[HN Gopher] The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus
___________________________________________________________________
The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus
Author : nnx
Score : 88 points
Date : 2021-03-28 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.technologyreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.technologyreview.com)
| djrogers wrote:
| > One problem with the lab leak theory is that it presumes the
| Chinese are lying or hiding facts, a position incompatible with a
| joint scientific effort.
|
| LOLOLOLOL Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor. Doesn't
| the default assumption about an authoritarian government have to
| be that it _is_ lying and hiding facts that would harm it?
| tbihl wrote:
| There's no need to talk about assumptions. The WHO suppressed
| evidence of the disease at the behest of PRC. The WHO
| fortunately finds itself in the convenient position where
| "Trump's wrong" makes a right. But an impartial WHO
| investigation and a forthright Chinese disclosure are two
| things I would never use as bases for understanding what
| happened.
| 99_00 wrote:
| The CCP prohibited the virus's genetic sequence from being
| published. After a lab published it, it was shut down.
|
| >On 11 January, Edward C. Holmes contacted Zhang for permission
| to publish the virus's genome. Zhang granted permission, and
| Holmes published the genome on virological.org that day.[1][3]
| The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing
| information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said
| he did not know about the prohibition.[3] The next day, the
| Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close
| temporarily for "rectification".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen#COVID-19_pandem...
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is not even limited to authoritarian governments.
| williamdclt wrote:
| I think it mostly is, we're just not always happy about which
| countries actually are in the "authoritarian" bucket
| flavius29663 wrote:
| most modern governments did similar stuff in the past few
| decades. I 'm having trouble thinking of one that didn't.
|
| You can call them all authoritarian, but then the word
| loses all meaning, you would just say "any strong modern
| government is authoritarian"
| mkolodny wrote:
| Switzerland's government isn't authoritarian. The Swiss
| government is the whole adult population. Every Swiss
| citizen over 18 can propose and vote on laws. No subset
| of Swiss people can force other Swiss people to do
| anything without approval from Swiss voters.
| cletus wrote:
| So I also don't favour the lab leak theory but this is the first
| time I'd read this (emphasis added):
|
| > Nor have the labs been entirely forthcoming about what viruses
| they do know about. The Wuhan Institute of Virology possesses
| gene information about similar viruses that it has not released
| publicly. _Other information disappeared from view when the
| institute took a database offline in late 2019, just before the
| outbreak started._
|
| That's... one hell of a coincidence (in timing). It continues:
|
| > One problem with the lab leak theory is that it presumes the
| Chinese are lying or hiding facts, a position incompatible with a
| joint scientific effort. This may have been why the WHO team, for
| instance, never asked to see the offline database.
|
| There are a number of problems here:
|
| 1. "... lying or hiding facts". My suspicion is that it's most
| likely no one knows but, more importantly, no one wants to find
| out. Think about it: what's the upside of turning over those
| particular rocks?
|
| This sort of thing happens all the time. Here's an example from
| the Columbia shuttle disaster [1]:
|
| > Several people within NASA pushed to get pictures of the
| breached wing in orbit. The Department of Defense was reportedly
| prepared to use its orbital spy cameras to get a closer look.
| However, NASA officials in charge declined the offer, according
| to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) and "Comm
| Check," a 2008 book by space journalists Michael Cabbage and
| William Harwood, about the disaster. The landing proceeded
| without further inspection.
|
| A certain breed of manager will just not want certain questions
| asked.
|
| 2. As for a "joint scientific effort", that means something
| different in the West vs China. In China, everything from
| companies to sports to "scientific efforts" is an extension of
| the state. There simply is no independence to the same degree
| we'd expect.
|
| 3. The WHO team not asking to see the offline database is...
| mind-blowing. There are a lot of problems with the WHO's response
| to the coronavirus. In the early days of the pandemic, the WHO
| went out of their way to accept and spread China's versions of
| events with little scrutiny [2]. It's one reason this article
| uses the term "patsy".
|
| Again, I'm not claiming the lab theory is accurate or even likely
| but... due diligence would mean you try to independently verify
| anything that's told to you no? I imagine it was a political deal
| for the WHO to not, for example, examine the offline database
| but... really?
|
| The other problematic part of this is how long it took for this
| investigation to start. It's also interesting (although not
| necessarily damning) about how China came down hard on Australia
| for asking for an inquiry [3]. Like.. that's just not a good
| look.
|
| But again it's not necessarily guilt. I imagine China just
| doesn't want to set the precedent that it's accountable to any
| outside authority and will punish anyone for trying to make that
| happen. Still... that doesn't help your case if you're trying to
| disprove the theory that one of your labs was responsible for the
| leak.
|
| [1]: https://www.space.com/19436-columbia-disaster.html
|
| [2]: https://www.who.int/news/item/29-06-2020-covidtimeline
|
| [3]: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/29/trade-war-with-china-
| austral...
| EMM_386 wrote:
| Remember that US State Department members were warning of risky
| coronavirus research at the lab in Wuhan years before this
| pandemic happened.
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...
|
| That isn't proof of anything but all of this makes for
| interesting reading.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Josh Rogin has been misrepesenting these diplomatic cables for
| a year now. If you read the actual cables (which Rogin refused
| to publish when he wrote his first story - they only came out
| later due to a FOIA request), they did not warn that the lab
| was unsafe. The cables stated said that the lab did not yet
| have enough technicians to run at full capacity. As of the time
| of writing of the cables, the lab had not yet opened.
|
| The cables were simply arguing that the US should continue to
| fund its training program for the lab's staff (they're trained
| at the premiere US high-biocontainment laboratory, in
| Galveston, Texas). The cables did not point to any safety
| problems with the lab. The people who visited the lab and wrote
| the cables wouldn't have known how to identify safety problems
| anyways - they were just diplomats. They simply stated that the
| US training program was important and to emphasize that, they
| stated that the not-yet-opened lab did not yet have enough
| technicians.
|
| Rogin has been trying to spin this into some sort of dire
| warning, but that's simply a willful misreading of the cables.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I disagree. You are referring to part (5).
|
| Part (6) in the cable specifically warns with regard to WIV
| scientists studying SARS viruses that interact with human
| ACE2 receptors.
|
| The cable is here:
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/context/read-the-state-
| depart...
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Part 6 is about a paper published in PLoS Pathogens. It
| says nothing about safety concerns.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| You are pointing out one section while ignoring another.
|
| What about the last sentence regarding WIV scientists
| studying human-disease causing SARS coronaviruses until
| "permission is granted" by China's NHFCP? The one with
| the redacted bit at the front?
|
| I'm not sure if you are intentionally playing games with
| words here but let's cut to the chase.
|
| Edit: Reading through your comment history and
| submissions, I can see this is an account used to spin
| discussions.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| > What about the last sentence regarding WIV scientists
| studying human-disease causing SARS coronaviruses until
| "permission is granted" by China's NHFCP?
|
| What about it? This isn't any kind of warning that the
| lab is unsafe. It's completely normal (and good) for
| countries to regulate research into pathogens. Would you
| rather that China not require approval before labs study
| SARS-CoV?
|
| I honestly don't think you understand what you are
| reading.
| [deleted]
| boldpandabear wrote:
| Despite all the contradicting evidence and all the holes in the
| narrative, mankind continues to stick with the germ theory and
| viral theory paradigms.
|
| When will smart people start to get curious and start to wonder
| if virus particles were ever the cause of illness to begin with.
| jkingsbery wrote:
| So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories:
|
| 1. Direct-jump from bat population
|
| 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal
|
| 3. Came from frozen food outside of China
|
| 4. Lab accident.
|
| I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it
| sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory,
| just a crazy one.
|
| But according to this article, despite a year of investigation,
| (1) is unlikely because we haven't found anyone that interacted
| with the nearest bat population hundred of miles away that didn't
| work in the virus lab in Wuhan and that caught the virus, (2) is
| unlikely because we would have found the intermediate animal by
| now, (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China
| (and not somewhere else... if frozen food had the virus, the food
| would have had it before it was frozen, and someone else would
| have had it), and (4) is unlikely because a government famous for
| blocking information and is paranoid about how it is perceived
| domestically and internationally says "No, trust us on this one."
|
| At some point, crazy theories become the most likely. Hopefully
| I'm wrong though, and they find an explanation that isn't "lab
| accident." It seems like we should be studying viruses and
| sharing that information with each other, and accidents like this
| will make it more likely that such research doesn't happen.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I don't see why 1) is unlikely - people that work with bats
| have antibodies to bat coronaviruses already, and we know that
| even in a vacuum people often have very mild symptoms or no
| symptoms at all. It's even more likely since the virus was
| probably not adapted to human hosts initially.
|
| 2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years,
| sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual
| intermediate animal.
|
| 4) is unlikely because further analysis cannot produce a likely
| scenario. If the virus was from an animal source known to the
| lab, we would know already, and if it was due to a gain-of-
| function experiment, it would be quite unlikely for the virus
| to take so much time to adapt to humans (it still hasn't fully
| done so), and there is still a lot of function to be gained.
| Besides, there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering
| (the furin cleavage sites are perfectly well described by both
| 1 and 2), and the fact the virus does not seem to be at a local
| optima yet indicates that it's probably not the result of
| engineering by repeated selection.
| analyte123 wrote:
| It's not "quite unlikely" for a virus to adapt to humans when
| you are digging through a lab archive of wild coronaviruses
| and injecting mice that express human proteins with them to
| see how sick they get. For example the president of
| EcoHealth, which sponsored bat coronavirus research at the
| Wuhan Institute of Virology, raved in _November 2019_ about
| all the exciting work they were doing filtering bat
| coronaviruses and even recombinant viruses for ones that look
| like they could infect humans and infecting humanized mice
| with them [1].
|
| Researchers at the same lab published a study in 2017 where
| they tested the infectivity of 8 artificial coronaviruses
| (having been edited with 8 different spike proteins) on
| primate and human cell lines [2].
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/PeterDaszak/status/119763138347003495
| 1?s...
|
| [2] https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.137
| 1/j... "Rescue of bat SARSr-CoVs and virus infectivity
| experiments"
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Hmm, that is not quite what I said.
|
| If it did come from this research, which is being done
| openly with the help of many international collaborators, I
| don't understand how this could have happened without the
| virus being known to many more people, especially given the
| amount of time that passed from the first human infection
| to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!).
| It would be very surprising for no one else to know about
| it whereas normally such results are shared quite rapidly.
|
| This is why the very person you quoted, and other people
| that were involved in such research that live outside of
| China, find the theory of a lab escape from this kind of
| research exceedingly unlikely.
| 2-tpg wrote:
| > If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we
| would know already
|
| Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and
| sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic
| started.
|
| > it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much
| time to adapt to humans
|
| All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to
| human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the
| gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could
| have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-
| of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China
| did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be
| weird to see optimal adaptivity.
|
| > there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering
|
| Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known
| possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that
| produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to
| engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV _is_ a bioweapon
| itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists),
| because the lab leak could also have been from a collected
| sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering
| there at all.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| That point 1 is interesting. Got any articles/papers?
| towergratis wrote:
| > I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy
|
| Accidents happen. Even if it was a lab accident, it's not a
| reason to be outraged with the Chinese government.
|
| I think in parallel to searching for the origin, they should
| also look into the reports that Chinese government tried to hid
| it under the carpet and only admitting that it couldn't control
| it after it was already spread all over the world.
|
| That's the real crime of the Chinese government in regards to
| Covid and that's what people should be outraged about.
|
| But yeah, good luck getting an unbiased report on that.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| The problem is that this is proof that the slippery slope of
| social media censorship already has a causality. Twitter
| banned ZeroHedge, an irreverent but very well known financial
| website, for months just for pushing this theory. Yesterday's
| crazy conspiracy theories become today's plausibilities.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-
| coronav...
| scythe wrote:
| ZH singled out an individual and made statements that could
| subject him to harassment. That's not merely a case of
| having the wrong suspicions about globally significant
| events.
| syrrim wrote:
| >made statements that could subject him to harassment
|
| Not sure what said statements were, but as described,
| that is not at all a reason to ban someone. On the
| internet, legitimate criticism very frequently leads to
| harassment. That is not at all the fault of the critic,
| and as long as they didn't intend to cause harassment,
| it's no reason to ban them.
| blueboo wrote:
| Perhaps some details will clarify things. ZeroHedge
| published and publicized an article "Is This Man Behind
| The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?" with the face, address,
| and phone number of an individual -- along with an
| invitition for readers to pay him a "visit".
| towergratis wrote:
| To be fair, although we are a bit better here in west, we
| are still far from perfect. Letting the POTUS call it China
| virus, is despicable.
| shawnz wrote:
| I agree that was in poor taste, but would you say the
| naming of "Zika virus", "Ebola virus", or "Middle East
| Respiratory Syndrome" is despicable?
| ttoomm28 wrote:
| Strange word to describe that, seems rather fair
| actually. Do you think UK, south African, brazilian
| variant are 'despicable' ?
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| Let's stay on topic. The truth is that many people were
| reluctant to even consider the lab theory because it
| might look anti-Chinese at a time when Trump was
| blatantly attacking them and blaming them for the virus
| with no evidence. The point is that politics led to
| censorship that made it difficult to consider all
| possibilities.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| But the cover up is the only way Chinese government could
| react. This property is embedded and immutable in this type
| of government.
| [deleted]
| phroobster wrote:
| A never before seen coronavirus was found just miles away from
| one of only two BSL-4 laboratories in all of China, which also
| happens to publish gain of function research on coronaviruses.
| I find it amusing that anyone can claim a lab accident origin
| is "crazy".
| xienze wrote:
| For some reason so many people are hung up on "lab accident"
| implying that it was a bioweapon made by China. And honestly
| the biggest reason why this theory is rejected is because
| Trump called it the China Virus, and lots of people have this
| "Trump said a thing, so I must be in direct opposition to it"
| reflex, creating a mental block on the possibility of China
| because responsible at some level.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Especially since US and European labs have had a lot of
| accidents that risked viruses escaping the lab.
|
| I really don't have any reason to believe or disbelieve it
| came from a lab. But that possibility certainly is not crazy.
| drran wrote:
| > Especially since US and European labs
|
| Hey, Russian Federation still exists on the map.
| jsz0 wrote:
| It wouldn't even be the first time Chinese labs have leaked
| dangerous pathogens so it's entirely plausible. People who
| reject the theory outright are just not living in a reality
| based world. It has happened before and it'll probably happen
| again.
| sampo wrote:
| Here are some escape cases, from both West and East:
|
| https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2016/02/Esc...
| coding123 wrote:
| What do all large countries not at war do? Prepare for war. Why
| would people think preparing for war be a crazy idea?
| chmod600 wrote:
| I think everyone knows that #4 is a plausible theory. But it's
| frustrating to see how the media played it as a conspiracy
| theory, which just discredits the media. Kind of like how they
| said that masks aren't helpful at first, with the ulterior (but
| noble) intention of preserving the mask supply for healthcare
| workers.
|
| It just reinforces the idea that misinformation is fine as long
| as it gets people to behave the "right" way, and only bad if it
| could cause someone to do something wrong.
| Touche wrote:
| The media didn't treat #4 as a conspiracy theory. If you mean
| Tom Cotton's claims, he first implied it was intentional
| (later walked it back). He also was claiming it was a
| biological weapons lab. That's not what #4 is. It's always
| been accepted that #4 was possible.
| tpmx wrote:
| Here's an example that was topping Google News the other
| day.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/former-cdc-director-
| redfield...
| Touche wrote:
| I don't know why (1) is unlikely. We know that a lot of people
| have weak symptoms. We know that symptoms are similar to other
| diseases. If it were to start in a remote area you probably
| _wouldn 't_ notice it until it entered a big city.
| neuronic wrote:
| The lab accident isn't crazy. Happens in the West too, it's
| just something that will be politically weaponized against
| China if it were to admit it, although we just got lucky in the
| US and Europe before.
|
| Typical Western hypocrisy would be at play and China has no
| motivation whatsoever to subject itself to that.
|
| Also, SARS-1 escaped twice, in Singapore and Beijing:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
| drran wrote:
| You forgot about another country, which was not so lucky
| before, and which had an incident in their 4 level biolab
| just before the start of epidemic.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| So that is more likely than a level 4 biolab that happened
| to be IN Wuhan and was being warned about by US State
| Department officials years before this happened?
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-
| rogin...
| drran wrote:
| Yep. I cannot calculate exact numbers, but a similar
| incident happened already in the past: a blast at the
| disinfection site created an aerosol with virus
| particles, which caused infection.
|
| Distance doesn't matter so much in today's world, when
| cities are connected by planes.
| Leary wrote:
| 2 is not unlikely just because they haven't found the
| intermediate species.
|
| It took 4 years to find the immediate species in the case of
| SARS (2002->2006)
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| > we haven't found anyone that interacted with the nearest bat
| population hundred of miles away
|
| This is simply untrue. People work and live in close proximity
| to bats throughout much of China and Southeast Asia, including
| in Yunnan province. The mine workers who got sick in Mojiang in
| 2012 (where RaTG13 was discovered) were literally cleaning out
| massive mounds of bat poop.[1] There is research that shows
| that a non-negligible fraction (up to a few percent) of the
| population in some areas of Yunnan province have antibodies to
| novel SARS-related coronaviruses.[2,3] Interestingly, it is not
| known how the people in these studies were infected, and before
| they were randomly tested for these studies, they were not
| aware that they had ever been infected.
|
| > is unlikely because we would have found the intermediate
| animal by now
|
| There's no reason to expect we'd have found the intermediate
| species by now. Finding intermediate hosts can be very
| difficult. For example, it took four decades to identify the
| likely host species of Ebola, and even so, there's still a huge
| amount of uncertainty about whether there are multiple host
| species, and how spillover occurs.[4]
|
| > (3) is unlikely because the first case found was in China
|
| The frozen food hypothesis that the WHO is looking at is that
| animals that were raised or caught in Yunnan province,
| slaughtered and frozen, and sent to Wuhan might have been
| carrying the virus.
|
| Option 4 is unlikely because nobody knew about this virus
| before it appeared in December 2019. The researchers at the
| Wuhan Institute of Virology work closely with international
| scientists (including in the US, Australia, France and
| Singapore). They regularly publish identifying RNA fragments of
| the viruses they discover. The viruses that they have isolated
| and cultured in the lab are well known, because they've
| published on them extensively, and because they collaborate
| with international researchers. They have only isolated three
| SARS-related coronaviruses (the vast majority of the viruses
| they discover are only detected as RNA fragments, not "live"
| virus particles), and those viruses are all much more closely
| related to the original SARS than they are to SARS-CoV-2. The
| reason for this is that before this pandemic, researchers
| focused their attention on viruses that were close to the
| original SARS (such as WIV-1[5,6]). SARS-CoV-2 and its closely
| related viruses would have been far less interesting to them.
| The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because it
| requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus that
| they didn't tell anyone about, including their close
| collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it,
| for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and
| then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all
| these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence for
| it.
|
| The alternative is that one of the millions of people who
| regularly interact with animals that harbor SARS-related
| coronaviruses got infected, and that as is usually the case, it
| takes time and painstaking work to determine how, when and
| where that happened.
|
| 1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2951-z
|
| 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
|
| 3.
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259005361...
|
| 4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4014719/
|
| 5. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711
|
| 6. https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048
| scythe wrote:
| >The lab leak theory really is a conspiracy theory, because
| it requires the scientists at WIV to have discovered a virus
| that they didn't tell anyone about, including their close
| collaborators abroad, for them to have secretly isolated it,
| for it to have escaped from a highly secure laboratory, and
| then for them to have covered it up. You can assert that all
| these things happened, but there's precisely zero evidence
| for it.
|
| This is a generally informative and helpful comment, but I
| think there's a flaw in this argument. If WIV isolates
| viruses (from samples), there could be the possibility that a
| virus escapes before it is isolated and sequenced, or that
| the virus is not successfully isolated and sequenced but
| escapes and infects somebody. We do not need to suggest that
| they had preexisting records of SARS-CoV-2, which I would
| agree is clearly beyond reasonable speculation.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The virus was out in the wild for months before it was
| detected.
|
| For the scenario in your second paragraph to play out, the
| WIV would have to have isolated the virus, then leaked it,
| but for nothing to published or communicated to
| collaborators about it for months. This is very unlikely.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Yeah, sure go look for it more than a year later. That's how it
| works best.
|
| China and WHO spit in the face of the world. And world smiled
| back and greeted them.
| simonh wrote:
| The WHO is a horrible cobbled together mess of political
| interference and compromises.
|
| The WHO is also a vital resource for developing nations which
| lack the technical infrastructure and know-how to do their own
| research or develop their own policies, and depend on support
| from the WHO to advise and provide resources to deal with
| medical crises. It's out there saving lives across the
| developing world every day.
|
| Both of these things are true, but the reason the WHO is a
| political football is because the nation states it depends on
| for funding and resources keep kicking it about for their own
| political purposes. The WHO is the organisation our countries
| have built, organised the way we structured it, vulnerable to
| nation state interference so that our nations can interfere
| with them when we want to.
|
| The only way to get the job the WHO are tasked with done
| properly is to stop kicking them about and actually support
| them in their efforts. Insist they be freed from nation state
| interference, stop blaming them for being kicked about, and go
| after the nation states interfering with and undermining them.
| That also means reforming the WHO itself and better resourcing
| it. We need to stop being part of the problem and start being
| part of the solution.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN.
| Comments like this are destructive of the forum, regardless of
| your views on the underlying issues. Protecting the commons
| from disintegrating and destroying itself is the higher
| priority here, for what should be obvious reasons.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Touche wrote:
| How exactly did the world "smile back and greet them"?
| sto_hristo wrote:
| By not doing anything to counteract China's self-interest
| influence over the whole organization. China turned them in a
| personal PR agency that went as far as having WHO's head
| renaming the virus to something that doesn't mention its
| origins and everyone happily ate it without question.
|
| It's infuriating. The only entity of significant influence
| that offered some resistance was Trump, but his leadership
| was compromised and had little to none net support to make a
| difference.
| Touche wrote:
| This is about the name, I see.
| tomohawk wrote:
| Hint: it looks like Winnie the Pooh
| thowaway959125 wrote:
| Note that SARS-CoV-2 contains a unique furin cleavage site,
| unseen in other coronaviruses.
|
| The first to point this out, in February 2020, was the Wuhan
| Institute of Virology:
|
| https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12250-020-002...
|
| This strange furin cleave site allows the virus to bind to human
| ACE2 receptors. An interesting scientific reading on this, which
| does not rule out genetic manipulation in a lab:
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002...
| tim333 wrote:
| The article seems a reasonable summary of the situation so far.
| I'm not sure the Chinese have been as helpful as they could be in
| terms of access to patients, blood samples and so forth which
| makes it tricky to find that much.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I'm not sure the Chinese have been as helpful as they could be
| ...
|
| Talk about an understatement.
| qwerty1234599 wrote:
| Obviously not. It's some random wild animal population of an
| unknown species, living near a bat cave in rural China.
| to1y wrote:
| So this particularly odd strain came from caves 900km away and
| settled next to a virology institute which has been studying
| coronaviruses for the last 15 years? Are you a betting man? If
| you think about it the alternative(it came from nature) is
| arguably much more worrying. Does it matter? Not that much.
| It'd just put an end to the research. This field of study has
| been criticized forever for this exact reason and the fact that
| its basically fancy chemical warfare being sold as research for
| medicine. Did China let it loose on purpose? Of course not, it
| wouldn't have come from China. Does no one remember SARS
| escaped twice?
| pluc wrote:
| We'll never find out since the answer is behind a paywall
| Method-X wrote:
| https://outline.com/jDKGUn
| tim333 wrote:
| Delete cookies?
| dang wrote:
| If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post
| workarounds in the thread.
|
| This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| and there's more explanation here:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Just disable JS.
| pluc wrote:
| they don't want me to read their article, why would I
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-lab-theory-robert-redfiel...
|
| CBS News, yesterday:
|
| _Kristian G. Andersen, director of the infectious disease
| genomics, translational research institute at Scripps Research,
| noted that "We know that the first epidemiologically linked
| cluster of cases came from the Hunan market and we know the virus
| was found in environmental samples -- including animal cages --
| at the market," he said. "Any 'lab leak' theory would have to
| account for that scenario -- which it simply can't, without
| invoking a major conspiracy and cover up by Chinese scientists
| and authorities."_
| jdhn wrote:
| Is it possible that the virus got there due to it floating
| around in the air, and not because it originated in animals?
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| No.
|
| The BSL-4 high-security lab was 7 miles away.
|
| https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/
| lioeters wrote:
| Possibly that animal was Homo sapiens, whose curiosity led to
| gathering a particularly virulent sample from the lungs of a
| dying miner, culturing it further in a lab.
| tzs wrote:
| > "If this is a man-made catastrophe," says Miles Yu, an analyst
| with the conservative Hudson Institute, "I think the world should
| seek reparations."
|
| That would open an interesting can of worms.
|
| 1. It is common under many (most?) legal systems for those harmed
| by another's negligence to have a duty to mitigate damages.
|
| For example, if I'm burning something on my property and an ember
| from my fire sets something on fire on your property, which you
| see happen, and you could put the fire out before it causes much
| damage easily with your garden hose but instead just watch it
| burn, I'm probably only going to by liable for that portion of
| the damage that would have happened had you used the hose.
|
| A few governments could make a case for full reparations, such as
| South Korea, Vietnam, and a few others. The US, most of Europe,
| and much of South America, on the other hand, would have a hard
| time arguing that most of their harm, especially after the first
| wave, was not due to their own poor handling of the pandemic.
|
| 2. If the release was accidental but not negligent, the "Act of
| God" principle may apply.
|
| That principle is that some failures are just expected in the
| course of some activity that is commonly done, and if the failure
| is not caused by negligence it is written off as an act of God,
| and it is up the victim to deal with.
|
| For example, my neighbor has several 100 ft (30 m) tall trees
| that when I look at them from my back door I have to look up at a
| 60 degree angle to see their tops, which means that they are much
| closer than 100 ft (30 m) from my house.. If one of those trees
| fell over in my direction the damage to my house (and me
| depending on where I was at the time) would be extensive.
|
| Whether my neighbor would pay for that damage or I would depends
| on the health of the tree. If the tree was dying or dead then the
| neighbor would be liable. They are supposed to watch for those
| things and have such trees safely removed. If the tree was
| healthy and just caught a bad break with the wind then I have to
| deal with it. An act of God brought it down and it is my problem.
|
| Several countries operate labs working with potential pandemic
| causing viruses. Accidents have happened before, and will happen
| again, but they all continue operating those labs. They know at
| the time they build these labs that these accidents happen even
| in the best run labs, they calculate about how often they will
| happen, and decide that the benefits (often military benefits)
| are worth it in the long run.
|
| I could see a country that has one of those accidents argue that
| at least in relation to other countries that also run such labs
| that their release was one of those "normal" accidents, not a
| negligent accident, and so each country that itself runs such
| labs is responsible for handling its own damages.
|
| 3. Some of the countries that would most like to receive
| reparations also do or have done things that have caused
| widespread harm outside their countries, which one might argue
| should lead to reparations. It may be hard to find a way to set
| the boundary on what should or should not require reparations
| that has COVID on the "yes" side and the things that they have
| done on the "no" side. They may decide it is better to keep the
| lid firmly on that Pandora's box.
| Touche wrote:
| On the world stage there is no court system. All you have is
| sanctions and war. And it seems unlikely that any significant
| number of countries are going to sanction an economic power
| like China over an accident. Look at the weak sanctions put on
| Russia which annexed a neighbor, and routinely assassinates
| political rivals.
| jdhn wrote:
| Frankly, if this did come from a lab in China, I doubt there
| would be any repercussions. What would happen, additional
| tariffs on Chinese products, or sanctions against certain CCP
| officials? I believe the latter is more likely than the former.
| Gelob wrote:
| Pretty sure it was randy marsh
| dimgl wrote:
| I was called a conspiracy theorist on Reddit last year for saying
| that this likely came from the lab in Wuhan. Now it's a
| possibility? It's getting incredibly frustrating to go online and
| be constantly attacked for having common sense views.
| stephenmcirl77 wrote:
| Did you have any evidence to back up your theory at the time? A
| broken clock is right twice a day after all.
|
| Are you saying we should now listen to every conspiracy theory
| on the internet on the off chance it might be right?
| williamdclt wrote:
| It might be because you were saying it was "likely" despite any
| evidence? Ending up being right isn't a to anybody's credit if
| the original assumption was groundless.
|
| (I'm not attacking you, I don't know what was your exact
| argument)
| peytn wrote:
| The initial outbreak was literally covered up. Conditioning
| on that fact, common sense would place more belief on "lab
| leak" and less on "natural origin." Thus, in the Bayesian
| sense, one might describe a lab leak as "likely" relatively
| speaking despite lacking direct evidence such as lab
| notebooks for or against that hypothesis.
| gred wrote:
| Partly agree, but also keep in mind that the CCP is by
| nature secretive and authoritarian. IMO the cover-up still
| shifts the probability, but less than it might in another
| country where cover-ups are less "business as usual".
| 13415 wrote:
| "possible" does not imply "likely". It was always a
| possibility, the only thing we know with relative certainty is
| that it originated from near Wuhan and that the virus is not
| engineered. But it could have been lab grown. The problem is
| the lack of concrete evidence for this thesis.
|
| I'd say that it's very likely that you did not present any
| concrete evidence for the lab theory last year, neither do you
| have any now. So as far as I'm concerned you're still in
| conspiracy theory territory.
|
| Here is the real problem, though: It's not really a common
| sense view. The only reasonable common sense view is to remain
| agnostic in such matters until enough evidence is discovered.
| If you have thousands of conspiracy theorists throwing around
| thousands of different claims around about something, then
| surely one or two may in hindsight turn out to be right. That
| doesn't mean they presented a reasonable view or aren't
| conspiracy theorists.
|
| Just to make this clear, I'm not talking about you personally,
| of course. Maybe you argued very well and convincingly and
| presented some great evidence a year ago. But the fallacious
| thought pattern is a huge problem in online discussions.
| Sometimes you don't even need to consider thousands of
| conspiracy theorists, some people are so prolific online that
| they make a lot of different claims about a lot of of different
| topics, and then, when they happen to be right in hindsight
| once, feel confirmed.
|
| On a side note (not related to the above post at all), another
| issue in online debates I've grown to really hate is that many
| people online have become extremely dismissive towards experts
| and come up with extremely obvious counter-arguments as if the
| experts hadn't considered them. In every single case they have,
| of course. It's crazy how much stupidity some people tend to
| attribute to experts but not to themselves.
| simonh wrote:
| Aliens!
|
| Since we're just making crap up.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| The WHO team has already reported new information about their
| recent investigation. I'm always surprised that that's entirely
| left out of these conversations.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/14/health/WHO-covid-daszak-c...
|
| Apparently China's disease-control center had done a great deal
| of investigating of the Wuhan market, a WHO team member told the
| New York Times:
|
| _They 'd actually done over 900 swabs in the end, a huge amount
| of work. They had been through the sewage system. They'd been
| into the air ventilation shaft to look for bats. They'd caught
| animals around the market. They'd caught cats, stray cats, rats,
| they even caught one weasel. They'd sampled snakes. People had
| live snakes at the market, live turtles, live frogs. Rabbits were
| there, rabbit carcasses... Animals were coming into that market
| that could have carried the coronavirus. They could have been
| infected by bats somewhere else in China and brought it in. So
| that's clue No. 1... Some of these are coming from places where
| we know the nearest relatives of the virus are found. So there's
| the real red flag..._
|
| _There were other markets. And we do know that some of the
| patients had links to other markets._
| Method-X wrote:
| To get past the paywall: https://outline.com/jDKGUn
| underseacables wrote:
| Possibly because it leaked from a lab?
| incrudible wrote:
| It's interesting to see that with Donald Trump out of office, the
| "lab escape" hypothesis is not roundly dismissed as a right-wing
| conspiracy theory anymore.
| tyingq wrote:
| Accidental lab escape, or premeditated lab escape?
|
| Edit: Because the former doesn't sound like much of a
| conspiracy, aside from a cover-up afterwards.
| incrudible wrote:
| I'm gonna invoke Hanlon's razor on that one.
| whiddershins wrote:
| What's odd is how infrequent it is for people to point out
| this distinction can never be known for sure.
|
| From there, the only safe bet is to act _as if_ it were
| intentional.
|
| This is a controversial concept, but it is the rational
| choice. Never assume that someone who harms you is doing it
| accidentally. Even though it is more often than not the case,
| you still have to protect yourself with the possibility of
| malice in mind.
| incrudible wrote:
| Taken to the extreme, there's a pathology for that line of
| reasoning:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecutory_delusion
| atoav wrote:
| I am going to transfer this to the individual:
|
| Working with the default hypothesis of "everybody is out
| there to destroy me" is not only a sign of paranoia, but in
| most cases also wrong (because in reality not everything is
| about you and accidents happen).
|
| So starting with the default hypothesis of malice has the
| serious downside that you will constantly feel threatened
| even if looking back there was no rational reason to feel
| threatened. This is not only incredibly exhausting, it also
| will lead to a "crying wolf"-type of problem, if the
| perceived threat rarely turns out to be one. And when
| something really dangerous is going to happen, you might
| not be able to react in a rational way (because all your
| previous reactions were irrational ones).
|
| What I think is important to rationally tackle that
| question is also to factor in confidence. I will always
| assume innocence (just because it makes me a happier
| person), but that doesn't mean my confidence in the other
| person being innocent is always big. If there are signs
| that other person is acting in malice, my confidence that
| they are innocent will shrink. Once that confidence crosses
| a certain threshold I will assume malice. This can also
| happen within a split second, so I don't see how this would
| not be the rational way to do this. If you go get bread at
| the bakery, you wouldn't assume the baker wants to poison
| you per default right? So you would assume their innocence
| unless there are clear indicators they are a baker that
| poisons their customers. The other way around, if a man
| jumps out of a bush in a dark alley and comes at you with a
| knife, you wouldn't assume they are innocent, because there
| are really strong indicators they are not.
|
| So what is irrational is to have incredible high confidence
| in either innocence or malice when in fact you are in a
| situation with lack of evidence to either direction. And
| this is the case in this situation.
| jmull wrote:
| How is that rational?
|
| For one, if we assume it was released from a lab and that
| was intentional, the what was the intent?
|
| If it was to do what happened -- kill millions and
| devastate the global economy -- then the right reaction is
| a very severe cold war or possibly outright war. We
| literally could not allow it to happen again.
|
| But if it was released from a lab unintentionally, the
| right reaction is to spare no expense, regulation and
| treaty to secure such labs from this ever happening again.
| This would go for all labs like this, not just Chinese
| ones.
|
| These are entirely different reactions with entirely
| different costs and long-term ramifications for peace and
| stability for our world.
|
| Not to mention, the intentional release scenario doesn't
| really make sense. E.g., China couldn't damage our economy
| without damaging their own. And if you're going to choose
| where to start the pandemic, why start it in your own
| country near a bio-research lab? If it was started
| intentionally, it makes more sense that China was framed.
| (Still doesn't make a lot of sense though because what's
| the rational motivation?)
| mrkramer wrote:
| Most likely accidental if it was premeditated all out global
| bio-weapon war would happen.
|
| Just like assassination of Austro-Hungarian heir Archduke
| Franz Ferdinand brought domino effect and caused First World
| war the same would happen now.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| Oh, one more thing. If you were in charge and your choices
| were "Start WW3 with tens of millions of US Casualties" or
| "ignore the fact that the enemy just killed 400,000 people"
| what the heck would you do?
| mrkramer wrote:
| What did Bush do when September 11 attacks happened?
| United States responded by invading Afghanistan in order
| to fight Talibans and they brought Patriot Act in order
| to greatly tighten US national security; the act included
| three main provisions:
|
| expanded abilities of law enforcement to surveil,
| including by tapping domestic and international phones;
|
| eased interagency communication to allow federal agencies
| to more effectively use all available resources in
| counterterrorism efforts; and
|
| increased penalties for terrorism crimes and an expanded
| list of activities which would qualify someone to be
| charged with terrorism.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| That's a non-sequitur. Bush wasn't President when this
| happened.
|
| The critic of Bush who spent the first three years of his
| term under investigation by the US's intelligence
| agencies was. If they'd have been doing their job maybe
| we'd know more about who commissioned the Surgisphere
| paper, and it would have actually made the news.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| >Most likely accidental if it was premeditated all out
| global bio-weapon war would happen.
|
| No, because at the same time they'd simultaneously make it
| look accidental; with a dictatorial, authoritarian country
| like China they could keep the evidence that it was
| premedicated from coming to light _and_ they could count on
| their politically fractured victims reacting in such a way
| as to further their goals.
|
| I notice that the matter of HCQ getting effectively shut
| down in the US due to the fraudulent Surgisphere paper and
| it _didn't raise any alarms at HN where someone asked WHY
| someone went through the trouble of planting a fake paper
| IN THE LANCET_.
|
| It's been brought up here but noone notices the
| implications.
|
| When did Hacker News become so damn intellectually
| incurious about these sorts of things?
| Touche wrote:
| It's almost as if the motivation for a claim matters.
| incrudible wrote:
| So, if a claim is made, but the person who claims it has bad
| intentions, it can be dismissed?
|
| I believe there's a logical fallacy for that:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum
| Touche wrote:
| We don't know if it's true, there's still no evidence even
| today.
|
| Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no
| evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC
| director.
|
| Btw, Tom Cotton's claim was that it was a government
| biochemical weapon's lab, that's not Redfield's theory.
| incrudible wrote:
| > We don't know if it's true, there's still no evidence
| even today.
|
| I have edited my comment to reflect that.
|
| > Motivation affects how we react to a theory with no
| evidence, when coming from Tom Cotton vs. a former CDC
| director.
|
| There's another fallacy for that:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
| Touche wrote:
| I took logic in college too. I didn't say that motivation
| affects whether something is true or not, just how much
| skepticism we apply to it. It's perfectly normal and good
| that we believe things experts say (when we ourselves do
| not have expertise) over a guy shouting on a street
| corner.
| incrudible wrote:
| > It's perfectly normal and good...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
| melling wrote:
| If a claim is made and no evidence is provided, then should
| anyone give it much credibility?
|
| The news prints these stories then they become the truth in
| the minds of many people.
| incrudible wrote:
| In hindsight, I'm not happy with the word "claim" either,
| but I don't want to edit the comment again.
|
| Let's go with "hypothesis" for the sake of argument:
|
| In this case, we have a basket of competing hypotheses,
| _none_ of which have any solid evidence going for them.
|
| Yet, some of these hypotheses have _not_ been dismissed
| as conspiracy theories. Those were the hypotheses that
| conveniently fit a "humans encroach on
| wildlife"-narrative.
|
| I'm just pointing this out as "interesting", I'm not
| arguing that this circumstance gives validity to one
| hypothesis over another.
| melling wrote:
| In the past, we have seen...
|
| So we have prior evidence...so we give more weight...
|
| The investigators should examine all possibilities, of
| course.
|
| Repeating the most "exciting" theory on Opinion News
| night after night...
| incrudible wrote:
| We have prior evidence for both lab escapes and gain-of-
| function experiments on coronaviruses (in Wuhan, no
| less).
|
| Assigning weights to these circumstances can be done
| arbitrarily, to the point where the lab escape hypothesis
| becomes the most plausible one:
|
| https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-
| COV...
| melling wrote:
| Sure, when you get the evidence let me know.
|
| Speculate all you want.
|
| I've never heard of the escapes. Perhaps we watch
| different news sources and you spend a lot of time
| reading different stories.
|
| I've got 55 years of hearing about viruses jumping from
| animals so my priors are different.
|
| AIDS, SARS, swine flu,...
|
| By the way, the last thing I want to be shown is some
| random sight on the Internet as evidence. Climate change
| deniers live by these sites
| dang wrote:
| Please don't perpetuate flamewars either. This just makes
| things worse.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking
| the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be
| grateful. Note these:
|
| " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
|
| " _Eschew flamebait. Don 't introduce flamewar topics
| unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid
| unrelated controversies and generic tangents._"
|
| $TOPIC -> Trump -> Hitler is a textbook example of what
| that last guideline is asking you not to do. We're trying
| for an end state other than default internet hell.
| mattacular wrote:
| We'd like to go to war with China now that the right people are
| positioned to profit from it. US doing a land war still
| requires public support so now it's ok to drum up.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Not sure they actually want a war with a real power, see how
| much they tucked their tails when Russia put it's foot down
| in Syria. They just want to find someone with enough money to
| play brinksmanship with them so they can continue to line
| their pockets.
| simonh wrote:
| It's a credible theory I think, but it doesn't help that
| various conspiracy nuts have been fabricating fake evidence for
| it, exaggerating or misrepresenting facts and clouding it with
| a fog of crazy. I have no idea if the lab escape hypothesis is
| true, there's a reasonable chance that's what happened, but
| it's also true that the crackpot brigade is out on this one in
| force and that really isn't helping.
| atoav wrote:
| Donald Trump would have used any present ambiguity to spin it
| into a conspiracy myth, like he has demonstrated e.g. in the
| last US election [1]. Unsurprisingly this practise doesn't
| really create a climate in which curiosity and open speculation
| will thrive.
|
| Understandably, there are few researchers who would like their
| scientific speculation to become part the often colourful
| narratives Donald Trump and his followers tell each others.
|
| Edit: edited to reduce snarkiness and polemic phrases
|
| [1] For an example of Trump trying to find "material" that he
| can use for the stories he tells his following, see this
| transcript of Trumps call to the Georgia election official at
| the bottom of the page:
| https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-tr...
| bsima wrote:
| It's almost as if the news media is made up, perhaps even
| "fake."
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. It makes
| discussions more predictable and nastier, and therefore dumber.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| beowulfey wrote:
| Nobody ever dismissed it. It has been a viable theory since the
| beginning. What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China
| and saying "this is all their fault!" without any evidence.
| There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn't mean it should
| not be investigated as a source.
|
| Dismissing the theory outright has never and will never be an
| option. I don't like that this is what the team decided to do,
| and I suspect there is a lot of tension in this investigation.
| incrudible wrote:
| > Nobody ever dismissed it.
|
| You must've missed out on previous HN discussions. I remember
| these guys in particular being paraded around:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBQplOe8-LE
|
| I did find their tone quite dismissive, and the verdict in
| the title leaves little room for interpretation.
|
| > What was dangerous was pointing the finger at China and
| saying "this is all their fault!" without any evidence.
|
| True, but that's irrelevant to the plausibility of the
| hypothesis.
|
| > There STILL is not evidence, but that doesn't mean it
| should not be investigated as a source.
|
| Arguably, it's _still dangerous_ to do exactly that.
| beowulfey wrote:
| I think a lot of the confusion, based on the responses to
| my comment, is separating the idea that the virus was
| CREATED in a lab from it being accidentally released from
| the lab. The former implies intent and carries a lot of
| secondary implications about bioweapons and political
| maneuverings. It is a hefty claim.
|
| The latter is simpler--it is reasonable to think a lab that
| maintains and studies viruses similar to Covid-19
| accidentally allowed one to be released. It does not imply
| an intent to misuse the virus.
|
| I have not watched the video, I'm sorry. I'll try and get
| to it later.
| incrudible wrote:
| > The former implies intent...
|
| It doesn't imply intent to use as a bioweapon, much less
| release it in their own population.
|
| The hypothesis that this was a gain-of-function
| experiment that went awry due to lax security still does
| put a lot of pressure on Chinese authorities, on top of
| the poor handling at the beginning of the outbreak.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Nobody ever dismissed it
|
| There was at least one paper calling it "natural selection",
| and some folks who read it agreed that it ruled out
| laboratory accidents:
|
| _" The high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein
| to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection
| on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal
| binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-
| CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation."_
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
|
| https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246597925288816640
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/claim-that-coronavirus-came-lab-
| chi...
| beowulfey wrote:
| That is not addressing the same claim though. That was
| refuting the theory that people were spreading about it
| being genetically engineered to be infectious towards
| humans.
| incrudible wrote:
| > ...it being genetically engineered to be infectious
| towards humans
|
| That's literally what a gain-of-function experiment is.
| These are done to study how viruses interact with humans
| so that we can deal with them better. There's nothing
| sinister about it, such experiments are happening all
| over the world and they did happen in Wuhan.
| cheaprentalyeti wrote:
| Maybe it's time for us to realize that some "gain of
| function" research can be weaponized and made sinister.
| dataflow wrote:
| > That is not addressing the same claim though.
|
| Did you just reply to the sentence I quoted or did you
| click the links? The tweets are very obviously not
| limited to that:
| https://twitter.com/ehundman/status/1246598376377831425
|
| And honestly, it's hard to go from "this happened via
| natural selection" to "nobody dismissed this coming from
| a lab". Even if it's technically possible, surely you can
| understand why readers' message from this is not "this
| could have come from a lab".
| beowulfey wrote:
| Alright, I'll concede I should not have used the phrase
| "nobody"
| graeme wrote:
| They absolutely did. See this NYT article. Ben Thompson of
| Stratechery discussed it in an excellent article linked
| below. Key excerpt from the NYT piece. Doesn't get more
| official than that:
|
| > Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren't new, but the
| extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may
| be. Thirty percent of Republicans have a favorable view of
| QAnon, according to a recent YouGov poll. According to other
| polls, more than 70 percent of Republicans believe Mr. Trump
| legitimately won the election, _and 40 percent of Americans
| -- including plenty of Democrats -- believe the baseless
| theory that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab._
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-
| reality-...
|
| https://stratechery.com/2021/mistakes-memes-and-foreign-
| grou...
| dataflow wrote:
| The NPR article that your NYT article links to is more
| direct about this; I'll link to it and quote it here
| directly: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/951095644
|
| > The poll gave people a sort of test to see if they could
| spot misinformation like the coronavirus was created in a
| lab or that voter fraud helped Joe Biden win the 2020
| election.
|
| > 40% of poll respondents believe one of the biggest
| conspiracy theories that's out there about the virus, that
| it was made in a lab in China. There is no evidence for
| this. And scientists say that the virus was transmitted to
| humans from another species. But I talked to people all
| over the country who responded to our poll and they still
| believe this.
| beowulfey wrote:
| That is addressing the theory that the virus was
| manufactured in a lab, i.e with the intent to release. Not
| the idea that it was released accidentally. It is very
| different.
| dataflow wrote:
| Do you just assume without clicking that every rebuttal
| to your point must be only addressing deliberate,
| malicious dissemination of the virus? I even went out of
| my way to quote the relevant parts of it here so you
| could immediately see the lack of "intent" without
| clicking:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26610037
| dang wrote:
| Please omit personal swipes and don't take threads
| further into flamewar. Those things don't help. If
| another comment is interpreting you inaccurately or
| otherwise in error, provide correct information
| respectfully. If you can't (or don't want to) do that,
| it's better not to post until you can (and do).
| incrudible wrote:
| It doesn't say anything about "intent". The hypothesis
| that the virus was modified in a gain-of-function
| experiment in Wuhan is plausible.
| graeme wrote:
| The quote doesn't say "with intent to release". You're
| writing that in. I'll quote Thompson on 'manufacture'
|
| > Wait, what was that last one? "The baseless theory that
| COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab"? I feel
| pretty certain that COVID-19 wasn't deliberately
| manufactured and deployed as some sort of biological
| attack, but where does "gain-of-function" experiments end
| and "manufacturing" begin? Even if it ends up being true
| that the lab-leak hypothesis is wrong there is actually
| zero question that the Wuhan lab was manipulating
| coronaviruses to make them more lethal. To that end, the
| primary evidence we have that the lab-leak hypothesis is
| false is that China says it is false.
|
| This gives a new perspective to Roose's recommendations
| (well technically, the recommendation of the experts he
| consulted, which all happen to align with Roose's
| previously stated beliefs) that the Biden administration
| set up a "truth commission", appoint a "reality czar",
| audit tech company algorithms, and "fix people's
| problems" with a social stimulus.
|
| The lab _was_ doing gain of function experiments, which
| most people would agree would constitute "being made in a
| lab".
|
| I don't necessarily think the lab leak hypothesis is the
| truth, but it certainly is a real possibility. And if it
| was an accidental leak then it would very likely have
| been a virus modified via gain of function.
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