and a few partisan
| media outlets. I really haven't seen much in the way of
| MSM doing that.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. I've
| spent a _lot_ of time, energy, and words asking people not to
| do that in the opposite direction [1]. It applies just as much
| the other way around. Name-calling, flamebait, and
| nationalistic provocations take the internet straight to hell.
| We 're trying to avoid that fate here, or at least stave it off
| [2] a little longer.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545902.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
|
| [2]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
| airhead969 wrote:
| I'm not. I'm in the US saying "stop attacking China without
| evidence."
|
| Edit: criticize justly and specifically, not
| nationalistically. Attacking any group using stretched/thin
| arguments makes the accusers look weak.
| ryanfreeborn wrote:
| Perhaps other MSM publications. The specific article here
| talks about US accidents in high-standards labs, and posits
| that those same accidents can happen in other countries.
| It's not attacking China at all. What you're describing
| doesn't apply to the discussion in this article or this
| thread, just seems non-productive.
| [deleted]
| ekianjo wrote:
| "Assume good faith" ?
| hayst4ck wrote:
| https://project-evidence.github.io/
|
| I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling
| story.
|
| TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The
| likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
|
| My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect
| bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with
| insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
| 8note wrote:
| Based on your takeaway, I'm looking for this to convince me
| that it's more likely that it's a researcher caught it first
| than anyone else handling bats.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| There is pretty good evidence for that as well. I think
| section 9 is most relevant.
| pageandrew wrote:
| I agree that the leak was likely accidental. That said, I think
| you gloss over the fact that Gain of Function Research
| (artificial selection) was certainly taking place inside the
| Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that US intelligence has
| concluded that the WIV was engaging in classified research for
| the Chinese military, unbeknownst to the rest of the world.
|
| So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| I don't find that compelling. Our own US scientists
| specifically stated they did not see the biological markers
| of tampering, and I don't see any reason we shouldn't be
| trusting them. I think there are a lot of people who want to
| believe China is evil incarnate and things are just as black
| and white as that. I think that's a mental shortcut with easy
| emotional payout. I would encourage you to read the link.
|
| Here is a direct link to some gain of function research being
| done at the lab for anyone interested:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
|
| Relevant line in abstract:
|
| > In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the
| SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based
| pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2
| molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
| pageandrew wrote:
| I don't think China is evil incarnate, but I do know that
| it is confirmed that they have performed GOF research
| (https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-
| experiments...), that there were reports in 2018 that they
| were not following proper lab safety practices
| (https://www.businessinsider.com/us-officials-raised-
| alarms-a...), and that the Chinese military was engaged in
| secret experimentation.
|
| This is all circumstantial, of course. But, that combined
| with the fact that COVID originated in Wuhan, thousands of
| kilometers away from the bat caves of Yunnan province, yet
| in the same city as the only BSL-4 laboratory in China,
| that's hard to ignore.
| [deleted]
| koheripbal wrote:
| ...and importantly, there was specifically Coronavirus bat
| research in that specific facility.
| matwood wrote:
| > TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The
| likelihood of it being directly malicious low.
|
| And this sounds like a reasonable possibility to be explored.
| Accidents happen. Lapses in procedures happen.
|
| The problem is that early on, and still in some circles, lab
| related equates to malicious bio-weapon and/or China purposely
| attempting to destroy the world. It's important to separate the
| two, and hopefully this is a cautionary tale for all labs to
| review their policies and procedures.
| koheripbal wrote:
| > in some circles, lab related equates to malicious bio-
| weapon
|
| Well that's the problem with reducing every argument to
| absurd extremes.
|
| It's part of why modern political discourse is fundamentally
| broken.
|
| We counter discourse out of fear of what the extreme form of
| that accusation will be - not based on what the argument is
| actually saying.
| kneel wrote:
| IMO it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak. It doesn't
| matter much however since there is no evidence, and any evidence
| of such will likely be covered up.
|
| Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be
| unprecedented in the economic reparations, so much so that we'll
| likely never find the origins.
| duxup wrote:
| >Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be
| unprecedented in the economic reparations
|
| I duno if that would ever really happen. I think much like a
| lot of things, concerns about Uyghurs it would just dissolve
| into the diplomatic and economic seas.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Being culpable for a disaster on this scale would be
| unprecedented in the economic reparations
|
| True. And not just economic reparations, you can imagine
| diplomatic relations and all would be severely impacted.
| theptip wrote:
| > it's very likely to have originated in a lab leak
|
| What evidence is informing this belief? i.e. what is your model
| for assigning "P>0.5" to the probability here? For example do
| you think the SARS outbreak circa 2002 was also a lab escape?
| kneel wrote:
| You misquoted me, I said 'IMO...'
|
| I've worked in several labs, created several viruses (non-
| pathogenic) myself. People are careless, did you read the
| article?
| theptip wrote:
| Do you feel that I was misquoting you because you don't
| think of it as a belief as you prefaced it with "IMO", or
| do you take issue with me translating "very likely" to
| "P>0.5"? (Or maybe something else?)
|
| I wasn't trying to be confrontational about it, just trying
| to understand why that's your opinion. In particular I was
| curious about your "very likely", because my priors are
| that most infectious diseases are not caused by lab leaks,
| and that there's no particular evidence of a lab leak here
| (though as you say plenty of reason to believe such
| evidence would be suppressed). But it's not my field so I'm
| not strongly attached to those priors.
|
| I'd certainly agree with the article's premise that the lab
| theory should not be dismissed out of hand, but I think
| that's a different conclusion than saying "it's very likely
| to have originated in a lab leak". My takeaway from the
| article is "it's possible, but still not very likely",
| though I suppose I'd give a higher % of probability now
| than before reading the article.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| I think that's how so many conspiracy theories spread. "IMO, I
| think it's very likely that the moon landings were faked. It
| doesn't matter since there is no evidence of the fake landings
| and any evidence of such will likely be covered up, like the
| way they got scientists to pretend that there are
| retroreflectors on the moon".
|
| As long as people believe that evidence is covered up, then
| they can believe anything.
| airhead969 wrote:
| It's easier to believe in a grand conspiracy to make one seem
| special and part of a tribe than accept the banality,
| incompetence, chaos, and coincidences of reality.
| lettergram wrote:
| If I recall correctly, Fauci's org funded gain of function
| research on corona viruses.
|
| https://asiatimes.com/2020/04/why-us-outsourced-bat-virus-re...
|
| Surely they've been receiving reports on progress, if so I'm
| sure there could be a match.
|
| Similarly, I believe there were scientists in India who
| determined the capsule which deploys the virus into cells looks
| exactly the same as the HIV mechanism.
|
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Caixin/Scientists-slam-Ind...
|
| This kinda matches people testing positive for HIV in an
| Australian vaccine trial:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/world/australia/uq-corona...
| alephr wrote:
| A lot of the discussion I see on this hinges on possibility and
| not strongly believing the claim is false. Sure, this theory is
| "possible" in some sense but I rarely see anyone presenting
| concrete evidence for it and I don't think I've seen anyone who
| supports it suggest a piece of evidence that would change their
| mind on it.
|
| If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss
| it or how any evidence is being covered up the idea might not be
| that strong.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Recently from MIT Technology Review ... worth a read:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...
| Huffers2 wrote:
| If true, I think this would be the first ever case of a novel
| virus ever being developed in a lab and then accidentally
| released.
|
| If false, then it's yet another viral mutation / species cross
| over which have happened all the time throughout history.
|
| When I hear hoofbeats I think "horses" not "zebras"...
| wccrawford wrote:
| Why not? There are multiple hurricanes every single year, but I
| still hear about them. Especially the ones that might affect my
| area.
|
| But it might be more like: "Yet another hurricane cause by
| weather." Not really a story, since they all have been. The
| opposite, though, that'd be a real story: "Hurricane not caused
| by weather!"
| Huffers2 wrote:
| Sorry, I edited my comment at the same time you posted your
| comment - leading to yours to not have the proper context.
|
| (For the record I wrote something about things that happen
| frequently not being news)
| georgeglue1 wrote:
| It's obviously super hazy, but it's worth clarifying that being
| developed in the lab != originating from the lab.
|
| From what I've heard on Chinese social media, there are a bunch
| of plausible sounding theories.
|
| For a lot of jobs in China, it's expected that there's moderate
| incompetence or grift.
|
| For example, say the lab has a bunch of extra animal samples
| (mice, bats, w/e). Someone in the cleaning staff could make a
| few extra $ by selling those samples to a wholesaler at the
| local wetmarket (to be turned into dogfood, etc.); maybe they
| only meant to sell the clean samples, but got things mixed up.
| whiddershins wrote:
| If I'm walking down the street and get surprised with a punch
| in the face I assume it was intentional, even if there are many
| scenarios in which it could be accidental.
| alacombe wrote:
| Accidental or intentional is irrelevant.
| daly wrote:
| For expert opinion on this subject listen to actual virologists.
| They do a podcast about 2-3 times a week.
|
| https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/
| Graffur wrote:
| Something that has been exposed a lot during this pandemic:
| expert opinions
| hfjfktkrkf wrote:
| Ok then. Let's watch TWiV 615, where they interview Peter
| Daszak, the virologist which headed the recent WHO origin
| seeking mission in China.
|
| Listen to him talk about how easy is to modify coronaviruses in
| labs and how they are actually doing this, mixing and matching
| viruses at 29:50:
|
| > _Well, coronaviruses are pretty good... you can manipulate
| them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot what
| happens in a coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the
| sequence, you can bulid a protein, and we work with Ralph Baric
| at UNC to do this, insert into the backbone of another virus,
| and do some work in the lab, so you can get more predictive,
| when you find a sequence._
|
| https://youtu.be/IdYDL_RK--w
| ekianjo wrote:
| Oh yeah, how reliable the experts were all along during this
| pandemic. We should be so glad we had them from day 1.
| pretendscholar wrote:
| Could you summarize their arguments rather than drop a content
| bomb and run away? Its really lazy and unproductive.
| TearsInTheRain wrote:
| Their main argument in the podcast is that the scientist in the
| lab says that they were not working on this virus and "even
| with the central control of china there is no way they could
| keep that secret". That argument is not going to hold a lot of
| water with people
| is-ought wrote:
| Eh, 'trust the experts' works in most other cases.
| coliveira wrote:
| > That argument is not going to hold a lot of water with
| people
|
| Yeah, because people prefer to hold their pet conspiracy
| theories.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > "even with the central control of china there is no way
| they could keep that secret"
|
| Funny, we have thousands of people in certain countries in
| three letters organizations who can keep secrets just fine.
| jacknews wrote:
| They don't cite any evidence to refute a lab accident, and the
| 'clubby' atmosphere raises suspicion that they dismiss the
| possibility on the grounds that 'we're all professionals, free
| to say what we want, free from government coercion, etc', but
| perhaps that does not reflect reality.
| refenestrator wrote:
| There's no evidence to refute, though, besides the fact that
| the lab exists. It's pure speculation either way.
| ciupicri wrote:
| So I should listen to all podcasts?
| wolfram74 wrote:
| Podcasts run on a given domain run by domain experts are
| certainly a good step above, epistemologically speaking, than
| a lot of news source on said domain. Obviously you can't be
| 100% sure any statement about the physical world is true, so
| you know, believe what you want.
| tbenst wrote:
| This article is written by a journalist who is clearly
| knowledgeable about safety practices and mistakes in US labs, but
| does not consider the extensive knowledge we have about the
| sequence of SARS-COV2. The preponderance of evidence supports a
| natural origin of the virus.
|
| This is no way exonerates the Wuhan government from possible
| culpability--indeed government officials did deliberately
| suppress information--but this investigative opinion doesn't pass
| scientific muster. Misinformation.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
| garmaine wrote:
| I think you are confusing "lab leak" with "lab manufactured."
| karmasimida wrote:
| Why would it be more feasible this virus is leaked from the
| lab other than some wild animals from the market itself?
|
| Either can be equally believable yet impossible to prove.
| garmaine wrote:
| There are cases in Wuhan which predate the wet market
| cluster. That appears to have been a super spreading event
| but not the origin.
|
| The bats this disease come from we're not being sold in the
| market at this time. They're out of season. So already the
| theory is assuming a multi-animal hop (some other wild
| animal got in contact with a bat and got infected, then
| captured and moved a thousand kilometers to the wet market
| and killed).
|
| Meanwhile the bio lab in Wuhan received a sample of
| infectious coronavirus just months prior to the earliest
| known case. Within a few weeks of the outbreak while China
| was still downplaying the disease, the central government
| passed a rushed emergency safety rules update for these
| labs, starts pushing back on requests for access, and using
| state media to throw out a bunch of crazy theories about
| external origin.
|
| Anyone with half a brain can connect the dots.
| jounker wrote:
| It's likely that this is derived from a pangolin virus.
| Pangolins are most definitely traded at Chinese wet
| markets.
| soperj wrote:
| If it was within a few weeks of the outbreak, then it
| wasn't likely the cause. As seen in other countries, the
| # of cases takes a while to ramp up, and it wouldn't go
| from a release to a couple thousand deaths in such a
| short time span.
| 8note wrote:
| The open question is: are there cases even before those,
| and outside Wuhan?
| tbenst wrote:
| On the contrary. A leak implies that something was contained.
| Notwithstanding the complete lack of evidence for a leak--and
| one could waste a lifetime trying to disprove claims that
| have no evidence-if of natural origin, the virus was already
| infecting animals and/or people.
| notsobig wrote:
| What's your point?
|
| If a bio research lab is accidentally allowing the public
| to come in contact with anything it is studying, this is
| something we need to
|
| 1. investigate
|
| 2. identify
|
| 3. prevent
|
| Saying "it's possible this could have happened anyway" is
| not meaningful. I would prefer we identify how it _did_
| happen. If a lab leaked it, this would inform future
| discussions on what lab practices and research projects
| have acceptable risk /reward.
|
| Ignoring the possibility this leaked from a lab until you
| have bulletproof evidence is nonsensical, particularly when
| investigator access is restricted. This, more than
| anything, is the point the article is making. Lab
| containment failures have a well documented history.
| garmaine wrote:
| The lab had samples of a disease that is remarkably close
| to COVID-19: https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-
| appeared-in-chi...
| tripletao wrote:
| In roughest form, Andersen is saying "SARS-CoV-2 doesn't
| closely resemble any existing known virus, so it wasn't
| produced by genetic manipulation of existing known viruses".
|
| I think that's true, but it ignores the possibility that the
| WIV was working with new viruses with unpublished genomes. The
| WIV routinely organized expeditions to remote bat caves to
| collect samples. There's naturally some delay between sampling,
| sequencing, and publishing, no conspiracy required. For
| example, RaTG13, the closest known animal virus to SARS-CoV-2,
| was collected by the WIV in 2013 but published only after the
| start of the pandemic.
|
| The WIV had a private database of viral genomes; but they took
| it offline in September 2019, they say due to hacking attempts.
| They haven't brought it back up, and the WHO has declined to
| ask for a copy.
|
| SARS-CoV-2 certainly could be a naturally-evolved virus first
| transmitted from an animal to a non-scientist human. It could
| also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally
| released by the WIV, or a recombinant of multiple such viruses,
| or the descendant of such a virus after serial passaging.
| Nothing in Andersen's argument distinguishes any of these
| possibilities.
|
| But don't trust me; check out Marc Lipsitch's Twitter feed
| today, or David Relman's article:
|
| > Some have argued that a deliberate engineering scenario is
| unlikely because one would not have had the insight a priori to
| design the current pandemic virus (3). This argument fails to
| acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed
| ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and
| RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a
| laboratory--for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and
| spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the
| SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a
| logical next step to wonder about the properties of a
| recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246
|
| This isn't a conspiracy theory, and it's not even a fringe
| viewpoint anymore. It's just a reasonable step in investigating
| the yet-unknown origin of what could be the worst industrial
| accident in human history.
| tbenst wrote:
| Thank you for this thoughtful post! I learned something and
| would like to revise my opinion. Also came across this
| excellent article that covers some of the scientific
| discussion: https://undark.org/2021/03/17/lab-leak-science-
| lost-in-polit....
|
| I now think the lab leak hypothesis is worth considering, and
| regret labeling as a conspiracy theory, although I maintain
| the characterization that the lab leak hypothesis is
| frequently found alongside other conspiracy theories.
|
| I also would maintain that the current consensus is that
| SARS-COV-2 came from natural spillover, and the leak
| hypothesis is a minority opinion, but one held by credible
| scientists with well-thought arguments and therefore worth
| considering. I wish the original article would cite this
| work.
| SpaceRaccoon wrote:
| You are indeed misunderstanding the point.
|
| Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't
| prohibit it from leaking from a lab.
| tbenst wrote:
| The author is irresponsibility propagating a conspiracy
| theory and elevating its status in the public's mind.
|
| I'm a bioscientist. It's frustrating to respond with evidence
| and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply
| disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice
| prevails over reason.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7
| whiddershins wrote:
| I, like many others, would truly like to be pointed to
| resources that can help me understand what would lead bio
| scientists to this conclusion.
|
| Make no mistake, I am super well aware that I lack all the
| grounding to understand the explanation.
|
| But can you point me in the right direction? The context
| surrounding what you are saying must be learnable. At least
| to some level.
| tbenst wrote:
| Your request is admirable! Here's how I go about
| gathering info:
|
| Google "covid 19 origin evidence", look for academic
| publications or scientific journalism that is well-cited
| & from reputable sources, eg
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5
| [2] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-05-09/was-
| the-cor... [3] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-
| perspective/2020/05/scientis... [4] https://www.nationalg
| eographic.com/science/article/coronavir...
|
| We really need to do better with scientific
| communication. As scientists we are evaluated too much on
| our communication with other scientists (ie paper
| publishing), while communication with the public is not
| weighed much for career advancement. I wish this
| structural problem would be discussed more so it can be
| addressed.
|
| But not all of this is on the scientists. The public must
| do better. We can't just blindly trust what a senator
| says on Fox News for political expedience, or "trust our
| gut".
| drocer88 wrote:
| There are other results, too. For instance ... https://on
| linelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.26478
| "However, the SARS-CoV-2 host tropism/adaptation pattern
| has significant discrepancies compared with other CoVs,
| raising questions concerning the proximal origin of SARS-
| CoV-2. The flat and nonsunken surface of the sialic acid-
| binding domain of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (S protein)
| conflicts with the general adaptation and survival
| pattern observed for all other CoV" .
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-
| esca... : "There are indeed many unexplained features of
| this virus that are hard if not impossible to explain
| based on a completely natural origin." Richard Ebright, a
| molecular biologist at Rutgers University, wrote that
| he'd been concerned for some years about the Wuhan
| laboratory and about the work being done there to create
| "chimeric" (i.e., hybrid) SARS-related bat coronaviruses
| "with enhanced human infectivity." Ebright said, "In this
| context, the news of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan *
| _screamed*_ lab release."
|
| I couldn't find anything on Fox News.
| SpaceRaccoon wrote:
| Could you explain why evidence that the virus evolved
| naturally contradicts the lab-leak theory? I'm all ears and
| waiting to hear the reasoning. As others have pointed out,
| lab-leak does not imply artificially developed.
|
| > I'm a bioscientist.
|
| And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it
| is a coincidence that:
|
| - the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan
|
| - genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical
| to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in
| Rhinolophus affinis
|
| - The bats carrying CoV ZC45 were originally found in
| Yunnan or Zhejiang province, both of which are more than
| 900 kilometers away Wuhan
|
| - According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31
| residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source
| in the city, and no bat was traded in the market
|
| - Wuhan is home to two laboratories conducting research on
| bat coronavirus
|
| - Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan
| Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC). WHCDC
| hosted animals in laboratories for research purposes. In
| one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus
| affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats
| were captured in Zhejiang province
|
| - one of the researchers described that he was once by
| attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin.
| In another accident, bats peed on him. He was once thrilled
| for capturing a bat carrying a live tick
|
| Not conclusive by any means, but I have yet to hear
| reasoning by which we should exclude the lab-leak theory,
| besides that the virus evolved naturally, which does not
| contradict the lab-leak theory whatsoever.
|
| Also, from your article:
|
| > As a team of researchers from the WHO
|
| This WHO? [0][1] Doesn't instill much confidence in me, to
| be sure.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
|
| [1] https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-
| outbreak/...
| tbenst wrote:
| No, it is not a coincidence.
|
| There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats
| carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past
| epidemics. Ergo, there's an institute for virology in
| Wuhan.
|
| Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from
| Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal
| relationship established.
| SpaceRaccoon wrote:
| > There are a lot of bats in Wuhan.
|
| Except everything I've read indicates the bats carrying
| the most closely related virus are not in Wuhan, not even
| close:
|
| > The SARS-CoV-2 virus is most closely related to
| coronaviruses found in certain populations of horseshoe
| bats that live about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away
| in Yunnan province, China. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-wuhan-lab-
| complicate...
|
| So why would the virus so strongly appear to originate in
| Wuhan, and not in another city, closer to the bats'
| native regions? Appears quite statically unlikely.
| tbenst wrote:
| What you're saying is all possible. But there's no
| evidence to support leak from a lab, and there is a lot
| of evidence supporting the natural spillover hypothesis.
| As such, the latter interpretation is more likely to be
| correct.
|
| For example, there were cases as early as December 2019
| that did not come from Wuhan. Wuhan was no doubt a key
| early hotspot.
|
| https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-
| market...
|
| There has been rigorous scholarship done on this
| question. I recommend reading it given your interest in
| the subject.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| The article that you linked, if anything, offers more
| support for a lab leak.
|
| Chiefly, it says that there is evidence that not only did
| the virus NOT originate from an animal source in the
| seafood market, but they suggest that Chinese officials
| knew that it did NOT originate in the Market, yet they
| issued statements saying that it did anyway.
| caminante wrote:
| _> For example, there were cases as early as December
| 2019 that did not come from Wuhan._
|
| No.
|
| This isn't deducible from the article YOU linked!
|
| Not having a link to the seafood marketplace in Wuhan !=
| originating from outside Wuhan.
|
| _> The paper, written by a large group of Chinese
| researchers _
|
| _> Their data also show that, in total, 13 of the 41
| cases had no link to the marketplace._
|
| _> the virus possibly spread silently between people in
| Wuhan--and perhaps elsewhere--before the cluster of cases
| from the city's now-infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale
| Market was discovered in late December._
| SpaceRaccoon wrote:
| Thanks for the link.
|
| I read the article, but it only states that the first
| case from December was not linked to the seafood market
| ("wet market"), but not that it occurred outside of
| Wuhan. Did I misread something?
|
| By the way, early on I believed that the virus jumped to
| humans at the seafood market, which was the prevailing
| theory at the time, it seemed. But as evidence like the
| above article came out - noting that many early cases had
| no link to the seafood market, while still being in Wuhan
| - it raised suspicions, and lent credence to the lab-leak
| theory.
|
| > There has been rigorous scholarship done on this
| question. I recommend reading it given your interest in
| the subject.
|
| I do, but I'm not convinced. A lot of reporting either
| relies on appeal to authority ("I'm a PhD, and this
| couldn't possibly happen, so don't question it"), or is
| purposely obtuse, confusing lab-leak with lab-
| synthesized, and by dodging the point, hardly alleviates
| suspicion.
|
| You must understandably excuse me for being a sceptic. I
| started wearing masks back in February or March, against
| the advice of the CDC who was telling me masks increase
| the rate of spread. At the same time I believed that
| borders should be closed to limit the rate of spread,
| while the WHO was telling me that closing borders would
| do no such thing.
|
| So I am not going to believe something just because an
| expert tells me to, nor do I find it at all scientific to
| dismiss politically inconvenient possibilities.
| caminante wrote:
| The study also calls into question information reported
| by Chinese authorities.
|
| _> The Lancet paper's data also raise questions about
| the accuracy of the initial information China provided,
| Lucey says._
|
| If anything, this source strengthens the possibility of
| lab leak hypothesis.
| drran wrote:
| Virus is absent in blood or urine.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Viruses behave very differently in different species. For
| example, I think ebola can be airborne in pigs because it
| binds to receptors in pig lung cells and is more of a
| respiratory disease for them. It doesn't have a great
| affinity to human lung cells however so it's NOT airborne
| in humans.
| SpaceRaccoon wrote:
| I'm not suggesting that either fluid was the pathway by
| which the virus jumped to humans, nor do I know how it
| happened, only that evidence suggests researchers
| interact closely with the animals.
|
| And I am not ready to dismiss the theory but I am always
| open to hearing evidence to exclude the theory.
| ineptech wrote:
| > And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is
| that it is a coincidence that...
|
| Then you ought to know that seeing more circumstantial
| evidence for A than B does _not_ imply that A is more
| likely. What would imply that A is more likely is if you
| find more circumstantial evidence for A than whatever
| amount you would expect to find if A didn 't happen.
|
| That's why good Bayesians place so little weight on
| circumstantial evidence: because it's difficult or
| impossible to predict the expected amount of
| circumstantial evidence for something that didn't happen.
| It would involve answering questions like, "When a novel
| coronavirus moves from the animal population to humans
| _without_ a lab accident, what are the odds that it will
| happen within X miles of a lab studying such viruses? "
| That's pretty difficult to answer, given that we don't
| know a lot about how or why that happens yet.
|
| And it shouldn't even need to be said that this all goes
| double when the thing being argued over is political
| (because, even if you personally are unbiased, the people
| gathering and publishing the evidence you rely on may not
| be) and treble when the evidence is technical and outside
| your area of expertise.
| polartx wrote:
| Archiving this before it's removed for 'elevating an idea
| to the public mind'
| [deleted]
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Empirically, HN collectively gets things like this right
| much more often than not. It's been right about the coming
| pandemic as early as beginning of Feb, it's been right
| about masks when it was dismissed by CDC, and lab leak
| hypothesis has been dismissed as crank the whole time while
| building more and more of an implausible case that it
| wasn't lab-leaked. HN has been coming around to that too.
| Of course, nothing is conclusive yet but you're actually
| furthering the damages caused by misinformation by grouping
| this into it. If lab leak comes to fruition, there's just
| going to be further outrage against traditional authority
| sources of info that gets things wrong, railing against
| people like you who called their correct hypothesis
| misinformation.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| ive been here for a decade... its my opinion that HN very
| much does NOT get things like this right more often than
| not. its very hard to even guage what the hn opinion is
| to begin with
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Can you explain why you are calling a plausible theory a
| "conspiracy theory" when it is something that indeed has
| happened in world history more than once?
| rpsw wrote:
| What is your opinion the open letter, as mentioned in the
| article: https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/COVID
| %20OPEN%20...
|
| Would you say the signatories are being irresponsible or
| are not qualified to suggest the lab-leak theory is worth
| investigating?
| throwawaysea wrote:
| The virus can be of a natural origin and still be leaked from a
| lab. Virology labs study copies of viruses regularly through
| various techniques
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research).
| People keep conflating the possibility of an _engineered_ virus
| with the possibility of a lab leak. They don 't have to go
| together.
|
| Furthermore, the WHO's own team admitted recently that they
| were simply not equipped to do any kind of forensic
| investigation of the lab
| (https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/world-health-
| organizat...):
|
| > [Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales
| Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO
| team] says that the team didn't see anything during its visits
| to suggest a lab accident. "Now, whether we were shown
| everything? You can never know. The group wasn't designed to go
| and do a forensic examination of lab practice."
|
| Even if they were appropriately equipped for such an
| investigation, what's the use when China had blocked their
| visits until a year later, when they've had ample time to cover
| any evidence. The whole situation is highly suspicious, from
| the initial suppression of news reports of the virus, to
| delaying international lab visits, to the deletion of studies
| from that Wuhan lab
| (https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/13701168/covid-cover-up-
| china-...).
| synergy20 wrote:
| I recall China passed an urgent law at lightening speed to
| enforce safe practice in the bio-virus-labs across the nation a
| few weeks after the outbreak. It might tell you something.
|
| Also it refused fiercely to let foreign experts in to
| investigate, which is also hard to explain other than something
| MUST be hidden at all costs.
| esja wrote:
| They also sent a Major General from the PLA to take over the
| lab. She since led the team which developed the Chinese
| vaccine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Wei_(medical_scientist)
| notsobig wrote:
| "urgent law at lightning speed" is unnecessary and extreme
| bias. It might tell me something if you included a source.
|
| A rational actor would take the opportunity to do this
| regardless of whether or not the source was known at the
| time. If it were even a possibility, you would hope they
| would use the outbreak as a reminder to take containment
| practices as seriously as possible.
|
| Whether or not to allow foreign investigators is a political
| decision. Maybe they calculated it would appear as an
| admission of guilt or incompetence.
| polartx wrote:
| >A rational actor...
|
| Let's remember this is China we're talking about. Before
| you hand wave that away, consider the emphasis that China
| places on keeping-up-appearances at practically any cost
| notsobig wrote:
| Honestly this is not relevant. My comment was not "what i
| think happened", it was "your argument is tilted crap".
| The action allegedly taken is not evidence of guilt, is
| all I was saying.
| tomp wrote:
| > Misinformation.
|
| from the article you linked to:
|
| > Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory
| construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.
|
| _You 're_ the one spreading FUD, intentionally misinterpreting
| the original article and making up a fake argument that "lab
| leak" hypothesis somehow contradicts "natural origin" and
| implies that the virus was "designed". (If I understand the
| article correctly, "purposefully manipulated" means
| "genetically manipulated", not "gain of function".) Flagged.
| tbenst wrote:
| If you're open hearing new information and revising your
| position, please consider listening to the podcast from
| Nature that I linked to in another comment. It's not
| controversial nor misleading to say that the scientific
| community views the "lab leak" hypothesis as a conspiracy
| theory. The main segment starts around 6:30.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7
| mancerayder wrote:
| How soon before stuff like this is marked as misinformation if it
| isn't coming from established media outlets? You know, dangerous
| conspiracy theories, and all that. Real world consequences, etc.
| and so forth.
| draw_down wrote:
| Yes, this is my issue as well. If you contradict the experts,
| you're a crackpot... but then a couple months later the experts
| start to say the things the crackpots had been saying... and
| then it's acceptable.
| wallawe wrote:
| Are you saying an opinion piece stating that we should leave
| open the possibility of a leak is misinformation? That doesn't
| make any sense.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Not OP, but I'm assuming he was arguing that, given that the
| major social media platforms have said they will remove any
| Covid information that is misleading, would they even allow
| posts like this "suggesting the possibility of a Wuhan lab
| leak is plausible".
|
| Note Facebook has previously explicitly banned posts "falsely
| claiming the virus is man-made". Source:
| https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965390755/facebook-widens-
| ban...
| bosswipe wrote:
| From FB's policy
| https://www.facebook.com/help/230764881494641
| " Claims that it was created by an individual, government,
| or country Excluding claims that it was
| studied in, came from, or leaked from a lab without
| specifically calling it man-made"
|
| So discussing possibility of a lab leak is not a problem,
| it's the deliberate bioweapon aspect that they're banning.
| "The goal of this policy is to remove common viral hoaxes
| that have been repeatedly debunked by independent fact-
| checkers."
| mancerayder wrote:
| How are these Fact Checkers to decide on a complicated
| and political question like a Wuhan lab leak hypothesis?
| They have a claim to truth, based on what credentials or
| mechanisms, that the rest of us don't have access to?
| polartx wrote:
| https://youtu.be/l7o4A16QCxE
|
| Hidden camera investigation of Facebook moderators (ie
| fact checkers)
| ttt0 wrote:
| > So discussing possibility of a lab leak is not a
| problem, it's the deliberate bioweapon aspect that
| they're banning.
|
| And the virus being man-made is not a possibility?
|
| https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-
| debat...
| mancerayder wrote:
| That's exactly it. They're not trying to crack down on
| misinformation, they're just trying to create a monopoly
| wherein established outlets are able to filter what's True
| and grey out what is False or Misleading.
| ttt0 wrote:
| They're fact-checking goddamn memes. Recently they "fact-
| checked" a meme with Joker on it and text "The truth will
| set you free. Except on Facebook, where it will get you a
| 30 day ban", and called it "missing context". Now the
| entire fanpage is gone.
| bedhead wrote:
| I guess you haven't been paying attention to what's happening
| with tech companies who get to control types of media.
| mancerayder wrote:
| No, I was echoing the mainstream media and many articles -
| including on this very site - pushing and wishing and
| demanding a crackdown on misinformation. And I sarcastically
| asked the crowd whether this article means only mainstream
| media outlets are allowed, permitted, to suggest
| conspiracies.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| It will be interesting if the cause of the pandemic can be pinned
| down to specific time, place and person
| woodruffw wrote:
| My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US,
| despite its world-class virology and disease study labs,
| regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to
| situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this
| is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect
| countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar
| lapses.
|
| That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a subsequent question:
| if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess the
| capacity for serious mistakes, why _don 't_ we see more regular
| outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs? In other
| words, what makes COVID _special_? I didn 't find a satisfactory
| answer to the latter question in the article.
|
| It's my (uninformed, uneducated) opinion that the severity of the
| author's claims don't correspond to the reality of the last few
| national and international disease crises (AIDS, Ebola, Zika,
| COVID). Which isn't to say that we should absolutely dismiss the
| possibility that COVID originated in a lab, only that claims that
| it did amount to currently unsubstantiated claims about COVID's
| special status among other recent pandemics.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Covid is special because it's highly contagious and has delayed
| symptoms.
|
| However in my opinion, chinese governments (esp. lower levels)
| like to lower the severity of any issue / risks and they like
| to repress / solve the issue with local power until it is
| solved or gets too big. The central gov that like to hide
| wrongdoings aren't helping either.
|
| In case of covid, they either underrate the severity or tried
| to suppress the outbreak locally, which they failed and it
| already spread too wide enough to be contained.
|
| If covid outbreak happened in europe or us, I believe it'll
| spread almost the same, albeit slower and you'll knew faster
| since it'll be in news faster.
| esja wrote:
| In general labs are not both a) bad at safety, and also b)
| doing gain of function research to make dangerous viruses more
| infectious to humans. The latter has been banned a few times
| due to the risk (see below). Both A and B were happening in
| Wuhan.
|
| "In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled
| pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
| the NIH announced that it would stop funding gain-of-function
| research into certain viruses -- including influenza, severe
| acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory
| syndrome (MERS) -- that have the potential to unleash a
| pandemic or epidemic if they escaped from the lab. Some
| researchers said the broad ban threatened necessary flu-
| surveillance and vaccine research."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00210-5
|
| p.s. The US NIH did ultimately stop funding that research
| locally, but continued funding it in Wuhan. Including the exact
| type of virus we're dealing with now.
| lamontcg wrote:
| The biggest difference between all of those and this virus is
| that those were leaks of already-known viruses. SARS-CoV-2
| wasn't known to exist before 2019 and there's no known
| precursor virus. There's a somewhat closely related virus that
| infected the miners in Yunnan but it was only 96% similar.
| There's nothing at all in this article on how SARS-CoV-2 was
| discovered or created.
|
| The problem I have is that China isn't interested in
| investigating the start of the pandemic. They've thrown away
| their wastewater samples, there's some evidence WHO found of
| SARS-CoV-2 spreading locally prior to December 2019, but no
| backtesting of any samples. Nobody seems to be looking at the
| bats in Hubei for sarbecoviruses.
|
| By blocking study of the zoonotic origin of the pandemic, they
| can use the theory it was imported in food for domestic
| propaganda. For external propaganda they're happy to have
| conspiracy theories flying about this lab leak theory creating
| a "firehose of falsehoods" and distractions. They can rely on
| American scientists to get engaged with the conspiracy theory
| and debunk it, wasting their efforts and then they can use that
| also for domestic propaganda.
|
| Meanwhile nobody gets fucking outraged that China isn't
| properly investigating the origin of the virus and isn't
| aggressively looking at the bats in Hubei and any animal farms
| in the surrounding area. My suspicion is that animal farms
| (like minks) functioned as a bioreactor that had many
| opportunities to spillover from bats and then the close contact
| allowed it to spread well and mutate to optimize it for a more
| human-like ACE2 receptor, then the mink contact with humans
| allowed multiple spillover events until it started to spread
| epidemically in humans.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| >The problem I have is that China isn't interested in
| investigating the start of the pandemic.
|
| Why should they be interested? We know how SARS type viruses
| can spread to humans, we know what other species are
| vulnerable, and we know what things make it more or less
| likely. A new outbreak was not a surprising result. What
| benefit is there to aggressively investigating the exact
| transmission method?
|
| If your mink idea was found to be accurate, would you
| advocate closing mink farms? It being the source this time
| doesn't make it likely to cause the next transferrable virus.
| throwaway53453 wrote:
| I'd argue China needs to engage in proper sanitation and
| stop treating citizens as disposable.
| dang wrote:
| Please do not post nationalistic flamebait to HN. It
| leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| While I have you: could you please stop creating accounts
| for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do
| that. This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to
| be a community, users need some identity for other users
| to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames
| and no community, and that would be a different kind of
| forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=community%20identity
| %20by:dang...
| kittiepryde wrote:
| Science is about collecting data, verifying, collecting
| more, in a repeating never ending cycle. Stopping science
| (especially in areas of active present day research) in the
| belief that we know and are done with it, just isn't sound
| logic. Viruses are not yet solved.
| [deleted]
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| If this Wuhan lab theory is correct, I think the wet markets
| play a huge role in the outbreak. They place a huge number of
| diverse, weakened, living animal in a relatively confined area.
| This seems to give an ideal breeding ground for a leaked virus
| - which perhaps can be incubated in a host species found at the
| wet market. Either the animals are in too poor of condition to
| notice the infection or they're a natural reservoir - eliciting
| no symptoms.
|
| My understanding is most other countries don't have wet markets
| like China does. Even if a virus escapes, it may not have
| access to the hosts it needs truly become problematic.
| orblivion wrote:
| The hypothesis is (or maybe this part is established fact?)
| that this lab was conducting Gain of Function research:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research
|
| It's purposely evolving diseases to spread faster or be more
| dangerous, for the sake of research. As I understand, it's at
| least a bit controversial. So maybe there's not as much of it
| going on as other research? If so, there probably wouldn't be
| as much opportunity for it to escape. But now that it has (per
| the hypothesis), it's ready to be very contagious right out of
| the gate. Thus, pandemic.
| 2-tpg wrote:
| Established fact. Biowarfare is often coated as "defense": we
| need to develop vaccines for future viruses or engineered
| pathogens. The offense is top secret.
|
| SARS-COV are classed Category C pathogen by CDC, in line with
| Hanta virus. SARS-COV is documented as a viable bioweapon,
| precisely for the things we have seen in the last year.
|
| The hypothesis is that this lab (and labs in Iran, China and
| Iran share biowarfare research) was conducting gene-targeted
| coronavirus research. Using proxy DNA-testing companies
| serving Western populace to get their data. A good weaponized
| coronavirus would have an extremely high R. It would look
| similar to the flu in the first stages. Then at a later stage
| (after two weeks) it would deliver a "payload" in the brains
| of the targeted genes, stopping breathing or causing
| haemorrhage. The non-targeted races would just have a flu and
| contribute to the spread. Other engineered viruses focus on
| plausible deniability, straining the hospitals with patients
| with vague symptoms, hard enough to visit the hospital and
| contribute to the strain on public services, soft enough not
| to actually kill them. It would throw the targeted country
| into chaos and unprepared for a war.
| medymed wrote:
| Other viruses do escape the lab sometimes. The first SARS virus
| escaped the lab more than once.
|
| https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
| woodruffw wrote:
| I'm not claiming that they don't! The article has multiple
| examples of viruses escaping either individual containment or
| the lab outright.
|
| What I'm claiming is that the _volume_ of attributed escapes
| indicates that the average escape has relatively local
| consequences. In other words: historically, when _everything_
| goes wrong, it hasn 't resulted in a global pandemic. What,
| then, made or makes COVID special?
|
| Maybe the answer is raw numbers, and that it was bound to
| happen eventually. But "one of these incidents was bound to
| cause a global pandemic" is the _exact_ same reasoning as the
| (original, still mainstream?) "wet market" theory. What I'd
| personally like to know is why I should believe one over the
| other, apart from human propensity to believe conspiratorial
| claims.
| koheripbal wrote:
| COVID-19 is special because it doesn't cause severe illness
| in most people. SARS killed a far far higher percentage of
| people it came in contact with, and made 100% of them sick,
| so it was much more easily detected, and therefore
| contained.
| rcpt wrote:
| Right. The last case of smallpox was from a lab leak but
| people knew better than to fuck around with that.
|
| Covid is asymptomatic and mild enough in enough people
| that masks get political
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Both in China no less.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The difference is easy. It's an aerosol. Known leaks from
| biological weapons programs are mostly things like anthrax.
|
| That also makes the biological warfare scenario less likely --
| armies like to control where the bomb goes.
|
| The other factor to discount this conjecture is that if you
| hear about covid as a biological weapon, it's less likely to be
| true as it would potentially expose research in other places.
| If China is doing this, the US, Russia and others are too.
| varjag wrote:
| Lab outbreaks with numerous civilian fatalities are not
| unprecedented:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
|
| The official cover-up initially was blaming the outbreak on
| contaminated meat from a wet market.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| COVID hits the sweet spot of infectiousness, asymptomatic
| spread, incubation time, and low mortality. I would expect the
| R of Ebola to be pretty low in developed countries. People wash
| their hands more often when every place you go to has running
| water, and if you show Ebola symptoms, you're going to the
| hospital, and if it's a hospital with a city that has a BSL4
| lab, there isn't going to be an outbreak - someone will
| recognize what it is, and you'll be in an isolation unit in no
| time and your contacts will be quarantined.
|
| I would expect such a case to make the headlines, but it's
| quite possible it would be quietly swept under the carpet. How
| well known was Reston back when it happened? If that didn't
| make the news, would a lab-originated outbreak?
|
| With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure out
| of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a
| pandemic.
|
| With a low-probability high-impact event like a global
| pandemic, near misses are the only indicator you have until the
| one time it does go catastrophically wrong.
| Pyramus wrote:
| Not disagreeing with your general point that SARS-CoV-2 is an
| interesting mix of infectiousness and low mortality.
|
| From what I've read Ebola has killed many healthcare
| professionals because they infected themselves when disposing
| off PPE. As a result a disproportionally large portion of
| deaths were healthcare workers.
|
| > With COVID, a worker could get infected, hide the exposure
| out of fear/shame, never show any symptoms... and yet start a
| pandemic.
|
| In many countries workers are actually incentivised to come
| to work sick and infect others.
| cnasc wrote:
| The armies of statisticians and (human) computers working for
| the war department found that most munitions fired off don't
| hit people. One figure often used is 25,000 bullets per
| casualty (where casualty does not imply killed). How many
| disease bullets have been accidentally fired since we've had
| disease study labs?
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit
| when the carrier is asymptomatic. That could be a credible
| reason why a potential lab leak went unnoticed for long enough
| to begin uncontrolled community spread.
| mrfusion wrote:
| CNN sold us on asymptomatic spread but it's actually highly
| unlikely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I personally know people who went to a party and got sick
| from an asymptomatic person.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can
| transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic.
|
| Is this actually true? It is certainly not true for HIV, and
| of course is not relevant to diseases like Zika that are
| transmitted by mosquitos.
|
| Edit: I found the answer to my own question:
| https://www.kff.org/infographic/ebola-characteristics-and-
| co... (see second bullet point). Given that this lists Hep C,
| HIV, Influenza, Malaria, Polio, and Tuberculosis as possible
| to transmit while asymptomatic, I'd say "COVID-19 is one of
| the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier
| is asymptomatic." is most definitely false.
| tasssko wrote:
| Why is Malaria in the list?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| As always, it is not a 1-0 situation, but a question of
| degree.
|
| You can catch flu from an asymptomatic person, but Covid
| has a much higher reproduction factor. During the winter
| lockdown in England, regular flu was completely eradicated
| - literally not a single case was detected in entire
| England [0]. At the same time, Covid was still spreading
| happily. The measures that stopped flu in its tracks only
| slightly inconvenienced SARS-Cov-2.
|
| Covid is simply too good at spreading, compared to other
| similar diseases.
|
| (As an analogy: I can swim, Michael Phelps can swim, we can
| both call ourselves swimmers, but we are not really
| comparable.)
|
| [0]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/flu-cases-
| covid-en...
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| I can clarify it: COVID-19 is just about the only serious
| respiratory disease that undergoes rapid exponential spread
| and is transmissible while asymptomatic. That's a lot of
| qualifiers, but it makes for a uniquely scary pandemic
| threat.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _if these lapses are so common and so many countries possess
| the capacity for serious mistakes, why don 't we see more
| regular outbreaks (if not full-blown pandemics) caused by labs?
| In other words, what makes COVID special?_
|
| Perhaps it is not special. One might as well ask what was
| special about a coin that lands heads three times in a row in
| its first three flips.
| 6_3_1 wrote:
| the elephant in the room that became too controversial to
| question. Solid post
| traveler01 wrote:
| It's very possible and shouldn't be dismissed at all. But we will
| never know since the CCP has already covered its tracks (not
| saying it was on purpose, but a clearly an accident covered by
| the CCP).
| jtdev wrote:
| It seems that the CCP actually very deliberately covered tracks
| here... nothing accidental about it.
| jsnk wrote:
| Mainstream media shouting "discredited", "already debunked!",
| "fringe", "conspiracy theory", "xenophobic" in unison last time
| Tom Cotton brought this up was a sign for me that there is
| actually something to investigate here.
|
| - https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84
|
| - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
|
| - https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/
|
| - https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeat...
|
| - https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senat...
|
| - https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavir...
|
| - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_...
|
| - https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theori...
| musicale wrote:
| Most of the media coverage and consensus, from the Washington
| Post to Nature, seems to be that:
|
| - the lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science
|
| - the WHO investigation put the final nails in the coffin of this
| theory
|
| - therefore, lab escape continues to be a fringe conspiracy
| theory at best
|
| - coverage of the lab escape theory is politically motivated
| rather than scientifically motivated
|
| - continued coverage is largely a combination of irresponsible
| journalism, disinformation and anti-China political propaganda
|
| Does the USA Today article indicate a shift in this perspective,
| or is it just an outlier? Has something changed, for example new
| information coming to light?
| geoduck14 wrote:
| The WHO investigation DID NOT eliminate this theory. From what
| I remember, while the WHO was investigating, one member said
| "it didn't come from a lab". Then when everyone returned to
| their home country, some members suggested that it was possible
| - and I don't think their official report opined on it coming
| from a lab.
| Klinky wrote:
| No, nothing has really changed. It's an opinion article that's
| basically saying since lab accidents happened elsewhere, a lab
| accident _could_ have happened in Wuhan. No smoking gun here.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| > The lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science
|
| This is absolutely not true. Lab invented was debunked, lab
| escaped was not.
|
| Have a read: https://project-evidence.github.io/
| crx07 wrote:
| This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day
| 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete
| accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus
| coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab
| that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The
| denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to
| get real and own up to what happened and figure out how to stop
| it from happening again. This has nothing to do with the PRC or
| anyone or anywhere else, it could have happened at any biological
| facility in the world and will eventually happen again somewhere
| unless scientific honesty and cooler heads prevail.
| asdff wrote:
| I'm not sure that this virus even behaves in this way where a
| BSL-4 worker could become infected. What we know now is that
| you need a concentration of virus particles over time in order
| to come down with the disease (in other words, you are most
| likely to catch it drinking in your friends living room for 4
| hours with an infected person, than in a grocery store where an
| infected person might cough on you in line but there is no long
| term exposure). I can't imagine where there is a situation in a
| lab environment where you would have the equivalent of an
| infected person drinking beer with you for hours in terms of
| exposure. Even a rip in your PPE wouldn't expose you to very
| much particulate compared with an infected person spitting in
| your face conversationally for hours.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| That's a good point. I have a hard time as well believing
| anyone who was even coming close to following BSL-4 protocols
| would get infected with this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_leve.
| ..
| [deleted]
| Zenst wrote:
| I've done security audits and related consulting work upon
| research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was -
| extremist animal activists.
|
| Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed)
| that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019.
|
| Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at
| that time involving Hong Kong.
|
| I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweeping
| things under carpets.
|
| So I could speculate how things played out in a way that fits
| events, but without any smoking gun - it would be just
| speculation and joining dots that may or may not of been there.
|
| Though even if it was something along the lines of what I'm
| thinking happened (animal activists with HK connections being
| politically motivated/manipulated and possibly no idea what
| type of lab it was beyond they may be hurting animals), the lab
| was researching virus's from the wild - seeing how they mutate
| and progress in an effort to see what lays ahead.
|
| So lab event or no lab event - this virus was already in
| existence in some form and was not a case of if, but when.
|
| One thing I do know, it sure did shine a spotlight upon how
| connected the World is and also how fragile many supply lines
| are.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Molecular dating studies place a hard limit on index cases at
| October 2019. Anything earlier and the virus should have
| mutated more than it has.
|
| Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in
| summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-
| CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too
| early for our timeline.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| I'm also waiting for people to admit that the dubious ban of
| Zero Hedge from Twitter (later reinstated) for bringing up this
| theory and "doxxing" the lab head was all made in bad faith (ht
| tps://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/01/twitter...).
| It's crazy how words like "doxxing" can lose all coherent
| meaning and be used to describe this blog post, where they
| simply posted the publicly listed information of the public
| face of the lab, fully visible from the Wuhan lab's own
| website. This authoritarian act of censorship and the biased
| news media coverage that followed led to further censorship,
| where discussions exploring the possibility of accidental lab
| leaks were banned on places like Medium or other social media.
| This is why free speech matters as a fundamental principle and
| this is why we must hold all tech platforms accountable to
| protect free speech.
| colllectorof wrote:
| Look, dude, _leading experts_ have looked at this claim and
| said there is nearly zero chance this has was a lab leak:
|
| https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...
|
| I mean, yeah, five out of 6 cited experts have ties to
| EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn has funding ties to one of
| the two virology labs in Wuhan, but that's, like, just a
| coincidence. If it wasn't, I'm sure NPR would mention it.
|
| And then Peter Daszak himself went to Wuhan with WHO team to
| investigate and didn't find anything conclusive. Peter fucking
| Daszak. You're not going to tell me that someone who was
| interviewed and cited on this subject by NPR, CNN, CBS, Slate,
| Democracy Now, Washing Post and The Guardian could be full of
| shit, right?
|
| /s
| xdavidliu wrote:
| I have no strong opinions on this matter, but I'm having
| difficulty understanding the sarcasm here. Can someone
| translate for me? Is the un-sarcastic version of parent's
| argument that most of the claims against this being a leak
| were put forth by a single organization, EcoHealth Alliance,
| which has an agenda for convincing people that this is not a
| leak?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| I'm with you, the parent's sarcasm is really malformed.
| They're claiming that EcoHealth has conflicts of interests
| that led them to disavow the WIV lab theory.
| esja wrote:
| Are you saying EcoHealth/Daszak do not have material
| conflicts of interest in this matter? On what basis?
| xdavidliu wrote:
| It doesn't seem to me like parent is disputing the
| factual accuracy of the argument, but rather saying that
| the sarcasm was not well constructed (possibly because of
| the multiple negatives, which require a certain amount of
| gymnastics to understand), and is thus not as effective
| as it could be.
| [deleted]
| hfjfktkrkf wrote:
| > _EcoHealth Alliance, which has an agenda for convincing
| people that this is not a leak?_
|
| Exactly that. The first paper which discredited the lab
| leak theory published in The Lancet early last year by a
| number of scientists was later found out to have been
| organized behind the scenes by EcoHealth, which also asked
| for it's name not to appear on the paper.
|
| https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/ecohealth-
| allian...
| esja wrote:
| You're also forgetting that these people are _scientists_.
| Scientists only look at the facts and are completely unbiased
| - they aren 't like normal humans, who might be worried about
| their entire livelihoods being cancelled (or worse) if the
| world realises their research is too dangerous to exist. And
| scientists who work for political organisations are the most
| unbiased of all. /s
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| "Look, dude," RNA mutates due to many environmental factors.
| It's why living organisms typically now use DNA and only
| short-term usage of RNA for copying purposes, certainly not
| as the primary data store.
|
| RNA mutations mimicking proteins are precisely how a non-
| living entity can, like a bike-thief trying combinations
| randomly, unlock the lipid or protein sheaths on animal cells
| and gain direct access to the inputs of a genetic
| reproduction machine inside the cell.
|
| So, aside from the fact that these folks only have some
| circumstantial evidence and woo to suggest a lab hypothesis,
| (not EVEN a theory, not EVEN a hypothesis, nay, mere
| speculation with a vested political axe to grind, hello) and
| that fact that all factual evidence of how all previous
| cross-species virus hops occurred point to this being a
| relatively common occurence (1918 avian-porcine-human
| connection occurred in Kansas by the way, not "Spanish")
|
| umm sure
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_hydrolysis
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| The WHO and Peter Daszak also said they weren't given enough
| access to develop any deliberate conclusions.
| esja wrote:
| A proper investigation would not include Peter Daszak at
| all, due to his immense conflicts of interest on this
| topic, and his behaviour since the outbreak occurred.
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _there 's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally
| originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes
| in that exact same type of virus_
|
| If it came from somewhere else, why wasn't the outbreak noticed
| there first, is the million dollar question. It requires some
| serious mental gymnastics at this point to believe it didn't
| originate in that lab. The only real question is if it was
| released deliberately.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Because winter is flu season, and most of the time the
| symptoms are impossible to distinguish, even when you're
| looking?
|
| Sure, China has _way_ more public health capacity than it
| used to, but we _know_ that COVID can spread silently in a
| community for a month without anyone noticing, even when we
| are looking. It happened in California and Seattle in January
| 2020. Why wouldn 't that have happened in, say, rural China
| in October?
| ekianjo wrote:
| There were apparently already people with COVID symptoms in
| Italy back in December 2019. That said, China was already
| aware of the virus in late 2019. It's all well known.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Well, that's what I mean. Nobody knew COVID was
| circulating in Italy at the time either. It's easy to
| miss a new respiratory virus. For it to originate one
| place and by chance end up exploding in a different
| metropolitan area doesn't seem unlikely at all.
| Pyramus wrote:
| In fact, simply from a modelling perspective, this is
| very likely scenario.
|
| If you take an unknown diseases with an R of 2-3, what
| you will see is a number of smaller clusters, some dying
| off, before you get the one cluster that becomes the
| pandemic.
| Aunche wrote:
| > there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally
| originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes
| in that exact same type of virus
|
| Why not? Wuhan is the 43rd largest city in the world.
| Meanwhile, the earliest cases of CoVid were all connected to
| the same wet market. Doesn't that have a higher probability
| being the origin?
| x3n0ph3n3 wrote:
| Evidence points to it _not_ being from the wet markets in
| China:
|
| https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-did-not-start-at-
| wuhan-...
| Aunche wrote:
| Your source cites the WSJ, which itself cites the Wuhan
| Virology Institute, which is trying to imply that China may
| not be the origin of CoVid at all, so I don't believe it.
| jdc wrote:
| Try this one:
|
| Lab Leak: A Scientific Debate Mired in Politics -- and
| Unresolved [March 22, 2021]
|
| https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/947620
|
| https://www.outline.com/XCTFJJ (registration-wall bypass)
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Perhaps it would have burned itself out if it hadn't spread
| to the market.
| lixtra wrote:
| > the earliest cases of Covid were all connected to the same
| wet market.
|
| This claim has less weight if China does not share the raw
| data.
|
| [1] https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/who-experts-want-more-
| data-f...
| boringg wrote:
| I subscribe to this theory. I didn't subscribe to it originally
| because it seemed to dystopian. However on reading the recent
| politico article
| (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-
| rogin...) really changed my opinion about it. To be clear I
| think it would have been an accident at a Chinese government
| lab that was underfunded and overworked. Seems to me like the
| likeliest candidate. I don't think the current US
| administration wants to point the finger at the Chinese
| government since it will cause a lot public anger. That and the
| Chinese government most certainly covered all their tracks by
| now.
| esja wrote:
| I'd also assign a small but non-zero probability to the US
| not wanting to point the finger because they prefer the
| scenario where the general population comes to believe that
| the lab accident was responsible, but no hard evidence is
| ever produced.
|
| Why? Because it seems like US institutions and people (right
| up to Fauci) were involved in this research and may not want
| the domestic blowback.
|
| Conveniently the CCP don't want a paper trail either.
|
| I'd be pretty sure the various scenarios have already been
| gamed out in both countries.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| What about that article convinced you? All I saw was some
| concern about safety protocols 2 years before the outbreak,
| some content free insinuations, and a whole lot of "we don't
| have any evidence."
|
| It's not a crazy theory by any means, but, if it happened,
| then there's evidence. So, where is the evidence? Literally,
| where is there _any_ actual evidence it happened?
| koheripbal wrote:
| > if it happened, then there's evidence
|
| Really? Why would there be evidence TODAY? Those bats have
| likely been destroyed, and all records of sequences taken
| from them have likely long since been shredded and burned.
|
| There's not that much evidence involved here.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Then, why wasn't evidence uncovered earlier? Surely the
| theory had just as much plausibility a year ago as today.
|
| Are you asking me to believe a theory for which _all_ the
| evidence was either not uncovered or destroyed? Why is
| that more plausible than origin from outside the lab?
| 2-tpg wrote:
| If you put two columns: zoonotic transfer, lab leak. And
| you list circumstantial evidence for both. Your zoonotic
| transfer column will be terribly empty in comparison. There
| is no patient 0, and the wet market was not the source, and
| we still do not have a zoonotic chain established. All
| those facts could be added to the lab leak hypothesis
| instead. For the most prominent clue of a biological attack
| is _Single cause of a certain disease caused by an uncommon
| agent, with lack of an epidemiological explanation._. If
| you look at the history: SARS-1 naturally arose once in
| China. SARS-1 escaped a lab twice in the few years after.
| Chinese spies infiltrated Western gain-of-function virus-
| and-cancer-research labs, then smuggled back vials to China
| in a sock in their check-in luggage.
|
| Domain expert scientists on the lab leak hypothesis:
| https://thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-the-sars-cov-2-virus-
| ari...
|
| The evidence is with the intelligence agencies of Western
| nations. Trump and Pompeo (Pompeo was sanctioned by China
| hours after new President took office) did not make up
| their "China Virus" as some racist dog whistle. They were
| informed.
|
| The WHO, when pressured by the UK for China not sharing
| information, nor allowing access to a team for
| investigation, said: Now is not the time to point fingers.
| We need China cooperation for now. The UK replied that it
| then has to assume the worst possible and prepare for a
| pandemic. It did.
|
| Actual tangible evidence is rare, but it is pretty damning
| that: China blocks Australian-led world-wide investigation
| into the origins of COVID -- re-sentencing Australian
| prisoners to death penalty and messing with trade relations
| to hurt Australia's economy. They'd do that for a natural
| zoonotic-base virus that was out of their control? Phone
| location records show containment procedures around Wuhan
| lab around October 2019. Former military analysts in Israel
| pose the lab leak hypothesis as plausible, betting their
| reputation on it.
|
| It is not too fair to ask actual tangible evidence, if
| evidence could mean a hot war or severely strained
| relations during a pandemic where people need to work
| together. And what is your tangible evidence for the
| popular zoonotic hypothesis? Just some experts saying that
| zoonotic base is most likely when interviewed for a popular
| news outlet? The most likely hypothesis should be the
| easiest to find actual support for. Why not?
|
| I think a lot of criticism on the drastic measures to
| contain a relatively low CFR virus would be dispelled if
| the general public knew what the decision-makers then knew:
| a strange novel virus which seems extremely adapted to
| infect humans, and shows more similarities to the lab
| viruses worked with in biowarfare, than with captured and
| documented cave bats. Similar to the "airborne COVID" --
| first publicized by the head of the WHO -- we seem to be
| managing the factual information flow to avoid panic,
| geopolitics, and xenophobia. It is right now not important
| that the general public knows it is dealing with an
| engineered virus or lab leak. Or at least... other things
| are more important right now.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| So, you're saying I should just believe it escaped from a
| lab because reasons? And you're asking me to believe the
| administration of a president who lied publicly 30,000
| times over 4 years and who may soon be facing criminal
| charges? Sorry, but that's just not good enough. Actual
| evidence in the zoonotic origin column greatly surpasses
| that in the lab leak column. I'll go with what I can see,
| thanks.
|
| Example: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
| environment-55998157
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally
| originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes
| in that exact same type of virus.
|
| I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the
| result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a
| huge dose of selection bias.
|
| If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed
| randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but they're not.
| They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses have
| crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they are
| likely to do so in the future.
|
| It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships to
| run aground, because many teams when ships run aground it's
| near a lighthouse.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| > They're placed near locations where novel coronaviruses
| have crossed the species barrier in the past, and where they
| are likely to do so in the future.
|
| Are they? I'm not aware of this trend, or of any other major
| species barrier crossings in Hubei. (If you're thinking of
| the original SARS, that started in Guangdong, two provinces
| to the south.)
| gregwebs wrote:
| China is a big country. Wuhan is 900km away from the bat
| caves that are believed to be the breeding ground for these
| viruses.
| koheripbal wrote:
| ...but Wuhan is also 0km away from the wet markets that
| sell meat sourced x00km away near and around the bat caves.
| [deleted]
| goatinaboat wrote:
| _were placed randomly around the world, you 'd be correct -
| but they're not. They're placed near locations_
|
| The world's foremost institute for tropical medicine is in
| London, England. So that debunks that idea.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I mean, that's a practical side effect of the fact that
| England owned much of the tropics for a few centuries.
|
| It's further evidence that these things get sited sensibly,
| not randomly.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Sensibly, yes, but not their location isn't based on
| geographic proximity but rather what is a sensible
| location for the group building and staffing the lab.
| [deleted]
| is-ought wrote:
| Can you link to something that proves this is the criteria
| used for lab placement?
| angio wrote:
| Another selection bias is that we can't say if the virus
| originated there, but only that it was first detected there.
| Even if it originated in the countryside hundreds of miles
| away it makes sense it was detected only after it spread to a
| city with the labs to discover the virus.
| ginko wrote:
| The virus was first sequenced by a lab in Shanghai. The WIV
| wasn't involved in the discovery of the virus.
| angio wrote:
| What I mean is that a small countryside hospital won't be
| able to notice there is a new type of pneumonia, while
| bigger cities have teams to detect that. It's the same
| reason why we probably had the virus circulating in
| europe in january but we only noticed after we started
| looking for it.
| temp8964 wrote:
| Wow. Why every comment questioned your argument is downvoted
| or even dead?
|
| > is-ought 34 minutes ago [dead] [-]
|
| > Can you link to something that proves this is the criteria
| used for lab placement?
|
| How is this even dead? It's only asking for a reference.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| This is, unfortunately, one of the issues that's been
| extraordinarily moralized. I've encountered more than a few
| people who argue that questions about the lab leak theory
| are inherently bad faith.
| enchiridion wrote:
| Maybe, I'm more inclined to believe it's some classic
| astroturfing.
|
| HN will normally answer questions in good faith, even
| controversial ones.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It's not that wanting sources is bad, but a plausible-
| sounding claim may as well be argued against by providing
| sources to the contrary, or defend by providing sources in
| support. Demanding rigorous proof of an intuitive claim is
| not a good way to argue against it.
| btilly wrote:
| Clearly there are a bunch of people voting down anything
| that is too critical of China.
|
| WHY there are a bunch of people voting that down I leave to
| others to speculate. But I'm going to vote up any
| verifiable factual statements that have been voted down.
| Fricken wrote:
| There are no pertinent facts anywhere in this thread.
| There are no pertinent facts available. We just don't
| know, and likely won't ever know.
| louloulou wrote:
| And we should ask that is. The fact that investigations
| to find patient 0, either never happened or were covered
| up is strong evidence for the WIV leak theory.
| dang wrote:
| HN has plenty of people who feel strongly on both sides
| of this issue. From my experience there are many more on
| your side than the other (probably by an order of
| magnitude), but it's not as if anyone has measured this.
| chc wrote:
| Can you link to something that proves this is only asking
| for a reference?
|
| That's what the comment sounded like to me, and why I
| downvoted it. It does not come across to me as a good-faith
| request for a reference, and more like an attempt to DOS
| the conversation, similar to a Gish gallop. For example,
| it's asking for a _specific link_ that constitutes _proof_
| of a general observation of tendency. That doesn 't scream
| "reasonable request."
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I don't understand how any conversation could work under
| the standard you're proposing. The original commenter
| made a wild assertion about the placement of virology
| labs that doesn't seem to me to be true; if it's
| unreasonable to ask for a more detailed explanation of
| the assertion or specific evidence in favor of the
| assertion, how is anyone supposed to engage?
| chc wrote:
| You're in a thread that was kicked off with unsourced
| statements about viral evolution and epidemiology, but
| suddenly we have an urgent need for sources -- actually,
| not just for _sources_ , but for _proof_ -- when we
| encounter the statement "Labs aren't randomly placed
| around the globe"?
|
| I guess you're supposed to engage the same way everyone
| had been engaging with the entire thread up to that
| point.
| dang wrote:
| That comment was killed by software, similarly to how
| comments by banned accounts are killed. It was later
| vouched for by other users, which unkilled it.
|
| Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents.
| They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably
| just imagine scenarios that confirm their priors.
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26544490.
| [deleted]
| esja wrote:
| Wuhan is nowhere near the caves where these bat viruses have
| been found. It's over 1800 kilometres to Southwest Yunnan,
| for example.
| garmaine wrote:
| Wuhan is around thousand kilometers away from where this
| virus supposedly originated from.
|
| But the Wuhan lab did receive samples in 2019 from miners who
| died in 2012 from an infection of a novel coronavirus that
| resulted in symptoms very similar to COVID-19.
|
| https://nypost.com/2020/08/15/covid-19-first-appeared-in-
| chi...
|
| That's a complete coincidence though and you're bigoted for
| thinking there could possibly be a connection! /s
| [deleted]
| autokad wrote:
| china has 100 cities with over a million people in them. Only
| one has a lab specializing in corona virus research.
| goatcode wrote:
| > It would be equivalent to say that lighthouses cause ships
| to run aground, because many teams when ships run aground
| it's near a lighthouse.
|
| But if a lighthouse manufactured coral reefs, and the coral
| reefs on which ships were running aground displayed features
| of those that a given lighthouse manufactured, it might be
| more accurate.
| 8note wrote:
| Coral reefs do like to form on sunken ships, so that's
| still not far off
| goatcode wrote:
| We may need to look into this further!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I don't really have a stake in this, and no real idea how
| plausible the lab accident theory is. That said, don't you
| think that the location of a lab like that would be highly
| correlated with the location of dangerous natural viral
| reservoir? Or put another way, if you wanted to study zoonotic
| viruses, wouldn't you put your lab in a place like that?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Not really. The lab is in a major city, and imported samples
| from all over China (and the rest of the world).
|
| The hypothesized bat in question, if it was really a wet-
| market outbreak, was imported from hundreds of miles away.
| vergessenmir wrote:
| It's also been reported that it wasn't the season for the
| bat species.
|
| Those in favour of the lab leak hypothesis point out that
| the virus showed up on the scene with all the evolutionary
| capability to spread amongst humans i.e with batteries
| included.
|
| With previous Sars viruses my understanding is that each
| zoonotic jump was traceable with examples of previous forms
| in prior animal hosts to corroborate the lineage.
|
| What makes Covid-19 interesting is that these zoonotic
| jumps or the gain of functions can be accelerated in the
| lab with the purpose of preparing us ahead of time for a
| dangerous forms of Sars style viruses. It looks like
| covid-19 may be that type of strain, not man made, but
| given the lab conditions for it to gain the capability. It
| may have escaped.
|
| It's worth exploring the lab leak hypothesis but I would
| say that it's not politically expedient for any of the
| scientists or parties involved. We will never really know
| the truth and that is something we need to grow comfortable
| with.
| [deleted]
| Pyramus wrote:
| You are mixing two theories here: A) A lab leak B) Gain
| of function research.
|
| My understanding is that A) is very much possible because
| it has happened before (SARS), but we have no evidence
| yet (and might never acquire).
|
| For B) however, from my limited understanding, there is
| no strong evidence. We only know about a fraction of
| existing coronaviruses out there and given we observe
| one, that has caused a pandemic, the (conditional!)
| probability that it is well adapted is extremely high
| (survivorship bias).
|
| If you have a credible source that claims B) please share
| it.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| We do at least know that they were doing gain-of-function
| research on coronaviruses in the Wuhan lab, since the US
| publicly funded it.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The Wuhan lab was absolutely involved in gain-of-function
| research. This has been widely reported
| https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-
| experiments...
|
| > What's more, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists
| have for the past five years been engaged in so-called
| "gain of function" (GOF) research, which is designed to
| enhance certain properties of viruses for the purpose of
| anticipating future pandemics. Gain-of-function
| techniques have been used to turn viruses into human
| pathogens capable of causing a global pandemic.
|
| > This is no nefarious secret program in an underground
| military bunker. The Wuhan lab received funding, mostly
| for virus discovery, in part from a ten-year, $200
| million international program called PREDICT, funded by
| the U.S. Agency for International Development and other
| countries.
| Pyramus wrote:
| I'm not doubting that at all, see also this statement by
| a US embassy [1].
|
| What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?)
| evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of
| function research. It is entirely possible but the
| majority of the scientists who do gain of function
| research say it's unlikely (given what we know today,
| which might change).
|
| Again, a credible source saying the opposite is
| appreciated.
|
| [1] https://ge.usembassy.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-
| wuhan-in...
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| >What I'm saying is that we don't have strong (any?)
| evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is the result of gain of
| function research
|
| There is analysis that suggests that SARS-CoV-2 wasn't
| engineered. However, if you were intentionally giving it
| to a bunch of animals in batches with some interspecies
| mixing, you wouldn't really expect it to look any
| different than a natural jump.
| polartx wrote:
| Isn't he referring to a lab leak of a virus which was
| engineered with 'gains of function'. I'm particularly
| convinced of this theory because it explains the glaring
| weakness of the Covid-19 virus to UV radiation (ie
| sunlight). If Chinese researches were modifying viral
| samples to gain functions (evolutionary or otherwise),
| weakness against sunlight is a believable oversight,
| considering it wouldn't have been subjected to it
| indoors.
| 8note wrote:
| Huh? Do most viruses thrive in UV radiation?
|
| I thought UV resistant organisms were usually referred to
| as extremophiles because it's so infrequent
| abecedarius wrote:
| The claim I've read is that the bats live thousands of miles
| away. We shouldn't need to speculate.
| hyperpape wrote:
| The migratory range of bats is apparently up to 2000 miles:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7149675/ (no
| idea whether this describes the specific bats that are
| known reservoirs of these viruses).
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| If we have no say in whether or not scientists should be
| creating super viruses (a.k.a. weapons of mass destruction),
| I'd prefer they do so somewhere like Antarctica or on a space
| station, not in the middle of a city.
| codezero wrote:
| My favorite conspiracy theory bend on this is that it's the
| best place to intentionally release it too, especially if WIV
| is absolutely not studying anything like COVID-19 because it
| looks so appealing to dig into the bio safety level four lab,
| but there's probably nothing there so it will be eventually
| dismissed.
|
| All that said I think it is really unlikely and a pointless
| effort as government bureaucracies wouldn't be able to even
| formulate a reaction to an intentional or even accidental
| release so I think we will not try too hard to imply that for
| political reasons.
| soperj wrote:
| I'm confused, do you think SARS was also escaped from the lab,
| or just COVID?
| tossaway12321 wrote:
| This is as well my strongly held belief, and the most likely
| cause.
|
| And people making the really odd responses below. They're, not
| saying it, but insinuating that the lab would be where there is
| lots of bat coronavirus? The lab is in the city of Wuhan. A
| city with a population of 11 million people. This isn't some
| rural town.
|
| There was a lab that studied this type of coronavirus, had
| published papers on it. And in a country the size of the USA
| had an outbreak within just a few miles from that lab. Then the
| govt came and refused to let anyone outside investigate.
|
| To me that leads pretty strongly that it was an accidental lab
| leak. And they weren't able to control the spread.
|
| My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent
| worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety
| practices to avoid this happening again
| echelon wrote:
| > My hopeful opinion is that this leads to more stringent
| worldwide rules for reporting leaks, and checking of safety
| practices to avoid this happening again
|
| A leak that results in 2.7 million worldwide deaths will not
| result in "more stringent worldwide rules for reporting
| leaks". It would result in economic reparations and possibly
| war.
|
| Leak or not, it's in China's interest to prevent the blame
| from falling on them. The narrative here is an incredibly
| powerful geopolitical tool.
| 8note wrote:
| It's even more in China's interest to not have more such
| leaks, or to have other countries have similar leaks.
|
| Their manufacturing economy does not benefit from being
| locked down on a regular basis
| jariel wrote:
| The WHO will never look where they don't want the answer to be
| found and will actively work against it.
|
| The chair of the WHO was a communist rebel fighter in north
| africa and his career has been sponsored and guided by China
| for this reason.
|
| They won't suppress findings made internally because it would
| be too hard to cover up - but they will 'do the least' with
| respect to finding answers.
|
| Only the US has enough power and wherewithal to even try to do
| something, but they'll be kept out direct, so it boils down to
| how sophisticated the US clandestine efforts are in China.
|
| My completely speculative guess is that US operating ability in
| China is 'really bad' and that they've already barked up that
| tree and found nothing conclusive.
| asmint3 wrote:
| That we're finally seeing some mainstream discussion around
| this hypothesis should not change the scary fact that months
| ago governments, scientists and media happily and immediately
| rejected it as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. The messaging
| and subsequent ease at which public opinion was influenced
| should make everyone pause and think hard about other ways they
| might be being manipulated.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| It's amazing how much ridicule I took for seriously
| suggesting this theory last year. My friends twisted and
| exaggerated the extent of my claims (implying I thought it
| was an intentional action on China's part, or an engineered
| virus, and not a result of mundane research + accidental
| containment failure), and called me a crazy conspiracy
| theorist.
|
| I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands
| on about the virus since February, but of course how could my
| interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If
| something I read in a journal article contradicted something
| on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".
|
| After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream
| news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They
| can figure it out for themselves.
| brabel wrote:
| Just in case you didn't understand what the article was
| saying: "Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in
| the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has
| been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased
| investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted
| without fear or favor."
|
| It did NOT say the virus was definitely released from a
| lab. It did NOT present any evidence it was. All the
| article said was that given the author's experience with
| labs like this, she thinks the chances the virus escaped
| are not as remote as the scientists investigating it claim
| it is. That's all! Your theory might be correct, but as of
| now, you have no reason to think you've been vindicated.
|
| EDIT: author is a woman, so fixed pronoun.
| jhokanson wrote:
| Interesting take. I did not interpret their statement as
| vindication of being correct but rather that this version
| of events is a possibility that can't currently be
| dismissed.
| jhokanson wrote:
| Agreed. However my reaction when first hearing about the
| lab leak (middle of last year?) was that the leak stories
| were meant to be malicious/propaganda against China. I
| didn't take any of this seriously until an article in
| Politico a week or two ago.
|
| But here's the kicker. Let's say this was a lab leak and as
| a reporter (which I'm not) I thought the evidence was good
| enough to warrant reporting. I'm not sure I would share it.
| The previous occupant of the white house did a great
| disservice in giving this whole thing a racially charged
| tone. I'm genuinely scared by the increased acts of
| violence against southeast Asians in the US and worry that
| stories like this will make it worse. I'm hoping that the
| new US government is secretly taking steps to help prevent
| what may have happened in that lab -- in addition to the
| large effort needed elsewhere to improve our handling after
| things had begun to spread.
|
| Anyway, main point is that this was the first time in a
| long time (ever?) where I really wondered whether, given
| the circumstances, if it was good to share "the whole
| truth" (as best we know it) given that we don't know what
| happened and the potential real-life implications to many
| people in the US.
| 13415 wrote:
| That's not true, there were plenty of mainstream media
| reports of these suspicions and the vast majority of them
| were correctly pointing out the same as they are pointing out
| today, namely that there is no concrete evidence for the
| theory and it therefore remains speculation. We would
| presumably know more if journalists from all over the world
| could report freely from China, but realistically speaking
| their work possibilities are limited there.
|
| It's a bit annoying that so many adults continue to mix up
| speculation with real evidence, and make up their minds based
| on gut feelings. That is not to say governments shouldn't put
| pressure on China to be more transparent, of course they
| should. But judging from the actual information available,
| the virus most likely jumped from an animal to humans due to
| the bad conditions of wet markets in China.
|
| While China is to blame for such markets, people need to bear
| in mind that the same can happen in many other places where
| animals are farmed closely together with humans. Even if it
| was true, the Wuhan lab theory would unfortunately distract
| from this real problem.
| esja wrote:
| The same reflexive denial happened on HN. Yet the lab leak
| theory has always been consistent with the situation. It's
| also always been the best fit to the behaviour we've seen
| from the various actors.
| autokad wrote:
| The other thing to note is this virus hops to new species super
| fast. its already in pretty much every mammal we interact with
| now. You going to tell me this super fast spreading - super
| species hoping virus was waiting in a cave somewhere and never
| spread?
|
| not buying it.
| totalZero wrote:
| Sometimes diplomacy means you smile when you don't want to
| smile. WHO has to play politics until we get this virus under
| control (ie, vaccines distributed worldwide). If WHO blames
| China now, in the thick of things, it would damage the world's
| ability to further study the origins of the virus and the
| results of Chinese research. Chinese vaccines are being used
| and studied in many countries worldwide and that is a good
| thing. Apart from the obvious benefits of those vaccines,
| better access to data gives us an inactivated vaccine
| counterfactual with which to evaluate the mRNA and protein
| subunit vaccines.
|
| CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand, must
| ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I agree
| with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR
| ramifications for China. From the looks of it, either their
| unsanitary bushmeat consumption got the world sick, or their
| irresponsible laboratory containment procedures did. Both are a
| reflection of China's culture, and were only exacerbated by
| authoritarian crackdown upon the early warnings issued by
| Chinese medical professionals. The US government shouldn't
| defend bad practices and systemic problems in the name of
| multilateral cooperation. That variety of ethical blindness
| forgives bad faith from our counterparts and damages our
| hegemony.
| echelon wrote:
| > CDC and other US government officials, on the other hand,
| must ratchet up their criticism of China as well as WHO. I
| agree with you there. It's alarming that there are so few PR
| ramifications for China.
|
| The US relies on Chinese manufacturing. If trade ends, the
| West will suffer. Consumer and industrial goods can't be
| built, which could incredibly damage the economy.
|
| Manufacturing is shifting to other countries - Vietnam,
| India, etc. It's been driven by rising costs in China, but
| we're seeing an acceleration to de-risk the supply chain. TSM
| is being asked to build fabs in the US. Slowly, the most
| strategic pieces are being maneuvered.
|
| China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they lose
| the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and starved of
| energy, resources, and food. They're building to reach parity
| with the US Navy or even outgun it, and they're trying to
| stall long enough that they can win should there be an
| encounter.
|
| The US and its allies are ramping up criticism of China, and
| you can see it in diplomatic activity, news, and social
| media. The rhetoric will grow until they're ready to shift
| from soft negotiations to taking a hard line.
|
| The game is being played right now.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > China is building up its navy to protect itself. If they
| lose the South China Sea, they could be blockaded and
| starved of energy, resources, and food. They're building to
| reach parity with the US Navy or even outgun it, and
| they're trying to stall long enough that they can win
| should there be an encounter.
|
| China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head against
| a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory. Absolutely
| none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike Groups.
|
| Ex: If China + US decides that we need to fight over in
| Antartica, the US will win in nearly every feasible
| encounter.
|
| -------
|
| China's plan isn't to win or even challenge the Navy on the
| high seas. Instead, China's plan is to assert military
| strength with the seas it is close to: asserting military
| might against Japan, Taiwan, Philippines, Korea, and other
| local minor powers.
|
| Furthermore: Chinese air-forces can launch from Mainland
| China to support any hypothetical naval operations.
|
| -------
|
| EX: Its not trying to beat US in a fair fight. China is
| likely aiming to beat the US in an "unfair fight": any
| fight close to China's territories + air force + cruise
| missile range might stand a chance against a US Carrier
| Strike Group.
|
| A few powerful Chinese ships under the protective cover of
| cruise-missiles + Chinese airforce is probably the plan. It
| only will be effective when close to the Chinese coast, but
| that's all China really cares about.
| echelon wrote:
| > China has absolutely no chance to meet head-to-head
| against a US Carrier Strike Group on neutral territory.
| Absolutely none, and the US has TEN Carrier Strike
| Groups.
|
| Right now. But take a look at the shipbuilding output
| they've achieved. In ten to twenty years, China could
| easily rival the US Navy.
| dragontamer wrote:
| China has many smaller Missile Destroyers or Frigates,
| and has far more production than the USA right now. True.
|
| However, smaller ships aren't going to do jack-diddly
| squat against a Carrier Strike Group in a neutral
| situation (ie: both sides meet in Antarctica). F-18s have
| an effective strike range of over 1000-miles.
|
| Submarines might have some theoretical advantages, but
| the 110,000 ton Ford-class Carriers moves faster than
| pretty much every submarine on the planet, so Submarines
| literally cannot speed up fast enough to engage.
|
| ----------
|
| Those smaller Chinese Ships are going to rely upon a lot
| of Air support + Cruise Missile support from the mainland
| if they ever wish to actually engage with a US Carrier
| Strike Group.
|
| Staying within the protective cover of SAM (against air
| threats), Cruise Missiles (against the CSG themselves)...
| and providing a launch platform for various missiles,
| Chinese Destroyers probably can do a job in a
| hypothetical fight vs US Navy within the confines of the
| South China Sea.
|
| But once they leave the protective cover of China's
| mainland... its all over. Swarms of F18s will just launch
| missiles at all the Destroyers, while the Carrier Strike
| Group sits back a thousand miles away.
|
| --------
|
| That's why the question isn't about those small Chinese
| ships (even though China is making a lot of them). The
| big question is about the performance of those Chinese
| Carriers. At 70,000 tons or so, they're much lighter than
| the 110,000 ton Ford-class carriers.
| dvt wrote:
| > In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US
| Navy.
|
| People said this 20 years ago. We've already started to
| see the CCP losing ground (see HK), and I'm quite bearish
| on the Party going forward. Jinping is 67, and I expect
| to see a major power struggle which will leave the
| Chinese Communist Party crippled when he dies.
| mrob wrote:
| >We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see
| HK)
|
| How is violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration and
| getting away with it "losing ground"? The Hong Kong
| protests failed and Hongkongers now have less freedom
| than before.
| hetspookjee wrote:
| I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in
| trade for politics. What is there to gain? Perhaps I am too
| short sighted but I cannot believe that this is ever the
| right compromise to take.
|
| I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith
| in a reliable investigation. After all these months of
| pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still
| bowed to their whims. How does this help the argument that
| it's better to just suck it up?
|
| One thing I am really interested in to read more on is a
| historians analysis of the parallels one can draw from the
| period rising up to World War 2, and more importantly, how
| the rest of the world acted back then. When Germany was
| dissolving all their democratic processes, and started
| labellling jews, what did the rest of the world do? What did
| their neighbours do? Did they just happily keep on conducting
| business?
|
| I have read slightly into it, but placing the responses of
| the countries at that time in the right context really
| requires some solid knowledge of history. If anyone knows
| interesting articles to read about the responses of the world
| during that time: I'm very interested.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| > I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity
| in trade for politics. What is there to gain?
|
| You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding
| the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very
| strongly influenced by China, and as a result the
| institution is working to please China, rather than working
| to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample
| rewards for corrupting the institution.
| nwah1 wrote:
| >I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in
| trade for politics. What is there to gain?
|
| Might have something to do with the fact that the leader of
| the WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom, was hand picked by the Chinese
| communist party and won the position over the US and EU's
| favored choice.
| coldtea wrote:
| "During its 140th meeting in January 2017, the Executive
| Board of the WHO shortlisted Tedros as the front runner
| out of six candidates through two rounds of secret
| voting. He collected the most votes during both
| rounds.[citation needed] Tedros "was supported by a bloc
| of African and Asian countries, including China, which
| has considerable influence with those members" while "the
| US, UK and Canada... lent their support to... the British
| doctor David Nabarro." One observer called it "a really
| nasty" election."
|
| Basically: "Oh, someone else can play the same game we've
| played for a century with UN, WHO, IMF, etc. - how dare
| they?"
| tomp wrote:
| You say this as if Africa&China was equivalent to US&EU.
| A bunch of totalitarian dictatorships / warlord states
| vs. democratic and at least _somewhat_ accountable and
| transparent free republics.
| refenestrator wrote:
| The somewhat accountable and transparent free republics
| spent like 200 years completely dicking over Africa &
| China to the tune of millions dead. Not really a position
| of moral superiority.
| coldtea wrote:
| You mean the proxy states, lackeys, and funded warlords
| and dictators setup by EU in Africa, to safeguard the ex-
| colonial pocessions and make sure they continue to get
| their resources and control on the cheap?
|
| Or the several Middle Easter/Asian/African countries
| bombed, invaded, toppled, etc by the US (3-4 of them in
| the last 20 years alone).
| Pyramus wrote:
| > When Germany was dissolving all their democratic
| processes, and started labellling jews, what did the rest
| of the world do? What did their neighbours do? Did they
| just happily keep on conducting business?
|
| The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in
| my opinion.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1936_Summer_Olympics
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| How bad of a deal it is to sell your credibility should
| have been obvious since April 2020.
|
| The lies about masks may have helped with shortages in the
| short term. The result is now that people rightfully
| distrust everything their governments say.
| tcpekin wrote:
| I recently read a very good book that was not so much a
| broad overview, but rather a closer look at the American
| ambassador and his family in Germany in the 1930s. I can
| wholeheartedly strongly recommend it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Garden_of_Beasts
| drran wrote:
| You may want to read this article:
|
| https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/articles/10.31646/gbio.41/
| the_jeremy wrote:
| As a layperson whose activism only amounts to charitable
| donations, yard signs, and voting, why should I care whether this
| virus was a lab escapee or naturally spread?
|
| This is an earnest question, not a blind "I don't care". I think
| this is interesting, and I can see some amount of merit in these
| claims, but at the end of the day it doesn't feel like it matters
| to me which one it was. It seems like the only change would be
| "China gets more bad PR" and maybe American racists use this as
| an excuse to be more racist.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| History exists for a reason. It's there to learn from.
|
| If we can establish that a lab leak lead to a worldwide
| pandemic, we'd place much more importance on lab security and
| better handling procedures.
|
| If it was naturally spread then we'd look at the feasibility of
| reducing the chances of this happening again, like improving
| sanitation of wet markets, implementing regulations, or even
| banning them entirely.
|
| Frankly the notion of it not mattering to someone how covid
| came to be is absurd.
|
| If you don't want something to happen again, you first need to
| understand the circumstances that lead to it.
| 8note wrote:
| What does this actually change? If China did indeed release the
| virus, does that mean I should not take a vaccine? That I
| should stop wearing a mask?
|
| If China knows and is hiding it, I'm still not clear what that
| changes. They'll still know to improve their safety practices
| stevenhuang wrote:
| It means culpability. A better understanding of the dangers
| of experimenting with deadly viruses.
|
| All of this contributes to the history and scientific corpus
| of what not to do, and lessons to learn from in the future
| that we can point to as what can happen in lab leak
| scenarios.
|
| It's hard to accept in good faith the proposition that not
| knowing the truth of what happened is preferable to knowing
| the truth.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Pretty incredible how far the US media will go to deflect
| attention from how bad the US response to the pandemic was to
| China.
|
| "Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in
| the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been
| found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation
| of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or
| favor."
|
| Okay. So basically this author has no evidence other than the
| fact that it's very difficult, maybe impossible to identify the
| site of first transmission. I don't know what progress would look
| like, but maybe sampling animals in the wild to find a carrier
| with a genetic signature that looks like an early version?
|
| This is just speculative nonsense to try to hype the government's
| pivot to China. That's why its in the opinion section, the worst
| part of the newspaper.
| varjag wrote:
| No, the evidence is there's a relevant viral research lab in
| the epicentre with known history of safety issues _and_ no
| animal transmission link have been confirmed.
| tehjoker wrote:
| There's evidence that many things are possible. Conspiracies
| are possible, but they are primarily a diagnosis of exclusion
| OR if there is specific evidence pointing in that direction.
|
| The US media has made an art out of turning speculation into
| exciting narratives that large fractions of the population
| believe that turned out to be completely fabricated but
| retain adherents for years or generations after.
| varjag wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy, but a not improbable covered up
| accident. I.e. something pretty normal in any authoritarian
| state.
|
| I don't think anyone suggests the CCP unleashed the virus
| onto its own city on purpose.
| tehjoker wrote:
| You're alleging the CCP is covering up their role a
| global pandemic. That's a conspiracy as there is a group
| of powerful people hiding something from the public.
|
| I believe in many conspiracy theories that have
| substantive evidence for them (e.g. the Gulf of Tonkin
| Resolution was faked), so I don't dismiss the idea of a
| conspiracy as impossible, they happen every day. However,
| there is no substantive evidence presented here other
| than the mere possibility that someone might have done
| something bad.
| varjag wrote:
| It's not a conspiracy in the sense of pre-meditated plan
| by a group of villains.
|
| It can well be a cover-up, which is a daily life in
| places like China. In USSR, _every_ technological,
| radiologic or biological disaster was covered up,
| surfacing only when it was impossible to conceal.
| ninkendo wrote:
| Epicenters of a disease like this (respiratory disease with
| asymptomatic transmission) are likely to be in an urban area,
| so it's not surprising it's in a large city.
|
| In a typical city the size of Wuhan, what are the odds it has
| some sort of viral research lab? If this happened in (picking
| a city at random...) Chicago, you could work backwards, find
| a viral research lab in say, University of Illinois, and make
| the same claim. "No link to animal transmission has been
| found, and the original epicenter was known to have a viral
| research lab. QED."
| varjag wrote:
| Well, we know for a fact that the outbreak started in
| Wuhan, not in Chicago. Had it happened in Chicago, am
| certain the university lab would be under suspicion.
|
| And no, the vast majority of cities do not have viral
| research labs.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Its very difficult maybe impossible because China is trying
| very hard to make it that way.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Maybe, but I think it's fairly obvious that this is naturally
| a hard problem (e.g. having teams of people sample
| potentially millions of animals in the field) unless you get
| lucky or catch it in the act.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Naturally hard and then a giant government is doing
| everything in their power to stymie it at every turn.
| Regardless of the debate on if this is a logically or
| morally appropriate thing to do, but one can conclude they
| wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think there was some
| possibility of it.
| bumbada wrote:
| People are too naive when they talk about China.
|
| For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no
| Chinese national will ever do.
|
| China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the
| press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because
| if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You
| can not compare numbers given in a free press country against
| numbers being given by a totalitarian country.
|
| That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and
| Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their
| official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.
|
| There is no evidence because China made impossible for
| scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They
| closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence
| with bleach.
| 8note wrote:
| As a result, I have no reason to believe that Wuhan is
| actually the first outbreak, making the existence of that lab
| irrelevant
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's amusing that you post this under a US propaganda piece
| trying to convince people based on zero evidence that China
| did something bad. The US press is just as propagandistic and
| vehemently denies it as large sections of the US population
| lose trust in it (so called "fake-news").
|
| I think you are referring to an event in Ukraine where some
| of the peasantry burned crops, but some exports were still
| bound for the cities. In the Irish potato famine, the UK
| exported food from Ireland even as people starved to death.
| In the US, farmers burned crops and poured out milk in the
| great depression as people starved.
|
| Juxtaposed, there is little reason to treat foreign
| governments as inherently worse than our own and much reason
| hold them to similar evidentiary standards. My hope is that
| the standard would be high for both domestic and foreign
| stories.
| saas_sam wrote:
| Did you know officials sent a warning in 2018 about the Wuhan
| Institute of Virology warning that their experiments were
| dangerous and the facility was run poorly, risking a new Sars-
| like pandemic? https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
| environment-52318539
|
| Did you know the CCP arrested the first doctor sounding the
| alarm about COVID? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-
| china-51364382
|
| Did you know viruses have escaped from labs before? It is a
| known risk.
|
| You can say the evidence is not conclusive and you would be
| right. But it's far from "speculative nonsense."
|
| One wonders if you would be similarly skeptical of claims
| relating to COVID's cause being something much more speculative
| and vague... say, global anthropogenic climate change, for
| example. I'm sure you'd be pumping the brakes just as hard on
| any speculation to that effect, right? ;-)
| tehjoker wrote:
| "The Washington Post newspaper reported information obtained
| from diplomatic cables on 14 April. They show that, in 2018,
| US science diplomats were sent on repeated visits to a
| Chinese research facility.
|
| Officials sent two warnings to Washington about the lab. The
| column says the officials were worried about safety and
| management weaknesses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
| (WIV) and called for more help." ... "What kinds of security
| failures were the cables describing?
|
| The short answer is we don't know from the information
| provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking,
| there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached
| at labs dealing with biological agents.
|
| According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to
| the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists
| and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage,
| inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification
| practices, emergency procedures.""
|
| In other words, all the information is non-public and coming
| from the entirely unreliable US Intelligence services whose
| job is to lie and make the US government look good. If these
| reports had been published (meaning in public documents)
| prior to the pandemic OR there was an admission by the
| Chinese government, this would be far more credible.
| saas_sam wrote:
| So the US intelligence service isn't credible... but the
| CCP is?
|
| I think I understand where you are coming from now, thank
| you.
| coliveira wrote:
| Except that experts have visited Wuhan and never found evidence
| of the theory proposed in this article. I think it is time to
| stop spreading even more disinformation about this deadly
| disease. If the US government had taken the virus seriously as
| the Chinese did, we most certainly wouldn't be in this situation.
| garmaine wrote:
| When did experts ever visit the labs in question?
| koheripbal wrote:
| China blocked investigators from going to Wuhan Institute of
| Virology.
| sasaf5 wrote:
| If the Chinese government had taken this virus seriously from
| the beginning the world wouldn't be in this situation.
| weibing wrote:
| "I have heard so many news about a guy winning more than 100
| millions from Powerball. I couldn't image that it won't happen to
| me in the future." That's my translation of this article.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| That's what the people at Rootclaim concluded as well
| https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/what-is-the-source-of-cov...
| kangnkodos wrote:
| This reminds me of the conspiracy theory book, Lab 257. There was
| a lab on Plum Island in the Long Island Sound that studied
| infectious diseases.
|
| If you trace back the spread of Lyme disease in time, you get two
| points. One in Connecticut, and one on Long Island, where workers
| got on the boats to Plum Island.
|
| The lab was studying diseases similar to Lyme disease at the
| time.
|
| All those are facts.
|
| The conspiracy theory is that Lyme disease was accidentally
| released by that lab.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp...
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Archived specimens show that Lyme disease was endemic well
| before the establishment of Plum Island laboratory.
|
| > Additionally, Lyme disease was never a topic of research at
| Plum Island, according to the US Department of Homeland
| Security and Department of Agriculture.
|
| These are facts, too, in your link. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| You should read the actual book, because it addresses both of
| these points.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| How?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#History
|
| > The 2010 autopsy of Otzi the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old
| mummy, revealed the presence of the DNA sequence of
| Borrelia burgdorferi making him the earliest known human
| with Lyme disease.
|
| Unless it's got conclusive evidence of a functional time
| machine, it's gonna struggle to explain how a town in
| Connecticut predates a prehistoric mummy.
| Giorgi wrote:
| Looks like breach theory is finally reaching mainstream. Good to
| know wokies protecting "poor China" will finally GTFO.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| A friend with access to Merrill Lynch Research told me in August
| that there was strong consensus around the WIV lab theory. If
| there's one reliable source of truth in the world, it's the
| information that banks are betting billions on.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| New coronavirus pandemics like this aren't novel. It's thought
| many of the boring common cold coronaviruses we don't think much
| of started as an outbreak sometime in the past crossing animal-
| human boundaries
|
| One common cold coronavirus that circulates around had a common
| ancestor in 1890. Suspiciously timed with the Russian "Flu"
| pandemic of 1890-1891[1]
|
| (Not that we can just discount the Wuhan lab theory, but a
| naturally occurring pandemic like this not that weird
| historically)
|
| 1 - https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-the-
| coronavir...
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| New coronavirus pandemics like this _are_ novel. Not because it
| 's a coronavirus, but because of how highly adapted and highly
| transmissible it has been since it was first "discovered".
| Other such viral outbreaks in recent decades were not nearly as
| transmissible
| tamaharbor wrote:
| Like John Lennon sang, "All I want is the truth, just give me
| some truth". Very hard to come by these days, especially if it
| has anything to do with 'The Orange Man'.
| [deleted]
| nathias wrote:
| maybe we should regulate gain-of-function research not tourism?
| 0xcafecafe wrote:
| While the headline talks about covid, I found other bits of the
| article scary. For instance the supposed lax handling of
| pathogens like smallpox. While I would trust the worldwide
| scientific community for covid origin theories, I cannot look
| past the egregious safety violations reported in the article (if
| true).
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| >While I would trust the worldwide scientific community for
| covid origin theories
|
| Which scientific community are you referring to? There are
| countless scientists who have been arguing against the risks of
| gain of function research for many years. Why are pro-gain of
| function scientists deathly silent now about the supposed
| benefits of their research?
| jMyles wrote:
| I had the same thought. Maybe it's just the crowd I run with,
| but criticism of gain-of-function research (certainly
| including informed speculation of a lab escape for this
| coronavirus) seem very mainstream to me.
| Pyramus wrote:
| I believe grand-parent was talking about a lab leak, not
| necessarily with gain of function research being involved,
| and scientists dismissal.
|
| Which is not a dismissal at all. What scientists are saying
| is that both zoonotic transfer and lab leak are plausible,
| but that we don't have evidence for the latter (yet!) and
| the former is more likely.
|
| In many media articles this simplifies to 'scientists say
| virus origins are zoonotic'.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| >the former is more likely.
|
| Is this likelihood differential being calculated using
| data, or is it just a hypothesis?
| Pyramus wrote:
| Just a binary variable 'A more likely than B' or vice
| versa formed from prior zoonotic transfers and lab
| escapes.
|
| I don't think at this point it is credible to assign
| probabilities to either hypothesis (which are assumed to
| be exclusive here).
| pnathan wrote:
| I have three perspectives here I want to share.
|
| (1) Let's address the glass windows in our own house first and
| tighten the US policies and culture. Secrecy is not a good idea
| here. Without even reflecting on Covid, it is clear the author
| has been dealing with this a while, and the US needs to improve.
| I am reminded of discussions on the old '50s/'60s nuclear
| culture...
|
| (2) A year later, it may not be possible for the most _honest_ ,
| the most _painstaking_ , the most _independent_ reconstruction of
| the Wuhan lab events to properly track what occurred. Nor would
| it be _per se_ politically doable. It might, however, be feasible
| for the Chinese official position to commit to an enhanced
| tightening of policies and culture around lab handling of
| specimens, in light of current events and looking forward.
|
| (3) To a first approximation (the same one where Pi = 3), I don't
| care if Covid comes from a lab, a bat, a pig, or a chicken. I
| care that there are dead people, and that there was massive
| dysfunction globally & in a multipartisan way in the response,
| leading to more dead and disabled people...
| pageandrew wrote:
| 1. The virus did not originate in our own house. Seems like a
| deflection to say we should focus on ourselves when we're
| starting at evidence that Chinese missteps could have caused a
| global pandemic that has killed millions and upended life for
| billions.
|
| 2. Doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should also acknowledge
| that an investigation much earlier on could have happened if it
| were not for Chinese government obstructionism and cover-ups.
|
| 3. Why do you not care about where it came from? The allegation
| at hand is that China's irresponsible scientific
| experimentation "created" this virus (intentional
| oversimplification) and allowed it to leak. If the truth never
| comes out, and China is never held accountable, the same thing
| could happen again. Why is your sole interest the global
| _response_ to the pandemic as opposed to the missteps that
| _caused_ the pandemic in the first place?
| soperj wrote:
| Would you then say that irresponsibly treating the virus
| within the US & other western countries actually caused the
| pandemic to be bigger than it should have been?
| pageandrew wrote:
| Even the Western countries that "responsibly" treated the
| virus are having pretty serious surges now. I guess
| anything short of a total and complete lockdown was
| irresponsible.
|
| I'd say that the release of a highly transmissible and
| moderately lethal pathogen was the primary issue.
| carols10cents wrote:
| 1. Even if this particular virus didn't originate in our own
| house, if we want to demand openness and security from other
| countries, we in the US should start by being open with
| records of accidents and enhanced measures to prevent future
| accidents.
| pageandrew wrote:
| Safety issues at US labs are not kept secret, as the author
| of the linked article has literally reported on them
| before, and they have also never caused a deadly global
| pandemic.
| gsk22 wrote:
| > Safety issues at US labs are not kept secret
|
| No, they are "inadvertently" misclassified [1] or kept
| secret because of bioterrorism laws [2].
|
| > and they have also never caused a deadly global
| pandemic.
|
| Neither has a Chinese lab, to the best of our knowledge.
| Doesn't rule it out, but let's not jump to conclusions.
|
| [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/06/23/undisc
| losed-c... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation
| /2014/08/17/report...
| DigiDigiorno wrote:
| 1. I think this perspective is basically "Whataboutism the US
| house...", Whataboutism aside, the US does examine and
| iteratively improve standards...but either way, we aren't
| talking about that house.
|
| 2. I only think a thorough investigation is not possible
| because the Chinese government is not going to allow that such
| a honest investigation to occur.
|
| 3. If a flowerpot fell from a balcony and killed your loved
| one, you wouldn't care if it was intentionally thrown,
| negligently left there, or simply a freak act of god? I think
| almost everyone cares about the cause of this event. If not for
| reasons of closure and blame, for reasons of understanding and
| improving out future actions.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| Peter Daszak, member of the WHO Covid origins team, was also the
| project lead for the US funded gain of function research of novel
| coronaviruses that was going on at the Wuhan BSL4 lab.
|
| There is historical precedent of authorities blaming local meat
| markets to cover up a lab leak.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
| musha68k wrote:
| Interesting pointer there but his answer on the issue seems
| plausible as well. Apparently they were "just fishing for
| funding":
|
| https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/1292819714935271424
|
| I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to,
| there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the
| most likely source of the virus.
|
| AFAIR they also expect similar events to happen increasingly
| all over the world due to side effects of the climate crisis
| and global heating.
| loveistheanswer wrote:
| >I'm not a virologist but every TWiV episode I listened to,
| there was convincing talk about natural reservoirs being the
| most likely source of the virus.
|
| In no way whatsoever does that rule out a lab leak. Most, if
| not all of the viruses being tested at the lab were taken
| from natural reservoirs
| jtdev wrote:
| I can't believe that Mr. Daszak is on the origins team...
| nothing like letting the accused do the investigation.
| watertom wrote:
| A lot of smart people in this forum.
|
| Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to
| identify that that had a new virus.
|
| I've done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they
| way you know you've got a new virus floating around is either new
| symptoms; significantly more "flu like" cases; significantly more
| cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths.
|
| Covid presents like the flu, so much so you need a test, but
| early on a test was not available. So the symptoms are not
| unique.
|
| Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have
| sparked an interest.
|
| Early on there was not a significant uptick in flu cases turning
| to to pneumonia, so that would not have sparked interest.
|
| Early on there was not a spike in deaths, so that would not have
| e sparked an interest.
|
| In fact when the Chinese discovered covid, there was absolutely
| no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was taking place.
|
| But somehow the Chinese knew that they had a very contagious, bat
| based virus circulating, based on no information.
|
| Everyone is focused on the wrong thing, I want to know how they
| discovered it with no information?
|
| I've always believed this was an lab accident by a technician
| that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too
| many family members got sick and it was obvious something was
| wrong.
|
| They knew about the virus because it was being studied, and
| that's the only answer that makes any sense.
| m0llusk wrote:
| You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet.
| There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people
| were dropping dead in the street. That was the freak out that
| led to the Communist Party not being able to keep a lid on the
| whole mess. It wasn't just sick people showing up in hospitals
| in huge numbers, it was dead bodies lying in the streets.
|
| The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of
| limited relevance. Viruses have been hopping from animal hosts
| from humans for a while and if anything this one was late and
| long expected. Either way the kind of preparations we need to
| make for future events are the same.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| > There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people
| were dropping dead in the street
|
| Wasn't this happening well after they knew the virus existed?
| From my understanding, they knew the virus existed very early
| on. Much early than when people were dropping dead in the
| streets or getting dragged out of their apartments.
| VivaCascadia wrote:
| This episode of Frontline does a really good job of walking
| through the timeline of what was discovered and when, and how
| long they sat on that information before taking action.
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...
| xienze wrote:
| > I've always believed this was an lab accident by a technician
| that needed their job so they covered it up until they and too
| many family members got sick and it was obvious something was
| wrong.
|
| Really drove me nuts how early on everyone, everyone was
| working overtime to try and dismiss the possibility that this
| was some sort of lab leak. I'm sorry but the way China went
| absolutely DEFCON 1 (welding people into their apartments,
| blocking the roads out of town, nightly fumigations of public
| spaces) within a short period of time strongly suggests that
| they had a "oh crap, _that thing we were working on got out_"
| moment. Never understood why people were so eager to dismiss
| this possibility.
| miemo23 wrote:
| but there was a spike in pneumonia related cases... didn't a
| doctor sound the alarm on this (and was reprimanded for it)
| hfjfktkrkf wrote:
| From what I've read when you have pneumonia you receive
| antibiotics. If that doesn't work, they test a lung wash
| against the usual bacterias/viruses. If that doesn't match
| anything, it's called unexplained pneumonia, and that gets
| escalated and the lung wash is sent to top labs for sequencing.
| When they did this, they got a 90% match to SARS and raised the
| alarm.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| For anyone who wants to set their Bayesian priors to estimate the
| probability of a lab leak I recommend this list:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
|
| For example, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) escaped from the
| lab twice, both in 2003 and 2004.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Also important to remember that the WIV had ongoing research in
| bat coronaviruses. Now that isn't unusual after SARS, but it
| does slightly make the theory more plausible.
| [deleted]
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Also, the Obama administration banned gain of function research
| broadly due to "biosafety incidents" at federal research labs
| in the US. The announcement explicitly called out research on
| SARS:
| https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d...
| offby37years wrote:
| And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
| is one of only two BSL-4 labs in China.
| robin21 wrote:
| > BSL-4 level lab put into operation in January 2018
|
| And only 2 years later we have an outbreak
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Lab 257 is an amazing book about germ research labs. It
| fascinated me both with how hard it is to contain diseases
| under ideal conditions (lab 257 was on an island miles from
| anything inhabited) and how poor of a job people who should
| have known better, the actual virologists and people with MDs,
| did at containing diseases they were researching.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora...
|
| Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Warning: this book is non-fiction and is scary.
|
| It may be scary, but it's not non-fiction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_257#Discredited_consp.
| ..
|
| > A discredited 2004 book entitled Lab 257: The Disturbing
| Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory
| fueled the conspiracy theories. Archived specimens show that
| Lyme disease was endemic well before the establishment of
| Plum Island laboratory. Additionally, Lyme disease was never
| a topic of research at Plum Island, according to the US
| Department of Homeland Security and Department of
| Agriculture.
| gregwebs wrote:
| This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always
| be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on
| its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to
| Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is
| lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the
| hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]
|
| This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened
| in the United States and many places in the world. We need to
| avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the
| truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...
| trhway wrote:
| >a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and
| many places in the world.
|
| no. US stopped doing that GoF research and funded it in those
| Wuhan labs instead - basically like outsourcing of any other
| environmentally dangerous manufacturing, etc. to China.
| anthony_romeo wrote:
| I agree. Personally I've not dismissed this possibility at all.
| But as it stands, it's just a hypothesis with suggestive
| information, but nothing concrete. There are verified wrongs to
| criticize them for, and can be a starting point where
| remediation can begin, rather than drum up hate and criticism
| of mere hypothetical wrongs. And of course, one such example of
| verifiable wrong could be proof of destroying evidence of the
| disease's origin...
| president wrote:
| > We need to avoid demonizing China over this
|
| Not a productive message and this sentiment just distracts from
| the discussion, which is playing into China's narrative.
|
| > if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to
| prevent another pandemic outbreak.
|
| It's a bit late isn't it? China witheld early information about
| the virus and prevented WHO scientists from visiting ground
| zero. Silencing journalists and censoring information from
| coming out all the while pushing propaganda...what do you think
| we're going to learn from them that hasn't already been swept
| under the rug?
|
| I find it absolutely flabbergasting the amount of trust people
| in the US and other countries place on the Chinese government.
| dang wrote:
| This comment is a noticeable step into nationalistic
| flamewar. Please don't do that in HN comments. That way lies
| hell, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion
| here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| kevbin wrote:
| The truth hurts. China released a deadly virus into the
| world. It tried to cover it up. It tried to blackmail
| Australia. It is extorting Africa.
|
| China and the Chinese people must accept their
| responsibility for this catastrophe. They must let the rest
| of the world, in the guise of the UN, come in and sort out
| how much of this crime was intentional and how much
| incompetence.
|
| China mist be held accountable. It should pay reparations
| to every other nation. It should be banned from doing any
| biomedical research until it can probably meet
| westernsafety standards.
| hokumguru wrote:
| Taking a step back, does he not at least bring up some
| valid points?
|
| The CCP did bar scientists from early investigation and has
| gone to considerable lengths to suppress news outlets from
| properly reporting on the issue at hand.
|
| This does at least deserve some criticism.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I think the theory should be dismissed because it's not
| falseable.
|
| Right now, there is no question that say, the US military has
| samples of Coronavirus.
|
| Even if Coronavirus originated in nature, going forward if
| there is ever a new outbreak, you technically can't prove it
| wasn't the US military accidentally messing up can you?
|
| You don't know the characteristics of the strain they're
| holding, and if it originated in nature then any study of it
| will show it came from nature.
|
| Likewise you can't prove it wasn't the lab. They could have had
| samples of it from before, how can you prove the negative of
| that? It's hard to prove you _didn 't_ have access to a given
| thing.
| jounker wrote:
| It's quite possible that it's a pangolin virus. Guess what
| trafficked in Chinese wet markets?
| eloff wrote:
| The earliest cases has no known link to the wet market.
| That's an old hypothesis.
| wilg wrote:
| Apparently the Pangolin thing is looking less likely:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4
| tripletao wrote:
| Pangolins were an early suspect, but Alina Chan discovered
| that the multiple pangolin papers were all from the same
| batch of smuggled pangolins. This makes it much more likely
| that the pangolins were infected by something else, in the
| same way that housecats get infected by their human owners.
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1..
| ..
|
| Because of this, Nature has placed an editor's note on their
| pangolin paper:
|
| > 11 November 2020 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that
| concerns have been raised about the identity of the pangolin
| samples reported in this paper and their relationship to
| previously published pangolin samples. Appropriate editorial
| action will be taken once this matter is resolved.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x
|
| No one is seriously proposing pangolins anymore, not even
| Daszak and the Chinese. The proximal host for MERS (camels)
| was identified in a little over a year, and for the original
| SARS (palm civets) in a little less. For SARS-CoV-2, despite
| the much greater effort, we're still waiting.
| kevbin wrote:
| > We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to
| ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another
| pandemic outbreak.
|
| No, we need to shame China and the Chinese people until they
| respect basic human dignity. Until they do, the country and its
| people are a dangerous, malignant threat to the civilized--
| i.e., Western--world.
| justinpowers wrote:
| A government and its people are not equivalent. The people
| should not be shamed in the same manner that you would shame
| a government.
|
| More importantly, with your last sentence you're implying
| that China and the entire eastern world is not civilized.
| Shame on you.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the
| authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology:
|
| > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is
| helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic
| emergence in the future.
|
| China clearly contributed valuable research into bat
| coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these
| after the first deadly SARS. I think it's silly to presume CCP
| engineered a virus as part of some warfare strategy, or even to
| vilify/sanction them for a lab leak if it indeed was the cause
| (mistakes happen).
|
| However, CCP's resistance to researching the origins of COVID
| is frustrating. Lab escapes happen. There are well-documented
| cases of the original SARS virus leaking from a lab in Beijing
| in 2004 (killing at least one person)--why would it be
| impossible all of a sudden now?
|
| [0]
| https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-...
| fulion wrote:
| In fact, it is very likely that the virus was brought to China by
| American soldiers during the military Games held in Wuhan,
| because there have been patients with similar pneumonia in the
| United States for a long time, but it has not been taken
| seriously. It just happened that the Spring Festival travel rush
| in China led to the widespread outbreak of the virus and was
| widely paid attention to
| benlumen wrote:
| Are you joking?
|
| > Account created 2 minutes ago
|
| Interesting.
| someperson wrote:
| The "virus brought in by foreign soldiers during 2019
| Military World Games" is a widely used narrative in
| government of China propaganda.
|
| It's understandable that many people believe it.
|
| It's not just paid trolls ("wumao") who believe this, but
| even normal people are susceptible to spreading such
| falsehoods.
| benlumen wrote:
| That's a brand new account pushing that narrative. They're
| here.
| fulion wrote:
| In the United States, many variants of the new coronavirus
| have been detected, and the types of these viruses are more
| complex than those found in China.
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| a.k.a. Please don't feed the you know what.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fulion wrote:
| Long before the virus was discovered in China, many people died
| in the United States because of the mysterious e-cigarette. Now
| it seems that these people are probably suffering from the new
| crown virus, but no one noticed it at that time.
| benlumen wrote:
| Literally a brand new account shilling a US origin theory.
| This is the internet now.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't. I know it doesn't feel this way, but replying
| is worse than the original comment.
|
| If people follow the site guidelines and flag such
| provocations without replying, the thread grounds out. By
| feeding it, you furnish a circuit and all the current
| necessary for a prolonged electrocution.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| benlumen wrote:
| Understood, thanks for taking the time to explain.
| benlumen wrote:
| Related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26389690 (In 2018,
| US Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan
| Lab - politico.com)
| Pyramus wrote:
| Please check the actual cables before jumping to conclusions
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26447042
| neartheplain wrote:
| "If you actually read the cables [...]"
|
| Link?
| EMM_386 wrote:
| MIT Technology Review, last week:
|
| "Did the coronavirus leak from a lab? These scientists say we
| shouldn't rule it out."
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/18/1021030/coronavi...
| neonate wrote:
| Also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 (The Lab
| Leak Hypothesis - nymag.com)
| trynton wrote:
| Without any verifiable evident, it just doesn't make sense. There
| is a continual exchange of information between Wuhan and other
| centers of disease control. So it would be very difficult to keep
| such a secret. Besides, if it was a virus that escaped, then the
| Chinese would already have the means to create a vaccine and so
| save the planet. Instead they did nothing and sat on it.
| Spooks wrote:
| >have the means to create a vaccine and so save the planet
|
| is that true though? Aren't a lot of diseases being worked on
| in labs without the means to cure them yet
| Uninen wrote:
| There's a recent episode of Joe Rogan podcast (#1616) with Jamie
| Metzl that goes quite deep in this very topic:
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/7aitKgecZ0fPKjT15no5jU?si=h...
|
| He's also published a blog post titled "Origins of SARS-CoV-2" on
| his Web site: https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/
| SlipperySlope wrote:
| The trend of circumstantial evidence continues to favor the lab
| leak hypothesis. In contrast there is no new circumstantial
| evidence favoring the natural origin hypothesis.
|
| Reported last year...
|
| US investigating 'hazardous event' in Wuhan lab in October
| Alleged 'hazardous event' occurred days before Wuhan Military
| World Games in October
|
| Plus, genetic drift research shows virus first cases in October.
| musicale wrote:
| I remember reading this article in the WP a year ago which seemed
| to conflate viral escape with bioengineering and imply that lack
| of the latter implies lack of the former:
|
| "Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that
| was already debunked"
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
| esja wrote:
| The mainstream press were all conflating accidental leaks with
| bioweapons engineering. It went on for months.
| Graffur wrote:
| Upvoted. People are brainwashed in both directions but discussion
| shouldn't be banned.
|
| EDIT: The downvotes to me represent people who want to silence
| discussion on the matter.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments,
| especially on divisive topics.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Please also don't go on about downvotes. As the site guidelines
| say, this never does any good and it makes boring reading.
| dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp wrote:
| So much opinionated certainty.
|
| Seems like the only consensus is that the origin was (lab-leak ||
| zoonotic). Given the unlikelihood of ever knowing the true origin
| story, future epidemic mitigation efforts should just assume both
| causes. History is rich with examples of both.
| f430 wrote:
| I recall many people calling the Wuhan lab leak theory as
| conspiracy on HN. They were adamant that it came from bats.
| Interestingly enough, those accounts were all brand new accounts
| and some haven't been active on HN for several months all of
| sudden started coming out of the wood works.
| jtdev wrote:
| What!? I thought it came from a shipment of fish sticks...
| dang wrote:
| Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to
| HN--especially on divisive topics. The guidelines are clear on
| this, and we ban accounts that break them repeatedly. Given
| that we've had to warn you half a dozen times now, it's time
| for you to review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and fix this.
| jtdev wrote:
| My apologies, I was simply trying to make a sarcastic
| observation regarding the ridiculousness of one of the CCP's
| bogus explanations for the virus origin.
| Graffur wrote:
| As someone else who has been unfairly flagged on this thread,
| I will stand up for jtdev. A quick scan of their profile and
| posts show they have been here 2-3 years. They have a small
| number of on topic submissions about CEOs, technologies and
| science. Their posts are normal enough. There's the obvious
| theme that they're not in the Woke club though.
| Leary wrote:
| The virus acquired the traits that made it infectious to humans
| either through natural selection or bio-engineering.
|
| If it was through natural selection, then it was likely such
| virus was going to cause a pandemic whether it was leaked by the
| lab or not, since presumably there's a natural reservoir of the
| virus.
| hootbootscoot wrote:
| Hypothesis. Theories have evidence. This hypothesis has
| circumstantial evidence that a basic study in RNA molecules,
| virii, hydrolysis, mutation, protein-mimicry, "trying all keys of
| a combination lock, getting the right one gives you a direct
| ticket to an animal cell taking you into it's DNA replication
| process"
|
| The so-called "Spanish Flu" of 1918 had origins in a migratory
| bird route over large tracts of pig stockyards, and the workers
| and nearby army base residents were subsequently infected and
| subsequently brought it over to Europe at the end of WW1.
|
| Given both points above, shame on USATODAY for giving the time of
| day to such dangerous speculation while much of the planet chafes
| under lockdown and is irritable and hating on China anyway...
| shameful demagoguery. Dismissed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_hydrolysis
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I'm sure everyone here can appreciate the difference between
| development and manufacturing.
|
| While I agree that it's extremely unlikely that a lab developed
| this virus, it's far more plausible for one to have manufactured
| it.
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| What makes you think it's "extremely unlikely" that this virus
| was developed in a lab, and who do you think you're agreeing
| with?
|
| > "It was very unlikely that anything could escape from such a
| place," Ben Embarek said during the Feb. 9 WHO press
| conference, citing the team's discussions with Wuhan lab
| officials about their safety protocols and audits. "If you look
| at the history of lab accidents, these are extremely rare
| events."
|
| > Yet lab accidents aren't rare.
|
| > What's rare are accidents causing documented outbreaks. But
| those have happened, including in 2004 when two researchers at
| a lab in Beijing unknowingly became infected with another type
| of SARS coronavirus, sparking a small outbreak that killed one
| person.
|
| > In the weeks since leaving Wuhan, the WHO's team has been
| questioned about its independence and depth, including by the
| Biden administration, amid media reports that China denied the
| team access to raw data on possible COVID-19 cases that were
| identified during the earliest part of the outbreak.
|
| > "We have deep concerns about the way in which the early
| findings of the COVID-19 investigation were communicated and
| questions about the process used to reach them," White House
| national security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement
| last month. "It is imperative that this report be independent,
| with expert findings free from intervention or alteration by
| the Chinese government."
|
| Why is the distinction between development and manufacturing
| relevant here? Have you read the article?
| Simulacra wrote:
| While I agree with your statement, please do not insinuate or
| ask if the commenter has read the article. It is against the
| rules. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| viklove wrote:
| HN has such odd and draconian rules that should really come
| under scrutiny more often. We're not allowed to think or
| say certain things? What?
| easton wrote:
| It's why the discourse stays on point and doesn't devolve
| into flame wars, or that's the theory, anyway. Pretty
| much everything has been designed to make people stay
| friendly.
| viklove wrote:
| Very Brave New World-esque. Make rules to keep everyone
| friendly, but meanwhile what you're actually doing is
| silencing people and making it impossible to have any
| real discussion.
|
| I better be careful, since I'm only allowed to make 4
| comments an hour I have to be very selective of the
| opinions I share.
| jhawk28 wrote:
| Asking if the user has read the article is an ad-hominem
| attack. The guidelines are there to encourage good
| discussion.
| dang wrote:
| I wish they would come under scrutiny more often--it
| would mean people are reading them!
|
| Everything on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is
| derived from (a) HN's core value of intellectual
| curiosity, which is the sole thing we're optimizing for (
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| sor...), and (b) well over 10 years of experience
| operating this place.
|
| Not only that, but they're garbage-collected
| periodically, meaning that if there's any rule there
| which isn't 'paying' for the space it consumes on that
| page, we take it out. It's like a codebase that way:
| complexity is the enemy, less is more, and deleting is at
| least as important as adding.
|
| If anyone has a cogent case for deleting one of the
| guidelines, that would be most helpful. If anyone can
| think of one that should be added, and can't be derived
| from what's already there, that would also be helpful.
| viklove wrote:
| It's very hard to be intellectually curious when I'm only
| allowed to post 3-4 comments an hour. What if I'm having
| a conversation with someone? Why am I not allowed to
| respond?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't believe anything was said about what you are
| allowed to think :)
| stunt wrote:
| Virus coming from a lab is just an effort to not invest against
| the next pandemic. This wasn't the first pandemic, and it isn't
| going to be the last one.
| Graffur wrote:
| Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about
| getting to the truth.
|
| No source of covid-19 has been found.
|
| Similar lab leaks happen frequently.
|
| BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that
| you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused
| of being a racist. But if you say South African or British
| variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest
| people aren't thinking critically about it you will be accused of
| flamebaiting or trolling. If you call out people who are trying
| to silence your comments you'll be accused of "making boring
| reading".
|
| I think it should be discussed, debated and seriously considered.
| There is a suggestion in here to assume both the animal farm and
| the lab were the cause and to respond appropriately. With lack of
| further evidence I think this is the best idea.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Here's why I dismiss it anyway:
|
| Regardless of what happened inside a lab, or how it got out, it's
| how we responded to it that ultimately matters. What did we learn
| from it? How are we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the
| future? ARE we prepared to deal with another outbreak in the
| future? If so, how long are we prepared to do so before we let
| our guards down?
|
| The people who are most interested in where it came from instead
| of how we handled it are those who are politically motivated to
| disregard safety in general. They need a boogeyman to deflect
| blame onto for their ridiculous dereliction of duty.
|
| I refuse to allow them to do so.
| xrd wrote:
| If there are "so many dangerous terrorists" worthy of trillions
| of dollars of military spending to protect me (I'm in the US, but
| all governments invoke terrorism as justification), why aren't
| those terrorists utilizing viral weapons like this person
| describes? Is there something that could stop this kind of
| threat, if it is as real as described?
| sweis wrote:
| "WHO Points To Wildlife Farms In Southern China As Likely Source
| Of Pandemic"
| https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/03/15/9775278...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...
|
| Historically, SARS-CoV-1 is suspected of being transmitted from
| bats to civets:
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291347/
|
| In Feb 2020, China shut down its wildlife farming industry and
| sent out directions on how to kill and dispose of the animals:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00677-0
|
| http://www.npc.gov.cn/npc/c30834/202002/c56b129850aa42acb584...
|
| https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/...
|
| Wildlife farming was a $70B industry that employed around 2% of
| China's workforce. There was a short-lived ban in 2003 in
| response to SARS-CoV-1, which was later rescinded.
| whytaka wrote:
| Regardless of its origin, what I cannot possibly figure out is
| why China didn't close its own borders while they were putting
| travel restrictions within.
| JulianRaphael wrote:
| Think of it from a perspective of game theory and geopolitics.
| You have an epidemic raging in your country that has led to
| lockdowns, casualties and severe economic damage. Now you have
| two options:
|
| 1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic
| damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens
| from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper
| response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and
| a loss of soft power.
|
| 2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information,
| impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading
| within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the
| rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information
| advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your
| position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand
| your soft power.
|
| What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese
| strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations.
| Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western
| rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers
| think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have
| asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly
| anyone in the West _really_ understands Chinese philosophy as
| it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it
| is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.
|
| This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
|
| Disturb the water and catch a fish (Hun Shui Mo Yu /Hun Shui Mo
| Yu )
|
| _Create confusion and exploit it to further one 's own goals._
| alacombe wrote:
| Because China first reflex is to deny anything is happening. By
| the time shit hit the fan, it's too late to do anything.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Because that would have impacted trade and commerce.
| hospadar wrote:
| Like, so what?
|
| Should we care a lot about the safety and security of places
| where dangerous infectious diseases are studied? sure!
|
| I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total lack
| of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health responses
| to new infectious diseases (regardless of their source).
|
| Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the
| other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not control
| might make mistakes. We should get better at responding fast to
| save lives.
|
| Maybe it was a sinister bio-terrorism plot. We should get better
| at responding fast to save lives. Bio-terror/warfare plan looks a
| whole lot like a good public health plan IMO.
|
| Maybe _gasp_ it really was from bats or something. We should get
| better at responding fast to save lives. This stuff DOES happen.
|
| Maybe s/.*/I don't care where it came from/g. We should get
| better at responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
| r00fus wrote:
| _This ^^^_ so very much. Think of it like infosec angle: Yes,
| it 's interesting to identify and neutralize hostile actors,
| but the 100% more effective solution is to have defense-in-
| depth and system resilience in place - because you control
| that, but you can't control the external actors unless you have
| a god-complex.
| esja wrote:
| What sort of defence in depth can work against a virus that's
| been engineered to infect humans very easily, and which can
| only be stopped by shutting down the world economy and
| waiting months or years for vaccination? I think the last
| year has proven comprehensively that we simply cannot
| implement any sort of defence in depth and need to try very
| hard to eliminate these problems at source. Just like we do
| with chemical and nuclear weapons. We don't wait to clean up
| the damage afterward, because the damage is so horrendous.
| r00fus wrote:
| How about reasonable health insurance without employment
| requirement?
|
| The defense is NOT to stop the virus (unrealistic defense
| solution) - it's to make sure we can withstand/resist it so
| things like vaccines can be put into place so we can go
| back to some sort of normal (e.g. New Zealand)
|
| The USA (only major western country without healthcare) was
| unique in how many deaths we had. 90% of those were
| unnecessary.
| selectodude wrote:
| USA was not unique and isn't even in the top ten for
| deaths per capita. Plenty of lockdowns happened in
| Western Europe and yet Portugal, UK, Belgium and Italy
| all had higher rates than the US.
| esja wrote:
| Many European countries have better health insurance and
| higher deaths per capita than the USA. They also had
| severe lockdowns, and are now entering a third wave while
| being way behind the USA on the vaccine rollout.
| hsitz wrote:
| Yes, exactly. I would add, though, that the "Wuhan lab leak
| theory", in many people's minds, seems to be combined with a
| suspected intentional act by the Chinese government, to unleash
| a dangerous virus on the rest of the world. I think we should
| dismiss that part of the theory (it's of course not impossible,
| just not likely, mostly fun fodder for conspiracy nuts). But as
| far as infectious disease labs all across the world being
| dangerous places that need strict safety and security measures,
| duh, yes.
| danudey wrote:
| Let's also add in that the "Wuhan lab leak theory", combined
| with the "China virus" nomenclature, has resulted in huge
| increases in racist and white supremacist violence against
| people of Asian descent.
| tryonenow wrote:
| Then the solution is to teach people not to mistake Chinese
| people for the CCP, not to police language. And this
| narrative of "white supremacist" violence is a concoction
| by the media. Whatever increase that can't be accounted for
| by increased reporting is most likely not coming from the
| white supremacists or even the white demographic. It's an
| increase in inner city tensions that have been around for
| decades. And the people predominantly committing these acts
| (and I assure you statistics point to a single demographic
| in particular) are probably not the type to follow Trump's
| speeches.
| enchiridion wrote:
| It's infuriating. I'm not sure what the solution is though.
| We can just not talk about the very real lab leak
| hypothesis because some people are dangerously unstable.
| weaksauce wrote:
| you can just call it covid-19 instead of the _insert
| racist nickname_ here for it and then discuss where the
| origin it may be from. those two things are not mutually
| exclusive. hell, the spanish flu is generally not thought
| to be originated in spain but they were the only ones
| talking about because the other countries had a gag on
| discussing it.
| enchiridion wrote:
| Maybe. Based on the circumstantial evidence and the lack
| of viable competing hypotheses, I firmly believe that it
| escaped from the Wuhan lab.
|
| What does an unstable person do with that info? It seems
| like calling it the "Chinese virus" is relatively benign
| by comparison.
|
| Does censoring do anything here?
| caeril wrote:
| You could even go back another step and recognize that
| the person you're replying to has made completely
| unsubstantiated and fabricated claims about:
|
| 1. An increase in violence targeted specifically at Asian
| people that is in excess of the already-documented rise
| of violence _in general_ experienced across all groups in
| 2020.
|
| 2. An attribution that this imaginary excess violence is
| "white supremacist" in nature and intent.
|
| 3. A direct causal connection between this imaginary and
| poorly-attributed violence stemming specifically from the
| origin of the virus.
|
| It's easier to defend freedom to hypothesize when you
| realize that the people advocating against said freedom
| are, themselves, simply making shit up.
| DanBC wrote:
| Weird that you talk about "making shit up" when your post
| contains no cites.
| Stupulous wrote:
| There were 49 incidents of anti-Asian hate crime in 2019
| and 122 in 2020. I get that those numbers should be zero.
| But am I way out of line in saying that something that
| affects ~.00006% of Asian-Americans, and makes up ~1.6% of
| total hate crimes, should have no bearing on how we
| approach this subject?
|
| My genuine apologies if I am crossing a line. I know this
| is a potentially touchy subject. Hate crime is serious and
| has many negative externalities that other crimes and
| accidents don't carry. They have also been on the rise, and
| could continue to grow more significant. It just feels very
| strange to me that 70 additional crimes in a year that saw
| thousands of additional murders has been such a common
| talking point for months now.
| polartx wrote:
| The public must not be trusted to discuss x, y, or z for
| fear of what the racist white supremacists might do!
| esja wrote:
| For some reason though it's okay to refer to the "British
| variant", or the "South African variant", or the
| "Brazilian variant".
| 3327 wrote:
| Maybe if it wasn't CONCEALED by the government in the country
| of origin, our lives would be different now.
|
| Talk about that will you?
| Pyramus wrote:
| > our lives would be different now.
|
| How? Following your line of reasoning, it makes the US
| response look even worse. No enemy of the US would have
| imagined that US citizens will turn wearing a mask into a
| political statement. Before the pandemic, the US was rated #1
| in epidemic preparedness. No one had imagined that it will
| become societal consensus to sacrifice 500k American lives.
| vkou wrote:
| We had 1.5 months [1][2][3] of clear warning that this is a
| serious epidemic.
|
| When China locks 35 million people in their homes, and this
| makes the New York Times, and we don't do _anything_ to
| respond for another month, and we don 't do anything
| _meaningful_ for a month and half... What we have is a
| domestic, not a foreign problem.
|
| These articles made the news on January 8th, January 23rd,
| and February 7th. The first travel ban, that only covered
| China was on... January 30th. The first travel ban on Europe
| was on March 11th (At this point, Europe had ten times the
| active COVID cases that China did at the end of January. Why
| did we wait so long to stop travel from it?)
|
| The first state lockdown was in New York State, on March
| 22nd.
|
| Exactly how much advance warning did we need to deal with
| this pandemic? Three months? Three years? Do you think that a
| president who would constantly deny reality, to the point of
| claiming that there would be zero cases in the US by April
| would have handled this crisis any better, regardless of how
| much lead time he was given?
|
| I'll also eat my shoe if the CIA and/or the NSA weren't at
| least as aware as the NYT of the seriousness of the situation
| in China (It can't be hard, my co-workers with relatives in
| China were all aware of it from, you know, talking to folks
| back phone. On the phone.) And if they weren't - why on Earth
| are we wasting billions of dollars on their cloak-and-dagger
| budgets, when I can get a better take on current events by
| having lunch with my team?
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/health/china-
| pneumonia-ou...
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/world/asia/china-
| coronavi...
|
| [3] https://time.com/5779678/li-wenliang-coronavirus-china-
| docto....
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Let's go back even further. There was a respiratory
| pandemic a few years ago. Perhaps not as deadly but still a
| pandemic. That resulted in no N95 or PPE stockpile. We knew
| we dodged a bullet yet no prep for next time?
| esja wrote:
| Would you write the same response about chemical or nuclear
| weapons research? I hope not.
|
| Yet we've just spent the last year proving that biological
| warfare will be potentially more deadly than chemical or even
| nuclear warfare.
|
| Decades ago we banned research into those other weapons and
| implemented international treaties and inspection regimes.
|
| Even the _possibility_ that this could have been a lab leak
| should scare the whole world and motivate a massive reform of
| these labs and the experiments people are conducting.
|
| I hope the people in power don't share your complacency.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > We should get better at responding fast and saving lives
|
| If the whole pandemic could've been avoided, that's part of
| getting better at this.
| dvt wrote:
| > We should get better at responding fast and saving lives (my
| opinion).
|
| I think you're wrestling with a strawman here, no one's arguing
| the inverse. But in any investigation (arson, murder, etc.) the
| details _do_ matter -- where, how, what weapon, when, and so
| on.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Respectfully, there is still a sizeable contingent of the US
| population that thinks that the pandemic is "no worse than
| the annual flu" and that efforts to combat the pandemic are
| at best a wild over-reaction and at worst some kind of
| sinister plot by the government.
| dvt wrote:
| > Respectfully, there is still a sizeable contingent of the
| US population that thinks that the pandemic is "no worse
| than the annual flu" and that efforts to combat the
| pandemic are at best a wild over-reaction and at worst some
| kind of sinister plot by the government.
|
| Respectfully, this just simply isn't supported by the data
| and the dozens upon dozens of polls available[1]. Sure,
| there's a bunch of QAnon weirdos out there or staunch Alex
| Jones acolytes, but most regular folks have been taking it
| more or less seriously: social distancing and mask-wearing
| has been almost universally adopted. Last year in April and
| May, the percentage of people that "weren't worried" about
| Covid-19 was in the _single digits_. And there is some
| mistrust out there, but it 's been well-earned: 15 days to
| flatten the curve has turned into 365 days of economic and
| social limbo.
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/308222/coronavirus-
| pandemic.asp...
| tryonenow wrote:
| The data clearly demonstrates at this point that the virus
| is indeed comparable to the flu, except with higher R
| value. This is also an implied strawman, that sizable
| contingent that you are alluding to is questioning whether
| the price of the lockdowns, and continued lockdowns, and
| approach to lockdowns, are worth the mitigation.
|
| Clearly the virus is only a major issue for elderly and
| infirm patients, where the vast majority of people under
| the age of 30-40 present mildly or asymptomatically. And if
| that's indeed the case, then perhaps forcing the entire
| population to shelter in place for more than a year makes
| less sense than, say, recommending protective measures
| primarily for the vulnerable.
| jariel wrote:
| Both things matter a lot.
|
| In particular, if true that it 'leaked' ... it's not like other
| nations are leaking pathogens which kill millions and cause 5
| Trillion in destruction. It would literally change the
| geostrategic equation overnight and be seminal, defining world
| event certainly bigger than 9/11. On the scale of a WW.
|
| If it was quasi-intentional (this is definitely not true, but
| since you speculated...) then it would be an act of war and the
| most damaging attack on the US (and other nations) ever. The US
| and the world would have to go to war with China over this.
| (Again this surely is not the case).
|
| All while the US/EU/Rest of Word 'get better' at the above.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > I think we should care A LOT MORE about our [apparent total
| lack of] ability to quickly deploy effective public health
| responses to new infectious diseases (regardless of their
| source).
|
| Then we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the
| types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.
|
| > Maybe it was an accident at a sloppy lab, ok, so labs on the
| other side of the planet in sovereign countries we do not
| control might make mistakes. We should get better at responding
| fast to save lives.
|
| What's the cost-benefit analysis for running the lab in the
| first place? Was any of it's research used in producing the
| vaccine? If it's all about saving lives, can't we be mad at
| both the lacking response and the laboratory at the same time?
|
| > I don't care where it came from [...] We should get better at
| responding fast and saving lives (my opinion).
|
| Those two goals seem in conflict with each other. Good offense
| is something we should aspire too.. but that doesn't mean we
| should entirely ignore defense as well.
| Pyramus wrote:
| I agree with parent's point to focus on defence, because a)
| defence is where the US leadership, but arguably also large
| parts of society, horribly failed and b) defence lies within
| your locus of control.
|
| Before the pandemic, the US was actually rated #1 for endemic
| preparedness. No one had imagined that wearing a piece of
| cloth to protect others would become a political statement.
| No one was dreaming of the loss of half a million (!)
| American lives being remotely acceptable.
|
| I would even go so far as to argue that from a psychological
| perspective the situation is similar to losing a war. US
| society will have to come to terms with what happened and how
| to prevent it in the future, and that's at the heart of
| parent's post.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| > we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the
| types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks.
|
| Why not? Seriously, this is the "let's just stop developing
| nukes" argument... someone will and whether we're prepared or
| not is on us.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| For one, the US banned such research and specifically for
| SARS: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/
| doing-d...
|
| We should also remember that there were past lab leaks in
| China of SARS, including ones that led to smaller outbreaks
| and deaths: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-
| sars-death
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Why not?
|
| It's not worth the risk.
| vkou wrote:
| Yes, but getting better at dealing with infectious diseases
| that we had ~1.5 months of advance warning for doesn't score
| political points among the base. The base does not like most of
| the machinery that is required to 'get better' at epidemic
| control.
|
| If your goal is not good governance, but getting re-elected by
| your base, that is not something you need to optimize for.
| zozin wrote:
| Maybe, just maybe you can care about two things at the same
| time? Maybe, just maybe, a Wuhan lab leak was concealed by the
| Chinese gov't to save face, thus shrinking the amount of time
| we had to respond fast in order to save lives?
| danudey wrote:
| Western nations had plenty of time to react, relatively
| speaking. The US was hit especially hard, though, by policies
| which dismantled the government's ability to handle this sort
| of event, the discarding of a practiced playbook for
| responding to this sort of event, and government and right-
| wing lies and conspiracy theories.
|
| Given that the US government's response was basically to do
| nothing until it was too late, and then to do nothing except
| hinder the states' abilities to respond, it's hard to imagine
| that an extra six months' time would have made any
| difference, other than giving them six more months to
| downplay and dismiss the problem.
|
| So yeah, we can care about whether the Chinese government was
| trying to save face, but in the end does it _matter_ whether
| that 's the case or not? The only thing we can change is our
| own countries' responses to pandemics like this.
| selectodude wrote:
| The virus was ripping roughshod through Northern Italy and
| New York City in January. It's nothing but an anecdotal
| data point but my friend had a suspicious cough in the
| middle of February and I tested positive for antibodies in
| May.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Worrying about where it came from is misdirection to distract
| us from the real issue that you pointed out: That nearly all
| countries totally failed to effectively deal with it and
| contain the spread, resulting in a body count that should be
| totally unacceptable. We got extraordinarily lucky that it
| _wasn 't_ super deadly. Imagine if the next COVID is 20X
| deadlier and hits uniformly across age ranges. We're doomed if
| we take the approach we took this time around.
| mc32 wrote:
| And maybe people should not have dismissed it as a crockpot
| idea that should be dismissed out or hand and had Twitter
| suspensions over mentioning it.
|
| And maybe if it was a leak and the world had been warned of
| the dangers then they would have locked down movement to and
| from the origin before it began to spread internationally.
| esja wrote:
| The way China responded to the leak, I don't think they
| felt it was a crackpot idea. Quite the reverse.
| tryonenow wrote:
| An excellent case against twitter's "fact checking" and
| censorship. They are not experts, and as this whole debacle
| proves, experts are fallible too, and it is not twitter's
| place to determine and censor dissent from consensus.
| enchiridion wrote:
| Yes and no. The response would have been far greater if the
| virus was more deadly. This virus was not that deadly
| (relatively), so ended up getting half measures.
| tryonenow wrote:
| I imagine if it were deadlier, people would have been more
| incentivised to deal with it. Bodies piling up on the streets
| is a much better motivator for staying inside and socially
| distancing than news reports of regional hospitals being
| gradually overwhelmed by a predominantly mild or asymptomatic
| virus.
|
| The fact is that even ignoring government response, all of
| our medical institutions seemed to presume that this was yet
| another [avian, swine, bird, ...] flu outbreak and it would
| be about as minimally impactful for the west as the rest have
| been. Which indicates that doctors and hospital
| administration were either not reading the literature coming
| out of China as early as last january 2020, or they simply
| disregarded it as sensationalist and/or sloppy. And, to be
| fair, given the state of crisis that our research
| institutions are in globally, I can't entirely blame them,
| though I still think it was irresponsible that no one seemed
| to make any preparations for months after the outbreak was
| apparent. It's as if everyone sat on their hands waiting for
| the government to tell them it was serious.
| waheoo wrote:
| Medical professionals are commonly wildly uninformed about
| recent research. Most GPs don't keep up on new research
| decades old let alone cutting edge research out of lancet.
| nexus2045 wrote:
| Especially considering Contagion was filmed close to 10 years
| ago...
| dfee wrote:
| This reads like "we shouldn't worry about the cause, only the
| effect". As in, I'm unable to see another interpretation of
| your remark.
|
| No! We should worry about the cause _and also_ concern
| ourselves with managing the effect.
|
| If we can prevent this, we should try. And, if our (American)
| politicians can be held to account for mishandling the
| situation, the WHO and China should be scrutinized on the
| international stage.
| [deleted]
| tkinom wrote:
| If it is indeed "sloppy lab" leak the virus and we don't care,
| it will happen again.
| onethought wrote:
| As has been pointed out, it will happen again no matter what.
| The vectors of deadly disease occurring are huge. The
| response is the piece we can properly control.
| esja wrote:
| If it is shown that this occurred because scientists took a
| virus and made it much more infectious to humans, banning
| that sort of research would mitigate a lot of the risk.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Would it ? I mean it's the same for nuclear. You can try
| to Ban it but someone will eventually get it. The
| difference here is that Nuclear Weapons aren't formed in
| nature will virus can be.
| esja wrote:
| Viruses may be formed in nature, but we've been dealing
| with that for all of our evolutionary history. Gain of
| function experiments are new and introduce much greater
| dangers.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| We should care about it because it will help prevent the next
| outbreak. Not only that, we should hold the CCP accountable on
| suppressing reports of COVID-19 early on, which delayed the
| world's understanding/preparation/response. Furthermore, China
| should have shut down all their ports much earlier. Take a look
| at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how
| ..., an article titled "How China locked down internally for
| COVID-19, but pushed foreign travel"
| pasquinelli wrote:
| cool. i agree, we need to git gud at public health. that
| notwithstanding, we should also know if this virus was made or
| not, if we can know, because if it was, that needs to be
| addressed from a public health policy perspective. imho, natch.
| CoryAlexMartin wrote:
| Knowing the environment in which the virus developed can help
| us better understand it, which will strengthen our ability to
| appropriately respond to it, now and in the future.
|
| You _should_ care about knowing where it came from if you want
| to save lives.
| burntoutfire wrote:
| > Like, so what?
|
| Compensation for damage inflicted, for one thing? If a country
| is inept at handling deadly viruses, tries to handle them
| anyway and in result causes millions of deaths and trillions of
| dollars worth of financial loss, they should be liable for the
| damage they've done?
| helloedward wrote:
| Hey man, you are supremely arrogant. No one is advocating that
| we loosen global pandemic preparedness, you can stop gasping.
| People talk about lab leak for a litany of reasons, but you are
| just grandstanding and straw-manning an argument no one is
| making. I can't stand you.
| sunstone wrote:
| The thing that really lends credibility to this theory is that
| nation states have been suspicious of this from the first few
| months. These are not ding bat facebook groups but countries that
| have a fair amount at stake by voicing these concerns and yet
| they still brought it up. I'm 7/10 that the lab leak theory has
| legs.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| This is definitely not my area of expertise but:
|
| role of furin cleavage site in covid:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-020-0184-0
|
| "In fact, no influenza virus with a furin cleavage site has ever
| been found in nature,"
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/
|
| Where did this mutation come from?
| bugzz wrote:
| It's never been found in an influenza virus in nature, but
| covid isn't an influenza virus. Is this never found in
| coronaviruses in nature?
| tshaddox wrote:
| From that second link:
|
| > Although they only emerge under artificial conditions in
| influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are found
| within several branches of the coronavirus family tree.
| However SARS-CoV-2 is the only lineage B coronavirus found
| with one, and the only other coronaviruses known to have them
| are only at most 60% identical to this novel coronavirus.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I'm not waynesonfire, but seriously, what is up with people
| making deliberately misleading claims (e.g. highlighting it
| is not found in influenza viruses, even though covid virus
| is not influenza), and then providing a link _that
| specifically debunks the implication they are trying to
| make_.
|
| It's like people just depend on nobody following the links
| they post.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that 's easier to criticize. Assume good faith._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| stonogo wrote:
| Hi dang,
|
| I am curious to know if this guideline applies only when
| responding to HN comments, or if it should be applied to
| source material in article links as well. I've noticed a
| lot more conspiracy-theorizing comments lately and it's
| hard to engage when the whole premise of a given comment
| is accusing someone else of misrepresenting facts.
|
| Thanks for all your hard work, regardless!
| koheripbal wrote:
| I'm not Dang, but I think it's a generally good life
| lesson that should apply always.
| dang wrote:
| It totally applies to the articles too. That wasn't in my
| mind when we introduced that guideline but it turns out
| to apply just as much at that level.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > However SARS-CoV-2 is the only lineage B coronavirus
| found with one
|
| It's unusual even for coronavirus.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Do you expect it to be unusual for coronaviruses that
| manage to cause a pandemic? Even if it is rare, as long
| as it is not unique, those priors are unbalanced.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| It's really only unusual for lineage B coronaviruses:
|
| > Although they only emerge under artificial conditions
| in influenza viruses, these furin cleavage sites are
| found within several branches of the coronavirus family
| tree.
|
| Even the original quote, "In fact, no influenza virus
| with a furin cleavage site has ever been found in nature"
| leaves out something important:
|
| > the fact remains that every highly pathogenic avian
| influenza virus, defined by having a furin cleavage site,
| has either been found on commercial poultry farms that
| create the pseudo-natural conditions necessary for serial
| passage, or created in laboratories with gain-of-function
| serial passage experiments.
|
| That is, the authors are defining "in nature" not to
| include commercial poultry farms.
| wahern wrote:
| "Furin cleavage sites naturally occur in coronaviruses", http
| s://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...
| StringyBob wrote:
| The Times newspaper (UK) has also some pretty good investigative
| coverage with a well-produced podcast episode covering Covid
| origins -
| https://play.acast.com/s/storiesofourtimes/failuresofstate-t...
| conspiritards wrote:
| The absolute state of this thread, it's full of conspiracy theory
| retards.
|
| Sort yourselves out, "hackers".
| duxup wrote:
| I wouldn't dismiss it.
|
| I just haven't seen any evidence of it that I think 'proves' it.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Serious coronaviruses have jumped into people like, twice in
| the last 20 years entirely naturally[0], and so many more
| people have contact with animals outside of labs than within
| labs (orders of magnitude!), that it seems much more likely
| that SARS-CoV-2 jumped the same way than any lab-leak idea.
| Like, it's physically possible, and it would be important to
| know if that's what happened- people shouldn't dismiss it!- but
| I don't know how much it should be entertained as a real
| likelihood.
|
| [0] natural insofar as humans intruding onto wildlife is
| natural
| [deleted]
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Serious cornaviruses jumped into people probably dozens of
| times in the last 20 years, and caused 3 epidemics, not two.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I meant to say two times other than Sars-CoV-2 (SARS and
| MERS).
| koheripbal wrote:
| Well it doesn't help that they've blocked the investigation.
| wrnr wrote:
| The link between the Wuhan lab and the virus is circumstantial,
| sure it's strange the virus shows up in a city with the only
| level 4 biolab in China where they research corona viruses, but
| only if the virus did originate from Wuhan. I don't think we
| know all the corona viruses in the wild and who was patient
| zero was.
| tantalor wrote:
| Easy answer: it's impossible to prove a negative.
|
| In this case, that the lab was _not_ responsible.
| bootlooped wrote:
| How do we prove that accused people are not guilty of crimes
| then?
| stonogo wrote:
| In the US courts system, we do not. People are presumed
| innocent, and the burden of proof is on the prosecution.
| bootlooped wrote:
| True. Maybe it was a poor analogy.
|
| In a bizarre world where you were presumed guilty, could
| you do anything? If you submitted evidence that you were on
| another continent at the time of the crime, doesn't that
| prove you didn't do it? (Assuming the crime is something
| you must be physically present to do)
| tim333 wrote:
| We may find proof of a zoonotic origin away from the lab.
| Delk wrote:
| You can't prove it, but apparently you can try to find evidence
| to see if it seems likely:
|
| https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200317175442.h...
| tantalor wrote:
| It can be both! The lab could have mishandled a natural
| specimen, causing first human infection.
| Simulacra wrote:
| I think it's possible the virus leaked from a lab in China, but
| it's also possible it was transmitted in the wild a la "wet
| markets". Either way, regrettably due to Chinese propaganda and
| tight controls on speech and the press, it is highly unlikely the
| world will get an open and honest investigation from the Chinese
| government. The PRC simply cannot be trusted, which sadly has
| added immense fuel to all conspiracy theories involving that
| nation.
|
| I think the Wuhan/COVID/Coronavirus can be compared to the Soviet
| government's response to Chernobyl. Great efforts were made to
| keep a lid on that disaster from the people, and the world, until
| it was too great to ignore. Granted, a long time ago, but it's an
| example of what a totalitarian government (like China) might do
| in the face of such catastrophe.
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| My own idea is a combination of the two. I wonder if it leaked
| out of the lab by a lab employee trying to make some money on
| the side by selling lab animals to the wet market. (Note well:
| This is just my "seems kind of plausible" guess. I have no
| actual evidence to support it. And no, it's not actually "my
| own" idea - I heard it suggested by someone, who also had no
| evidence that I recall.)
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Ban Hun Dan So you say, it was the janitor, with dead lab
| animals, in the wet market, making some surplus money?
|
| I assumed it was the gardener, in the dining room, with the
| hatchet..
|
| Its almost as if the whole human species could not be trusted
| with dangerous tools and regularly drops the ball.
|
| These wet-market are such a medieval relic and all just
| because of superstitious nonsense about refrigerated food
| being bad for your chi.
|
| Homeopathy, TMC and how those shamanistic practices are all
| called wherever by whomever kill. 2.7 million so far...
|
| Even worser, when you think about all those other "tech"
| miracles enlightenment zealots insist humanity can be
| entrusted. We blow a nuclear power plant every ten years,
| drop the vials like they are hot, but hey more power into
| each pocket.
|
| Cant wait for the first long-range flying car, getting hacked
| and used in a remote attack. That surely will be the day,
| someone will admit that tech is limited,not by what can be
| done, but by who gets to wield it.
|
| Makes one wonder though, that day i entrusted that vital
| system for millions, to that upstream repo.. was i the
| janitor that day..
| michaelmrose wrote:
| This is an extremely poor theory formulated by blindly
| speculating and then skipping the step where one gathers
| evidence for or against or even considers whether the idea
| even makes sense in theory.
|
| Nobody would sell lab animals from a virology lab to markets
| to eat. The consequences are obvious, animals would be
| accounted for, the risk would be extremely high to the
| persons future, and the profits small.
|
| It's the kind of ideas you find on racist conspiracy theory
| blogs and you shouldn't share it here.
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