[HN Gopher] More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus ...
___________________________________________________________________
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins
Author : temp8964
Score : 251 points
Date : 2021-05-14 23:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| haspoken wrote:
| http://archive.is/vgHCm
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| Everyone should read Frank Herbert's White Plague.
|
| The transmission vector can be anything.
| johncena33 wrote:
| What does a sci-fi author or book have to do anthing with
| actual investigation of a real-life pandemic?
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| No answer will be given, of course, but perhaps it can open
| one's mind to new avenues of thought that may help lead to
| an/the answer.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they
| think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they
| think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any
| authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not
| true.
|
| People imagine Chinese social media as something that is
| completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with
| information when a new mysterious disease was appearing in Wuhan.
| Countries like Taiwan were suspicious and taking action as early
| as December.
|
| Here is a set of evidence I have a hard time poking holes in:
|
| https://project-evidence.github.io/
|
| There are some pieces of evidence that are compelling alone:
| - beyond a reasonable doubt, coronavirus research was done at
| WIV. - beyond a reasonable doubt, collection of coronavirus
| from bats was done for the lab. - beyond a reasonable
| doubt, there have been instances of poor PPE/safety measures.
| throwkeep wrote:
| > Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother
| to look
|
| The origin was politicized in the US and taboo to even question
| it, so few did. It was labeled a crazy conspiracy theory by the
| media and that shut the door on open inquiry until recently.
| prox wrote:
| This is why there is a big difference between skepticism and
| conspiracy. A skeptic digs deeper to gather more data and
| facts, a conspiracy loosely joins a few data points and makes
| a poor conjecture.
|
| Conspiracy is political ammunition, skepticism is healthy
| debate and gladly welcomes more data.
| andrewclunn wrote:
| "Skepticsm" is when over educated pseudo-intellectuals want
| THEIR theories to have the ring of "science," while
| dismissing others as conspiracy theorists.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| All of science is driven by hypothesis, but those
| hypotheses don't just appear out of nowhere. Suspicion,
| bias, and bad data can all drive focus on a particular
| field. In that way, such conjecture is a powerful
| scientific tool that in my opinion is too often dismissed.
| lumost wrote:
| It is a miraculous coincidence that a novel virus would
| spontaneously emerge at the exact location of a virology lab
| studying that virus.
|
| The counterpoint to this is that this lab was setup in this
| location for the exact reason that a novel coronavirus would
| potentially emerge from bats in the region. This would require
| both miraculous forethought on the potential for bats in the
| region to produce novel coronaviruses, and a strange desire to
| place the virology lab near the location.
|
| Most high level virology labs are centered based on
| considerations such as ability to hire talent and security/land
| concerns. It's relatively straightforward to organize
| expeditions to any region of the world at this point to collect
| samples.
|
| Which means that for the standard explanation to hold true.
|
| - A virology lab was created to study potentially dangerous
| versions of coronavirus (WIV founded 1956)
|
| - The virology lab must have been placed near the location
| where animals were producing interesting virus strains. (WIV
| studying coronaviruses from all over China since 2005 including
| Horshoe bats from Yunnan province carrying progenitor strains
| of the SARS virus
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology)
|
| - A novel coronavirus emerged near the WIV lab in Q4 2019 due
| to unrelated sales of locally hunted bats.
|
| Strange things occur, but this would be strange enough as to
| require plausible studies identifying animal sources of
| Covid-19 to take at face value.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Isn't "beyond a reasonable doubt" a legal construct, rather
| than a scientific one? Science looks at probabilities and
| measurable numbers not one person or another's "reasonable
| doubt".
| querez wrote:
| I'm sorry, but this feels like conspiracy-theory peddling and
| FUD. What the linked site calls "evidence", is are at best
| "hints" or "possible signs". No evidence anywhere. Instead, you
| have wildly weird texts like section 8.3 ("A Note on
| Biowarfare") that literally just reads "This document does not
| make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as
| part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program.". It's
| completely and utterly disconnected from the rest of the text.
| Why even bring it up? Just so you can throw the word
| "bioweapon" out there?
|
| Plus, the site always seems to see "causation" whenever there
| is correlation, and never even stops to admit that there's the
| possibility they got the chain of causation backwards: if there
| was a lot of coronavirus-carrying bats in the region wouldn't
| it make sense to build a research institute there? And publish
| on all the findings? The site goes on to cite papers and job
| postings that are exactly the kinds of research (and job
| postings) you'd expect from a site that focuses on coronavirus
| related research. Yet the linked site makes it sound ominous,
| when it is utterly mundane.
|
| So one has to ask who actually produced this site to begin
| with? To quote the page:
|
| > "We are an anonymous group of researchers"
|
| Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research
| background could be convinced to put their name on this
| nonsense.
| syshum wrote:
| >>Oh, how convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious
| research background could be convinced to put their name on
| this nonsense.
|
| Appeals to authority are one of the failings of modern
| science, The data and facts should stand up to independent
| review no need for "credentials"
| hayst4ck wrote:
| You say the article feels like a conspiracy theory, yet it
| points to negligence as the likely culprit, which is pretty
| much the opposite of a conspiracy. You call it FUD (fear
| uncertainty doubt), but I'm totally uncertain how it would
| qualify as FUD.
|
| There is one obvious conspiracy by the Chinese government to
| prevent all understanding of the virus. That does fit the
| definition of what a conspiracy is.
|
| > "This document does not make any attempt to link the work
| done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-
| warfare" program."
|
| This makes perfect sense if you are an American, because in
| the anti-intellectual Trump era, there was a well circulated
| rumor that COVID was a Chinese bio-weapon that the CPC
| figured it could deal with better than Americans because
| China can weld people's door's shut, and you can't do that in
| America. This is on par with the widely circulated Chinese
| rumor that the American military brought it to Wuhan.
| Obviously both of those are extremely unlikely and very much
| conspiracy theories. Certainly on the American side our
| scientists said it's extremely unlikely that COVID was
| engineered and has none of the markers of bio-engineering
| very early into covid.
|
| This is the article stating that it is not addressing that
| conspiracy theory, which was very much part of the
| conversation when it was written over a year ago.
|
| > Just so you can throw the word "bioweapon" out there?
|
| Out of your own ignorance of the context you are assuming
| malice.
|
| >and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility
| that the causal reasoning is backwards
|
| This is literally the second paragraph in the article, and it
| was bolded for emphasis: This document does
| not attempt to provide a concrete conclusion on
| whether either claim is factually true. Rather, it examines
| the probability that each claim is true to allow the reader
| to make his or her own conclusions. While either claim
| cannot be irrevocably proven true, an attempt has been
| made to ensure the evidence used to support these
| claims is as factual as possible.
|
| Furthermore, you completely ignored the meat of the article
| focusing on a couple of weaker and overall not super central
| points.
|
| > Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious
| research background could be convinced to put their name on
| this nonsense.
|
| It's almost like there is an extremely draconian
| authoritarian ruling government with very deep reach that has
| a long history of disappearing people it doesn't like or
| punishing them via connections with people who have power
| over them that people might be afraid of.
| lumost wrote:
| There doesn't appear to be any regional association with the
| WIV's research on Bats. WIV studied bats fro all over China
| and notably isolated the likely center of the 2003 SARS
| outbreak to a set of bats in Yunnan. The institute was
| founded in 1956, long before Coronavirus research started in
| earnest.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA.
| ..
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| Wuhan is, however, in the range of Horseshoe Bats. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_horseshoe_bat So
| people who suggest that it's far from Yunnan are missing
| the point.
| pishpash wrote:
| This is not evidence of anything in particular, without some
| Bayesian calibration:
|
| - What other kinds of virus research besides coronavirus was
| done at the WIV? - What proportion of coronaviruses are anyway
| derived from bats? - What were the outcomes of the instances of
| poor PPE/safety measures with regard to containment?
|
| Without this calibration, all you've written is innuendo.
| ggm wrote:
| The sheer amount of the word "seems" and "plausible" here ought
| to tell you what is being discussed: what's being discussed is
| not primary evidence, it's interpretation of the meaning and
| impact, _in the mind of the discussing parties_
|
| If you want to go judicial on this, _" on the balance of
| probabilities"_ in the context of an ongoing political and trade
| dispute between the parties, feels to me like an attempt to
| appeal to pseudo rational claims, more than an actual,
| dispassionate declaration of likelihood.
|
| The article says "keep an open mind" which strongly suggests the
| "evidence" is equivocal. If you're not a virologist or scientist
| who works in the primary field, and I am not one either, you're
| at _BEST_ attempting to interpret science at second or third
| hand. Science often uses words differently to colloquial speech.
| The word "must" for instance, has no normative force always.
| This "must" be because blah blah blah is not saying "causative"
| unless it actually says so. If it doesn't say _WHY_ it _MUST_
| mean something, it 's opinion. If it says _MUST_ because of the
| _balance of probabilities_ it 's actually _MAY_ in any case.
| natch wrote:
| Some scientists in China have been questioning things too. Here
| is a list of them:
|
| https://twitter.com/brendancarrfcc/status/124844281241420186...
|
| Spoiler: They are all "mysteriously" missing or at least have
| disappeared from their normal lives.
| monday_ wrote:
| The trouble here is that a lot of institutions and public persons
| have more or less staked their credibility on dismissing the lab
| origin hypothesis. They had their reasons - if anything, over the
| last years their standing and the value of expert opinion was
| under constant pressure (notice I'm talking about a reason, not a
| justification).
|
| But this makes any admission of an error and, by extension, any
| useful reflection on it very, very improbable. I think if the lab
| origin is true and at some point becomes common knowledge, it
| will be treated like the Iraq war. The people responsible for
| botching the response and the message will fail up and treat the
| pandemic as if it were a tsunami, rather then human error.
| [deleted]
| bonzini wrote:
| Lab manufacturing is one thing and has been widely debunked,
| lab leak is another. I don't think the lab leak has been
| dismissed as much.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| What does it matter, beyond natural curiosity, whether it was
| released from a lab or not? It is of no real consequence because:
|
| (1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it
| was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it
| was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it
| somewhere else.
|
| (2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for
| experimentation on diseases and viruses. It suffers from it-
| could-happen-here-ism where COVID or a COVID-like disease could
| be released by any other country and we'd still be in the exact
| same situation.
|
| So, in my mind, the only definitive issue is whether it was
| released maliciously or by accident. If it was malicious, that's
| a completely different, crimes against humanity, type problem. If
| it was not, then I don't think it matters really how COVID
| happened.
| mateo1 wrote:
| It's quite surprising that so far I've never read your first
| point, not once, in any article. Another point is that if some
| other actor was planning to release this virus in China, they'd
| definitely do it in Wuhan.
|
| In the end, this discussion doesn't even matter. The fact is
| that we, the non-specialists with no access to hard evidence,
| will probably never know what happened, and in fact it does not
| matter at all.
|
| The origin of the virus is completely irrelevant to its
| consequences and the potential for accidental or purposeful
| releases of new viruses, engineered or not, is still there
| regardless. We're lucky(?) we got ample warning of what
| biological threats can do, and we got it with a low mortality
| and morbidity virus.
|
| After all, trying to infer the origin of the virus by it's
| mutations and features is a bit like trying to infer if a
| computer virus is made in Russian by the inclusion of Cyrillic
| variable names or something, anyone can put them in there, so
| it's basically not even evidence.
| mjparrott wrote:
| If it was by accident, then it calls into question the quality
| controls over labs. It isn't "equally likely to happen
| anywhere" if the quality and safety standards vary by location.
| Operating a lab with poor safety standards is not "bad luck".
| xxpor wrote:
| The problem is: what is anyone going to do about it? China
| will never admit it, even if it is true (I have no position
| one way or the other).
| antattack wrote:
| It's not going to be possible to prove lab origin w/o Chinese
| cooperation.
|
| However, lab origin should not be totally dismissed, so we can
| have a discussion about safety of _gain-of-function_ research
| now, rather than waiting for some verifiable event to happen in
| the future.
| kossTKR wrote:
| Why are people acting like China is doing anything in
| isolation?
|
| The Wuhan Lab was funded through the american Ecohealth
| alliance, and a dozen american scientists probably know just as
| much as the Chinese do.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
| fullshark wrote:
| I don't know who is acting like that, but that's the kind of
| thing that becomes very interesting if you believe COVID
| leaked from a lab and not appeared suddenly at a wet market.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| As it takes longer and longer to find any evidence in nature a
| lab leaking is becoming the most likely source.
| Dah00n wrote:
| That may be but we have hardly started looking yet. We haven't
| even found a source of SARS from 2002 yet..
|
| > _"... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat
| populations despite 15 years of searching... "_
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...
|
| Edit: Added source.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For
| Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to
| WHO report) and found nothing.
|
| Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology,
| Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the
| Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia
| also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their
| findings were published in Science in September 2005
| Dah00n wrote:
| Finding a virus in an animal isn't that same as finding the
| source. A source has _not_ been found. Only later and
| intermediate hosts (as in 2005):
|
| >"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat
| populations _despite 15 years of searching_ and as RNA
| recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is
| highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through
| recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-
| identified bat caves "
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=1
| 1...
|
| >" _No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat
| populations_ , but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan
| province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96%
| genetically similar virus strain."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_synd
| r...
| [deleted]
| austincheney wrote:
| That is an argument from ignorance logical fallacy. The
| inability to find something has no bearing on whether it exists
| or not and thus has no bearing on the probability of an
| inverted outcome.
|
| Dark matter/energy also frequently fall into this sort of
| argument. There is no evidence that they do exist, which does
| not suggest the absence of their existence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
| btilly wrote:
| It stops being a fallacy and starts to become a valid
| consideration when the search for the thing not found has
| been thorough enough that it would have been very likely to
| be found if it had been there.
|
| Suppose that I remember leaving $5000 in plain sight on a
| table. My initial priors are a 90% chance that it is there, a
| 9% chance that I put it somewhere else by accident, and a 1%
| that my friend Bob took it. I conduct a search that would
| have found it with 100% odds if it was on the table, 95% odds
| if I had put it somewhere else by accident, and a 0% chance
| if Bob took it. Add in the evidence of the search and all of
| a sudden the new odds are 0% chance that it is where I
| thought it was, about a 31% chance that I put it somewhere
| else, and a 69% chance that Bob took it.
|
| This is the first major disease to jump to humans in the last
| 20 years that we haven't quickly tracked down the path to us.
| We're good at it. The fact that we didn't succeed this time
| when more effort was put into the search is something that
| should give us pause.
| austincheney wrote:
| Logic does not cease to be fallacious merely because
| somebody works hard and becomes frustrated.
| jerf wrote:
| Many of the logical fallacies are logical fallacies from
| an Aristotelian perspective of statements that are either
| True or False, and nothing in between. "True" is a high
| bar.
|
| Many of them dissolve when treated correctly with
| something like a Bayesian analysis. [1] This is one of
| them. Absence of evidence _is_ , in fact, _evidence_ of
| absence, contrary to the frequent assertions otherwise.
| It just isn 't _proof_. The strength of the evidence is
| proportional to the amount of the possibility space
| searched and the quality of that search.
|
| It is not fallacious to observe that our normally-
| successful efforts to find a natural cause failing raises
| the probabilities of the remaining explanations, and that
| of those possibilities, "lab origin" has a lot of the
| remaining probability. It doesn't mean that natural
| origin is disproved, nor did it mean any of the other
| possibilities are certain, but it is valid to adjust ones
| probability estimates.
|
| (I've also learned from experience a lot of people will
| read this as being critical of the Aristotelian
| perspective or something. I am not. It is a valid logic.
| There are other valid logics. Many of them are more
| practically useful than rigid True and False, but
| Aristotelian logic, like Newtonian physics, is still a
| very important one to understand as it serves as an
| important limiting case for many other more complicated
| logics.)
|
| [1]: This is not a position statement on Bayesian vs.
| frequentist.
| austincheney wrote:
| The problem with your reasoning is that you are falsely
| equating _absence of evidence_ into a qualifier for an
| opinion or conclusion, which it isn 't. The absence of
| evidence only means that such evidence is missing and is
| in no way suggestive of anything else. All conclusions
| drawn from an absence of evidence are otherwise
| unqualified assumptions.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_assumption
|
| This was the exact reasoning people bet the farm on the
| housing market prior to late 2008. There was no evidence
| the housing market ever depreciated, so with that absence
| of evidence the housing market must therefore not ever
| depreciate. Contrary to that reasoning the housing market
| crashed and I got my house as a foreclosure at a heavily
| depreciated value.
| whatthesmack wrote:
| Not sure what your point is. The source for SARS and MERS
| were found within months. We're over a year into this with no
| clue. Based on the current circumstances' inconsistencies
| with historical circumstances, this appears to be something
| different.
| actusual wrote:
| His point still stands. Lack of evidence for one thing
| shouldn't be confused as evidence for something else. A man
| is home alone during a murder, and there is no evidence for
| this, did he commit the murder?
| dgfitz wrote:
| How do you know he was home?
| dkersten wrote:
| No, but when the second hypothesis is the one that CCP
| has banned any investigation and news of, is not
| cooperating on the investigation and when there had been
| claims about the WIV safety _and_ the WIV has openly
| stated that they were researching bat-borne SARS-like
| coronaviruses, then the lack of evidence for any other
| cause makes this one seem all the more likely. That 's a
| lot of coincidences.
|
| If CCP are covering it up, then of course there will be a
| lack of direct evidence. The above doesn't prove it
| conclusively, but it does make it rather suspicious. Why
| would CCP be hampering the investigations if they have
| nothing to hide? It was over a year before they let the
| WHO have a look. Plenty of time to get rid of any actual
| evidence.
| checker wrote:
| Source for finding SARS source within months?
|
| This is contrary but I'm open to debate.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747529/
| adrianb wrote:
| Wikipedia [1] seems to include sources:
|
| > In late May 2003, studies were conducted using samples
| of wild animals sold as food in the local market in
| Guangdong, China. The results found that the SARS
| coronavirus could be isolated from masked palm civets
| (Paguma sp.), even if the animals did not show clinical
| signs of the virus. The preliminary conclusion was the
| SARS virus crossed the xenographic barrier from Asian
| palm civets to humans, and more than 10,000 masked palm
| civets were killed in Guangdong Province. The virus was
| also later found in raccoon dogs (Nyctereuteus sp.),
| ferret badgers (Melogale spp.), and domestic cats. In
| 2005, two studies identified a number of SARS-like
| coronaviruses in Chinese bats.[60][61]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respirator
| y_syndr...
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| In 2003, it was hypothesized that civets were the source.
| However, this was not conclusively proved until 2017.
| adrianb wrote:
| Infected animals were found in the market where the
| outbreak began 4 months after it started. We have nothing
| comparable a year and a half after COVID.
| checker wrote:
| Thanks. Pretty legit sources from 2005.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Hasn't the exact same amount of time elapsed without finding
| any evidence of a lab leak?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Nature leaves a trail, so if you don't find a trail then it
| becomes increasingly implausible that COVID resulted from a
| natural process. There are currently several intermediate
| steps that have not been uncovered anywhere, and which would
| have to have happened in order for this to be a natural
| process.
| tshaddox wrote:
| This just sounds like the "lack of evidence is evidence of
| a conspiracy" epistemology so often resorted to by
| conspiracy theorists. The problem with the epistemology is
| that it applies equally well to all conceivable
| conspiracies.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| Nope - no investigation for _that_ theory allowed by Beijing.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You only need a handful of people working on this to have
| knowledge of it. The PRC is really good at locking up people
| to keep them quiet.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I'm not sure I follow the logic. If China is so good at
| keeping people quiet, how do you know? Sounds to me that
| for us to know they have to be less than good at it?
| t8e56vd4ih wrote:
| there is footage of Fauci in a public congressional questioning
| where he first denies a financial tie to that lab and then admits
| it reluctantly.
|
| can somebody shed light on what's going on there?
| LetThereBeLight wrote:
| For those interested in understanding more detailed discussions
| there is an article by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:
| https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
|
| Perhaps the most interesting point is the discussion of the furin
| cleavage site.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| If scientists believe a leak like this is plausible, then I don't
| think we need to wait for proof to push for international
| treaties against doing this kind of research that can have these
| disastrous accidental consequences. Developing super-viruses
| should not be allowed by the international community, including
| in the USA. It is too dangerous.
| actuator wrote:
| How is this even going to work? PRC will never allow access to
| the actual data if it was a lab escape/origin. The sort of
| propoganda happening on Twitter shows that even discussion is
| going to be difficult.
| [deleted]
| fullshark wrote:
| Even if the west simply refuses to 100% accept the natural
| origin story it will have geopolitical consequences.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| If experts can make a decent argument that the lab escape is
| the most likely scenario, then the PRC can choose to let us
| have access to the data, or look 100% guilty and be treated
| accordingly.
| actuator wrote:
| You don't believe data can be manufactured/erased to tell a
| story if someone is willing to? There is enough time as well
| to generate a new trail of breadcrumbs.
|
| I don't think we will get the true answer or an answer that
| is going to satisfy everyone, just a lot of geopolitical
| posturing.
| calotow wrote:
| I read on a bumper sticker though that "science doesn't
| lie".
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| No, all the choices have already been made.
|
| The data have already been destroyed. The Wuhan lab where
| this research was taking place also had a leadership change,
| and is now run by someone in the military. That happened in
| March or April of 2020, IIRC.
|
| Chinese researchers and journalists disappeared in that time
| frame (their work was deleted from online archives, their
| names removed from public employment listings... etc.).
|
| I have family in China, and we watched all this happen. These
| are the things that happened in public. The Western press was
| too busy with "oh my gosh, we should probably stop flights
| now" to take serious notice. Then the whole thing became
| politicized (in the U.S., at least) and if you made
| statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not
| in the animal market next to it," you were called racist,
| even though race had nothing to do with it.
|
| We can ask until the cows come hom. The evidence is gone,
| disposed of by a series of decisions made more than a year
| ago.
| adrianb wrote:
| > if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in
| the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you
| were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with
| it.
|
| Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with
| dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist
| than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And
| yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario,
| almost as if the opinions were influenced by someone.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| To be fair the lab escape scenario looks a lot like a
| conspiracy theory. One should remember that around that
| time the "flat earth" theory was still going on (IIRC),
| and there are similar lab escape theories about AIDS.
| smolder wrote:
| No, a lab escape scenario is an accident theory. The
| Chinese military sending infectious people to our country
| on purpose sounds like a conspiracy theory.
| fumbly wrote:
| It doesn't at all look "like a conspiracy theory". Many
| past lab leaks have been documented (edit:
| https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327678136852488),
| there had been widespread debate among virologists for
| years about whether the risk of a lab leak was too high
| to fund such research, the Obama administration banned it
| for a while for that reason, the State Department had
| expressed concerns about lax safety at the Wuhan lab, and
| so on. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. If
| anything "looks like a conspiracy theory" it's the way
| that the topic was so harshly suppressed for the last
| year. I don't think that was a conspiracy either, though,
| I think it was just political polarization. Hopefully the
| winds are shifting now to reduce that, on this particular
| issue.
| munk-a wrote:
| There have always been conspiracy theories but I think
| it's more relevant to note how quickly this theory was
| co-opted by anti-asian racism and converted into a
| version where that lab escape was interpreted to be an
| intention action to cause a world wide pandemic.
|
| I really sympathize with both sides here - I think it's
| quite possible a lab accident was involved with the virus
| escaping into the world... but the benefit we'd get from
| knowing that would mostly involve labs being a lot more
| careful with PPE and I think we've seen PPE usage tick
| way up and the dangerous involved with disease handling
| get a lot larger of a spotlight. And, I also think that
| beating up or harassing Asian-Americans is wrong and if
| we need to tell a big societal level lie to people to get
| them to stop then I'm okay with that.
| stirfish wrote:
| We went pretty quickly from "it started somewhere in
| China" to beating elderly asian people to death in the
| streets. I think the backlash was more against the
| justifications people use to be awful.
| tomp wrote:
| Didn't it only start happening, like, a year after people
| daring to _wrongthink_ (that the virus wasn 't of
| entirely natural origin) were persistently being called
| Trump-supporting Nazi conspiracy theorists?
| stirfish wrote:
| The hate crimes started accelerating in March of 2020,
| around the time #ChineseVirus was trending on twitter.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| I don't think a lot of people dismissed the "lab theory"
| per se. The people who were coopting the theory were also
| the folks who called in intentional/by design. We had
| evidence for neither and yet suddenly it had become an
| excuse to yell epithets at random people on the street.
| fumbly wrote:
| > No, all the choices have already been made. The data have
| already been destroyed
|
| You don't know that. You'd need an investigation to
| conclude that. Using it as an excuse not to investigate
| seems like assuming the conclusion.
|
| Even if some data have been destroyed, it doesn't follow
| that every last piece of data everywhere has. Who knows
| what might turn out to be significant? There may well be
| relevant data in many countries, too, since the research
| was international.
| jollybean wrote:
| As we learned in the last election cycle, the Truth is a
| matter of populism.
|
| If Wuhan lab leak were 'truth' - without hard evidence and a
| bold international campaign to forcefully make people aware
| ... then China would be able to hide behind a cloud of
| whataboutery and changing the subject.
|
| Unless there is some kind of genetic linkage etc..
|
| I also feel that some US authorities wouldn't want the truth
| to be fully known lest there be unpredictable repercussions
| and 'worries about Anti Asian Hate Crime' and those kinds of
| things, preferring to handle it 'behind closed doors'.
|
| It would be great if we could arrive at some kind of
| objective truth, not holding my breath.
| Dah00n wrote:
| So guilty unless proven innocent?
| option wrote:
| if they are indeed innocent isn't fair and unbiased
| investigation in their best interest?
| thereare5lights wrote:
| No because there's no such thing as a fair and unbiased
| investigation.
|
| Politics will be inexorably intertwined in such an
| investigation.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Yes, by Chinese citizens. _Not_ by foreigners.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| For anybody who has power, absolutely. I am beyond tired of
| police, countries and politicians getting away with
| horrible crimes.
|
| For ordinary citizens, of course not.
| 99_00 wrote:
| I'm convinced that it's a lab leak. I'm also convinced the slow
| reveal is a psyop and I don't disagree with it's objectives.
|
| The sudden revelation that China screwed up and lied to the world
| is too shocking for the vast majority of people. The global
| public's response would not be optimal.
|
| The slow reveal gives societies around the world time to adjust
| to the new reality.
|
| If we were all thrown into that reality overnight it would get
| messy.
| ObserverNeutral wrote:
| Screw that, I don't want to live in a new cold war. Even if it
| came from a lab people should be told it's natural
|
| Besides after Snowden whistleblowers learned that their life is
| basically over after they speak out.
|
| Very low recognition and potentially jail time or worse
| dataflow wrote:
| Related (long) article in case you missed it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
| captaincurrie wrote:
| https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
| [deleted]
| Dah00n wrote:
| Any actual scientist (and not an "expert") know how long these
| things take. It took from 2002 to 2020 to find a closely related
| SARS host (as in "not a match but close enough to point to a
| likely cause"). I find it very telling that we get lots of
| articles stating lots of stuff but not really any real scientific
| research papers on the source. I'm also not seeing any of these
| scientists volunteer to live for years in remote locations taking
| anal swaps of animals to actually find the cause. I believe what
| we are seeing are the science equivalent to armchair generals.
| marcell wrote:
| What do you make of the claim in this article [1], which says
| that intermediate host species were found within 4 months of
| SARS1 outbreak, and within 9 months of MERS outbreak?
| Admittedly I can't find the underlying source for his claims.
|
| [1] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-
| th...
| Dah00n wrote:
| I haven't read it but an intermediate host is a link between
| humans and the original host. The intermediate host was
| quickly found. I linked this elsewhere in the thread:
|
| > _" As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat
| populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA
| recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly
| likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of
| bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat
| caves."_
|
| They also write...
|
| > _" After the causative agent of SARS was identified, SARS-
| CoV and/or anti-SARS-CoV antibodies were found in masked palm
| civets (Paguma larvata) and animal handlers in a market
| place1. However, later, wide-reaching investigations of
| farmed and wild-caught civets revealed that the SARS-CoV
| strains found in market civets were transmitted to them by
| other animals."_
|
| Sorry if I made a mess of this as I'm on my phone and
| commented on more than on post too quickly really..
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I know this sounds odd, but at this point I don't think it
| matters, as far as what we need to do next, and more pressure on
| this point may just make that harder.
|
| 1) Regardless of whether or not this virus came from a lab, could
| such a thing plausibly happen in the future? Unquestionably yes.
|
| 2) Do we have international bodies to do inspection of the safety
| standards of any lab doing this kind of work? Ones that have the
| authority to require changes, or even shut down a lab, if those
| safety standards are not met? Unquestionably no, we have no such
| international body.
|
| 3) Could we make one? Yes, if China and Russia and the USA all
| agree to make one, it could be made binding on the rest of the
| world.
|
| So, let's get on with that. I fear that the discussion of the
| origin of covid-19, while it has certainly been useful in showing
| what the potential future problems are, may get in the way of
| setting up something to prevent it happening (again?) in the
| future.
| daenz wrote:
| >I know this sounds odd, but at this point I don't think it
| matters
|
| I know the quote "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a
| statistic" and all, but if we deem it important to get to the
| bottom of individual deaths, accidental or not, than it is
| important to get to the bottom of millions of deaths.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| What's the point? Regardless if it leaked from the lab or not we
| have to prepare for the future the same way.
| dxuh wrote:
| If the lab leak is real, then we should absolutely use this as
| a reason to stop Gain of Function research or at least
| establish institutions that ensure the safety of such research,
| preferably across international borders. The point being that
| you want to avoid something like this ever happening again.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| If it leaked from a lap we need to hold China responsible and
| ensure that no scientists ever do similar research, under pain
| of life in any country on earth.
|
| Whomever leaked this murdered over 1/2 the holocaust, and the
| total death count is only going to keep going up. The leak is a
| crime against humanity and should be prosecuted as one.
| dang wrote:
| Please stop posting flamewar comments. You've done it
| repeatedly in this thread already--that's seriously not cool.
|
| If you're posting inflamed, denunciatory rhetoric about a
| divisive topic, you're not using HN as intended.
|
| " _Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not
| less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I've asked myself the same, and can only think of two reasons
| why they focus on if it came from a lab.
|
| (1) people like dramatic scandalous stories, in general. (2)
| knowing such might drive some prevention of whatever mistake
| lead to such from recurring.
| lovemenot wrote:
| It is certain that _some_ series of events led to the
| pandemic.
|
| There exists a class of people who, without necessarily being
| driven by other motivations, generally try to find out what
| is really going on. We call such people scientists.
|
| No need to focus on motivation. Curiosity should be enough.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| well said: i'm one of the class you mentioned!
| johncena33 wrote:
| I see this argument pop up quite frequently on HN with good
| amount of upvotes. I am guessing this type of arguments are
| motivated by and upvoted because of poltical and ideological
| ulterior motives.
|
| I think there's also something more insidious at play. In
| western countries lot of people have become rich by exporting
| manufacturing to China. If somehow it is found that COVID was a
| lab-leak, there'd be a huge amount of backlash against China.
| It will harm the business, who are doing their manufacturing in
| China. There's a lot of money involved if lab-leak hypothesis
| turned out true.
| [deleted]
| btilly wrote:
| The question is whether the type of research that might have
| lead to this result should be shut down to prevent similar
| accidents in the future.
|
| If COVID-19 was, in fact, a lab release then that's a strong
| argument for shutting the research down.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Even if it was a lab release, it's still a natural virus and
| could have happened without the lab release. Without previous
| studies of related viruses, it would have taken multiple
| years to produce a vaccine.
| dataflow wrote:
| > Even if it was a lab release, it's still a natural virus
| and could have happened without the lab release.
|
| This is disputed.
| saas_sam wrote:
| >Even if it was a lab release, it's still a natural virus
| and could have happened without the lab release.
|
| That is not the assertion being made by the scientists
| pushing for the investigation. The assertion is that this
| is a chimeric virus that very much does NOT show up in
| nature and its lab-made qualities are precisely why it
| became a global pandemic.
|
| Or would you take it as pure coincidence that the first
| truly global pandemic in however many decades you'd like
| just happened to be lab made?
| feanaro wrote:
| Was the Spanish flu also manufactured? Clearly there is
| such a thing as natural pandemics.
| saas_sam wrote:
| OP: "This virus was natural therefore any investigations
| into its artificiality are moot."
|
| Me: "This virus has unique qualities that made it
| especially contagious, so its artificiality is not moot."
|
| You: "Other viruses in the past were also bad."
|
| Me, now: Yes, other viruses in the past were also bad. If
| you meant that to relate to the previous comments I think
| you left out the important bits.
|
| It's like if we were discussing whether we should
| investigate if someone caused a deadly landslide. Why
| would you argue that we shouldn't look into it simply
| because landslides also happen naturally? If there are
| empty crates of TNT on the top of the hill, shouldn't we
| look into it?
| mirekrusin wrote:
| It still doesn't change anything, this type of research
| is getting too easy/too cheap to say that policy can save
| us from it. Somewhere someone will be doing it knowing
| the goal is to invoke genocide like final solution.
| juancampa wrote:
| Not exactly. "gain of function" [0] research, if I
| understand correctly, tries to understand how to make a
| virus more virulent. Or make it affect hosts it wouldn't
| normally affect.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain_of_function_research
| slenk wrote:
| Depends on what you view as natural. They have been doing
| "Gain of Function" research which is designed to enhance
| viruses.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-
| experiments...
| johncena33 wrote:
| By that logic there shouldn't be any murder trials.
| Eventually everyone will die.
|
| It is sickening that millions of people died, more will
| die, hundreds of millions of people have been pushed below
| poverty line, almost every single person's life on the
| planet is affected in some way and some people think it's
| unnecessary to investigate.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Adorable and naive, it's becoming too easy to do it,
| regardless of policies there will be somebody somewhere
| working on it as a weapon. [0] gives a good perspective.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post snarky putdowns to HN, especially not on
| flamewar topics. Your comment would be fine without that
| opening swipe.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| bko wrote:
| And maybe liability on the offending party?
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I agree. We should start looking at Anthony Fauci himself,
| who most likely pushed for this type of research via his
| influence at the NIAID/NIH [0].
|
| [0] https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-
| did-peop...
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| There's no possibility to get that kind of money paid back
| if a party was found responsible. At this point it must be
| trillions.
| noofen wrote:
| Liable in the hundreds of billions? Too big to fail.
|
| Liable in the trillions? Too big to speak about.
| loudmax wrote:
| I tend to sympathize with this attitude, and while it is
| absolutely true that the world needs to be better prepared for
| pandemics regardless of origin, I don't think it's correct that
| the origin of the disease doesn't matter.
|
| Just from a scientific perspective, we should know where
| covid-19 came from. If it hopped from bats to people in a wet
| market, that tells us something about the likelihood of this
| type of virus spreading from contact with wild animals. If it
| was accidentally released from a lab, that tells us something
| different.
|
| In a healthy geopolitical environment, an impartial
| investigative team that's able to pinpoint the source of the
| original transmission could make this information public so
| that everyone can learn how to avoid this happening again. If
| the pandemic happened because policy enforcement at the virus
| lab in Wuhan was weak, this is worth knowing. Not to to lay
| blame and point fingers, but to help labs worldwide identify
| potential weak points in their own procedures.
|
| The danger is that if evidence points to an accidental lab
| release, some Western politicians will seize on the opportunity
| to shame China just for the sake of national chauvinism. This
| will accomplish nothing positive. The Chinese Communist Party
| is very thin skinned and essentially amoral so they'll have no
| compunctions about covering up any evidence of a lab leak in
| order to save face. All of this political stuff risks getting
| in the way of helping the scientific community understand where
| covid-19 came from so we'll have a better understanding of how
| to reduce the chances of this happening again.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| If this virus indeed came from a lab, then:
|
| a.) It was covered up,
|
| b.) The people responsible hid crucial information which could
| have helped contain the spread in the early days and find
| treatments,
|
| c.) The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible
| "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face,
| and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a campaign
| of mis/disinformation.
|
| And that's without getting into questions of whether the "leak"
| story is being used to cover for "intentional release."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Ok, those are 3 very different points, so:
|
| > It was covered up
|
| This is not actionable.
|
| > The people responsible hid crucial information which could
| have helped contain the spread in the early days and find
| treatments
|
| You imply in punishing those people? In the case it was a
| leak, the people interested in punishing them don't have that
| power, the people with that power were the same suppressing
| the information, so no, that won't happen.
|
| > The people assuring us that lab creation was an impossible
| "conspiracy theory" at the very least have egg on their face,
| and at worst have no credibility or were engaged in a
| campaign of mis/disinformation
|
| You should already remove any credibility from anybody
| claiming it was impossible, as well as from anybody claiming
| any other kind of certainty. What actually happened won't
| change that.
|
| What we should do is take a good new look at the containment
| procedures of those labs, reevaluate them, verify if they are
| followed and fix what is not. We should also press
| uncooperative countries, like China, to open those up for
| inspection. Again, whether this one virus came from a lab
| leak or not is not relevant, we know that best practices are
| still leaky, and we have seen how problematic a leak would
| be.
|
| All this politics game of "did | did not" is very
| counterproductive.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| > _What we should do is take a good new look at the
| containment procedures of those labs, reevaluate them,
| verify if they are followed and fix what is not._
|
| Who should do that, exactly? The same people you seem to
| think we should not to attempt to investigate or hold
| accountable in any way?
|
| > _We should also press uncooperative countries, like
| China, to open those up for inspection._
|
| If China was demanding to have a bunch of their inspectors
| let into Fort Detrick to poke around, we wouldn't be any
| more welcoming than they have been. It's silly to allow
| imperial powers to engage in bioweapons research and then
| expect them to show each other all their cards.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Why are you assuming this is bioweapons research? There
| is more to virus research than bioweapons.
|
| It is much easier to get China to complain with "we
| developed those standards for virus research, and would
| like you to comply too, like any other serious country"
| than "we believe you made an incredibly large fuck-up and
| want your help to prove it".
| fullshark wrote:
| I see a lot of these appeals for ignorance in these
| conversations. There's so many obvious reasons why we'd want to
| learn to truth, such as learning how to prevent it from
| happening again and to determine if gain of function research
| is too risky.
|
| The only reason I see why we should want to remain ignorant is
| it will possibly embarrass China.
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| The discussion around this issue is always implicitly framed as
| though "Covid came from a lab" implies "created by CCP
| researchers." The GoF ties to US institutions including the
| Pentagon are always assiduously avoided (the NY Mag article being
| one notable exception:
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...)
|
| Very interesting to see this idea bubbling to the surface at the
| same time that Bill Gates's Epstein ties are being re-broadcast,
| the CDC is rapidly reversing guidance and relaxing protocols, the
| WEF cancelling its summer meeting, Elon Musk suddenly sticking
| the knife in crypto's back ....
| screye wrote:
| Shekhar Gupta (One of India's foremost journalists and media
| people) did a great 30 minute analysis of this article covering
| who the _cast members_ are and how this ties back into various
| stories from the last year.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlO8sKRynBY
|
| So far, the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has
| the least holes in it. Now innocent until proven guilty is a
| thing, but is not like the PRC would ever agree to a fair trial.
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| > _the lab origin story sounds the most plausible and has the
| least holes in it_
|
| You seem to ignore the fact that there's exactly zero evidence
| either pro or contra. The fame of the "media person" is the
| kind of argument you typically see invoked in Facebook and
| Youtube comments.
| jostmey wrote:
| How is this the lab origin story more plausible than the
| original hypothesis that sars-cov2 originated from the wet-
| markets? Both are places where human and exotic animals closely
| interact, where sars-cov2 could have jumped. Why do you think
| the odds of the virus jumping are higher in one place than
| another?
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I don't know anything about virology, but I do know about wet
| markets. Every working class neighborhood in every city in
| China has at least one wet market. I would guess that
| hundreds of millions of people in China shop at wet markets
| every day. Even if you filter out all the wet markets that do
| not sell exotic animals like bats and pangolins, it still
| seems suspicious that this outbreak appears to have been
| centered around one of the few wet markets in China that
| happens to be situated in the vicinity of a major virus lab.
| splithalf wrote:
| Not one single infected animal. No serious honest person
| believes the wet market nonesense. It's not _supposed_ to be
| believable.
| dang wrote:
| Please stop posting flamewar comments. You've done it more
| than once in this thread already. That's basically
| vandalism, if not arson, when the topic is this
| inflammatory. No more of this please.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
| Note this one: " _Comments should get more thoughtful and
| substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive._ "
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| I'm not in a position to say one way or the other, but the
| articles detail a number of suggestive evidence that in my
| mind makes the wild animal spread less likely. But as has
| been pointed out, it is NOT definitive one way or the other.
| prewett wrote:
| There was an article posted recently on HN with no discussion
| that outlined the evidence for the various theories, and had
| pretty solid evidence for the leak theory (assuming they didn't
| omit evidence for the other theories):
|
| https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
| dang wrote:
| There was a large discussion about that article:
|
| _The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora's
| box?_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May
| 2021 (536 comments)
| elliekelly wrote:
| Since there isn't any evidence for either scenario I don't
| think it's at all accurate to say one possible origin is "the
| most plausible". A lack of evidence for one does not give
| credence to the other and vice versa.
| ProjectArcturis wrote:
| To say that "there isn't any evidence for either scenario" is
| willful ignorance.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| fallingknife wrote:
| If I can't find my phone and I either left it somewhere in
| the house or on the Uber I took home last night, the longer I
| search my house and don't find it, the more likely it is that
| I left it on the Uber.
| adolph wrote:
| By observation of the night sky would you believe Copernicus
| or Ptolemy? Would you need to have evidence of the solar
| system's origins or is the decreased computation required for
| Copernicus enough to indicate it to be a superior
| explanation?
|
| https://farside.ph.utexas.edu/books/Syntaxis/Almagest/node4..
| ..
| Bayesian_bro wrote:
| The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news
| stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to
| take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think
| everyone had the best of intentions and either they found
| something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone
| down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting
| links
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd...
| is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This
| shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the
| Wuhan Institute of Virology.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114...
| This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and
| incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in
| the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest
| being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't copy-paste comments. It strictly lowers the
| signal/noise ratio, and it contradicts the principle that HN
| threads are supposed to be conversations. People don't repeat
| long pre-written statements in conversation.
|
| If you want to refer to something you said in a previous
| context, that's fine and is what links are for.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| varispeed wrote:
| > China's global reputation is going to take a hit.
|
| If having openly racist culture and running concentration camps
| has done nothing to their reputation, I don't think anything
| will.
|
| > I don't think they did this intentionally.
|
| Regardless if this was intentional or not, they should take
| responsibility. Imagine if Russia dropped a nuclear bomb on
| Europe by mistake. This is the same calibre of "oops my bad.".
| It's not a secret that these viruses were researched as a
| potential bio-weapon. In that sense whether it was intentional
| or not, it has done immense damage to worldwide economy, which
| is exactly the goal of such bio-weapon.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar.
| Nationalistic flamewar is particularly not welcome here.
|
| If we're to have a thoughtful, substantive conversation about
| a topic as sensitive as the OP, not jumping straight into the
| flames of hell is...rather a precondition.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| wedn3sday wrote:
| Claiming that COVID came from a lab is pretty close to non-
| falsifiable, i.e. impossible to prove. I assume that if it was an
| accidental or intentional release of a bioweapon, all evidence
| would have long since been wiped clean. Making the claim that the
| CCP secretly created COVID is backed by zero evidence, and
| assuming they're even vaguely competent, all evidence to prove it
| would have been long since destroyed. This is a very unproductive
| path of inquiry,
| prewett wrote:
| There was an article posted to HN recently that went into
| detail on the evidence contained within the virus itself, that
| it has features not consistent with natural processes. However,
| it wasn't secretly created, it was created (in part) with
| grants from the US, which are public.
|
| https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
| dicroce wrote:
| It's also possible that it was an accidental lab leak. But yes,
| its going to be next to impossible to prove.
| kossTKR wrote:
| What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression
| among certain virologist: "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered
| in a lab, please unfollow me. "
| https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1390720308265508871
|
| Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is
| certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at
| Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be
| multiple explanations.
|
| I know the issue is politicised and that's wrong as Ecohealth
| alliance from the US sponsored this research so there is no
| "single country at fault" - no need to avoid topics.
|
| It's not "chinas fault" it's more like, what on earth was the US
| based Ecohealth alliance doing with this research, why so many
| previous lab leaks with little attention, what is the history if
| the Wuhan lab, whats the actual facts about Gain of Function
| research etc. All topics that the press is not looking into for
| some reason.
|
| On Ecohealth alliance:
|
| " It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized
| and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance
| of New York. Daszak's organization funded coronavirus research at
| the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed
| escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially
| culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the
| Lancet's readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, "We
| declare no competing interests.""
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432
| syshum wrote:
| >>I know the issue is politicized
|
| This is becoming more and more common, Pure Science is almost
| never practiced anymore. The Hard sciences like Immunology,
| virology, general medicine used to be some what insulated from
| politics however in the last few years all sciences are no
| longer data driven.
|
| You form a conclusion then find the facts that fit your
| narrative, and if your narrative is not the "correct" one you
| better not release your facts...
| franciscop wrote:
| Is it? Since the beginning the science has been in conflict
| with politics (or the Church, or the Kings/Emperors before
| democracy). Notable political/social opposition to the
| sciences are well documented. Couple of examples: doctors
| washing their hands was a controversial issue [2] and how
| being able to eat "higher-class" food killed thousands of
| Japanese, who rejected eating other food even when it was
| known it was killing them [3].
|
| [1] https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-
| culture/2020/09/18/what...
|
| [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwa
| shi...
|
| [3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-
| mystery-e...
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific
| agression among certain virologist
|
| Would be interesting to dig further into who is funding their
| research.
| jrockway wrote:
| That sounds like the worst of the Internet in action. You
| disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social media, so
| you want to remove their funding source?
|
| I guess that's pretty popular, but I have to say I don't care
| for it.
|
| Many people are still in the bargaining stage of COVID
| response -- if we find that some person made this virus and
| released it into the wild, we just send them to prison and
| the problem goes away. That's a very human reaction to the
| problem, but unfortunately it doesn't actually work. We have
| to clean up this colossal mess regardless of whether it was
| man-made or not, and we have to reckon with the millions that
| died and will never come back.
|
| Finding someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine
| that many people want to move past that distraction and
| eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when we're
| collectively more calm.
|
| I doubt that anyone was funded to create SARS-CoV-2 and then
| try to suppress discussion about it on Twitter. I think the
| "unfollow me if you think it's man-made" is just a short-
| circuit to avoid flamewars and distraction. It probably isn't
| a belief against doing a blameless postmortem so that we can
| handle things like this better in the future.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > You disagree with someone's off-handed remark on social
| media, so you want to remove their funding source?
|
| No, what I was getting at is that they might have a
| financial incentive to discredit the lab escape theory. For
| instance, some of this researcher's funding or his
| institution's funding might be from CCP-backed entities.
|
| > We have to clean up this colossal mess regardless of
| whether it was man-made or not, and we have to reckon with
| the millions that died and will never come back. Finding
| someone to blame is just a distraction, and I imagine that
| many people want to move past that distraction and
| eradicate the disease. The learning can come later when
| we're collectively more calm.
|
| This, trying to push the idea that fighting the virus or
| investigating the outbreak theory are mutually exclusive,
| is also a rhetoric I would expect to be pushed from the
| party responsible for the outbreak.
|
| Truth is, why obstruct investigation efforts and try to
| hide the facts if the origin of the virus is natural?
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| I'm no virologist but of all the places on earth we are
| supposed to believe that, by cheer coincidence, the outbreak
| happened in that one city that happens to do research and have
| patents on lab-modified bat viruses and that it doesn't have
| anything to do with that lab.
|
| I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.
| Pepe1vo wrote:
| To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely
| because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred
| multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses
| for shipwrecks.
|
| That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab
| escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll
| ever find out
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| I've heard this a number of times now, but is it actually
| true?
|
| I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are
| other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in
| Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality
| institutions of higher education.
| lumost wrote:
| There doesn't appear to be any relation between the labs
| founding and zoonoses in the local region.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology
| sharken wrote:
| Your point about the lab is great, it's just very hard to
| dismiss the idea that a lab error was at fault.
|
| But i too think it all too likely that we won't be any
| wiser about the origins.
|
| Though it would be great if a timeline could be
| established, i don't remember seeing a good explanation on
| Covid in Italy being discovered in 2019.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-
| tim...
| prox wrote:
| I believe that Italy origin story was not credible.
| Snopes goes with Wuhan as the origin.
| amayne wrote:
| "Wuhan is ~1000km away from SARS spillover zones. Its human
| population was even used as a negative (no SARS) control
| group."
|
| Via @Ayjchan on Twitter:
| https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327680456220672?s=20
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| kossTKR wrote:
| That fact alone is what makes this even more absurd to me. I
| know about probability math, - the fact the these virologists
| seemingly just discard that factor is twilight-zone territory
| to me.
| johncena33 wrote:
| Of course certain virologists would be eager to dismiss lab
| leak hypothesis. Just think about the implication of this
| hypothesis turns out to be true. Virologists have very strong
| conflict of interests. If these people have any integrity
| they'd refrain from commenting.
| fumbly wrote:
| What's particularly significant and hasn't much been
| commented on yet is that Ralph Baric, the leading American
| collaborator of the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan, has
| signed the letter. He also (according to the OP) declined to
| comment further. That seems more like integrity.
| bbatha wrote:
| Lab leak does not necessarily imply the virus was engineered.
| Indeed there is reasonable evidence for the former and
| little, but not none, for the later.
| tristanj wrote:
| Not surprising at all considering Wuhan Lab scientists admitted
| on video they were bitten by bats and they had lax to no safety
| standards. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4102619
|
| > _A video released two years before the start of the Wuhan
| coronavirus pandemic shows Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
| scientists being cavalier toward protective equipment and being
| bitten by bats that carry deadly viruses such as SARS,
| demonstrating a lax safety culture in the lab._
|
| > _On Dec. 29, 2017, Chinese state-run TV released a video
| designed to showcase Shi Zhengli, (Shi Zheng Li ), also known as
| "Bat Woman," and her team of scientists at the WIV in their quest
| to find the origin of SARS. Despite the fact that the scientists
| work in a biosafety level 4 lab, they show a shocking disregard
| for safety when handling potentially infectious bats both in the
| wild and in the lab._
|
| > _From 4:45 to 4:56, a scientist can be seen holding a bat with
| his bare hands. Team members from 7:44 to 7:50 can be seen
| collecting potentially highly infectious bat feces while wearing
| short sleeves and shorts and with no noticeable personal
| protective equipment (PPE) other than gloves._
|
| > _Virus researcher Cui Jie (Cui Jie ) relates his experiences of
| being bitten from 8:47 to 8:50. He said that the bat 's fangs
| went right through his glove, which was likely nitrile. He
| described the feeling as "like being jabbed with a needle." The
| video then cuts to a person's limb showing swelling after a bat
| bite._
|
| That provides a plausible origin scenario of the pandemic: In
| October 2019, a researcher at the Wuhan Lab was bitten by a bat,
| got infected (asymptomatically), went home and unknowingly
| infected other people in the community, and the virus spread from
| there.
|
| Sadly, I don't think we'll ever know what happened. Those who
| were directly involved with the early stage of the outbreak will
| never speak up, because Beijing issued a complete gag order on
| what happened. Anyone that speaks about the early stages of the
| pandemic be charged with espionage, and if found guilty, they can
| receive the death penalty.
| https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2020/11/9833532bb925-chin...
| yabones wrote:
| Indeed, this type of carelessness adds to the inherent danger
| of researching highly infectious diseases. Labs leak _all the
| time_ , for example the original SARS escaped from labs at
| least three times [1]:
|
| > The recent announcement of nine cases of severe acute
| respiratory syndrome linked to China's National Institute of
| Virology brings to three the number of lab outbreaks of the
| disease in the past eight months.
|
| It's also happened dozens of times in the US, UK, and former
| Soviet Union. Tuberculosis, Smallpox, various flu viruses have
| all escaped from "secure" labs. [2] [3]
|
| Maybe studying viruses isn't as safe as we thought.
|
| ---
|
| [1]
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/05/29/s...
|
| [2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-virology-research-center-
| hit...
|
| [3] https://www.bmj.com/rapid-
| response/2011/10/29/1978-accidenta...
| Florin_Andrei wrote:
| > _Not surprising at all_
|
| Given that the amount of evidence is exactly zero, anyone can
| spin their favorite "unsurprising" theories all day long.
| searine wrote:
| >That provides a plausible origin scenario of the pandemic
|
| Plausible but it gets us no closer to the truth unfortunately.
| There are many plausible origins, but it is important we do not
| mistake plausible for the most likely.
|
| I agree though, the CCP has massively hindered this search for
| truth and will likely continue to do so, all to save face.
| splithalf wrote:
| The innocent have nothing to hide.
| pishpash wrote:
| You'd need to find that bat that you imagine bit someone in
| October 2019, swab its nose or anus and sequence for SARS-
| CoV-2, because the closest known bat virus relative to SARS-
| CoV-2 has a decades-long evolutionary gap to it.
|
| Oh, also viruses don't get virulent in the new host the moment
| the zoonotic transfer occurs. It takes a bit of time to evolve
| and adapt.
| _wldu wrote:
| This answers the Fermi paradox.
| pishpash wrote:
| Suppose for a moment this was not a lab leak. What kind of
| evidence would be sufficient to be convincing? Or are we looking
| for investigation after investigation until the end of time?
|
| What this letter fails to establish is a success criterion.
| Nobody is going to invest in a "proper investigation", much less
| one tinged with politics, without even knowing something will
| come out of it.
| ping_pong wrote:
| What's the point? After reading all the evidence, people such as
| myself firmly believe that it came from the Wuhan lab. Nothing
| the inquiry will come up with convince me otherwise. It's pretty
| obvious once you read all of the unbiased articles that show that
| months earlier, the same research facilities and scientists were
| touting their research in gain-of-function in bat coronaviruses.
| I mean come on!
|
| Bureacracies like WHO will NEVER EVER say that it came from a
| Chinese lab. The "inquiry" will say that it's unlikely and try to
| bury the issue, and then it will just keep popping its head out
| in news articles that get ultimately ignored.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Bureacracies like WHO will NEVER EVER say that it came from a
| Chinese lab.
|
| Why do you care if you will NEVER EVER believe it didn't?
| Dah00n wrote:
| You haven't read enough evidence to know the cause no matter
| how much you follow the case as we have hardly started
| collecting evidence. It's still in early preliminary stages.
|
| To find a source we need a host. We haven't even found a host
| from SARS yet even though that happened back in 2002. All we
| have is a very closely related one (96% match?) and that was
| found in 2020. It takes _a lot_ of work by scientists living
| among wild animals for years in often very remote locations.
| Stating it was from a lab after so little time has past and so
| little work has been done is at a minimum jumping to
| conclusions.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Part of me thinks that we should almost not waste the time to
| find out. Spend the effort on preparing for the next one, by
| improving air filtration etc.
|
| Politics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to
| uncover the truth.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Sort of agree. But if it was from a lab, that might make people
| and governments more careful in the future
|
| Also, what do you mean by "improving air filtration"?
| google234123 wrote:
| What is sad is that these ideas were dismissed as crackpotish
| or racist until now.
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I wonder in who's best interest it was to dismiss these
| theories as racist.
| google234123 wrote:
| China? This seems pretty obvious. The far left also enjoys
| calling things racist so they probably pushed it too.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| I wonder if that's why the comment was downvoted so
| heavily and flagged.
| Judgmentality wrote:
| Are you saying Trump was complicit in calling it the
| Chinese virus as part of their propaganda campaign?
| Sometimes things can just be explained by stupidity.
| ska wrote:
| Most of what I recalling at the time doesn't match that
| description. It was more disparaged as pointless speculation
| mostly being used to fuel political finger pointing when
| people had far more important things to figure out.
|
| Sampling bias acknowledged.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Was the idea that we should inquire about the virus' origin
| dismissed as such, or just the idea that there is already
| strong evidence of any particular origin story?
| baryphonic wrote:
| How do we know the next one will involve air filtration at all?
| Perhaps it will thrive on surfaces for long periods and will
| react negatively to air. How should we prepare for this or any
| other etiology that might be significantly different than this
| one? If we're constantly preparing for the last pandemic, and
| the next one is surprisingly different, wouldn't that be bad as
| well, as those resources could have been used better in the
| intervening time?
|
| But, also, wouldn't it be better to determine the cause of this
| one so we know not to do whatever it was that caused this? For
| example, try to discourage exotic meats that might be host to
| the virus and/or eliminate or strictly control gain of function
| research, depending on the actual cause (or some other cause
| that isn't actually either of these)?
| johncena33 wrote:
| Yes. By that logic, why start punishing people for vehicular
| manslaughter? Just spend the effort on educating perpretrators
| so that they don't kill someone next time.
| dougmwne wrote:
| That viewpoint basically amounts to head in the sand. There is
| a plausible pathway to determine the origin. The lab could be
| openly investigated and the natural environment could be combed
| for an ancestor. If this was an unintentional release, it would
| vastly change the public perception and oversight protocols
| around pathogen research. Think what Chernobyl, Three Mile
| Island and Fukushima did to nuclear energy.
|
| If we don't get open cooperation from China, it's also
| extremely useful information and helps all other nations
| recalibrate their levels of trust and ties.
|
| Because if a future lab release happens, it could be so, so
| much worse. If it seems impossible, disease was a contributing
| factor in 31 species' extinctions that we know of, and those
| diseases were of natural origin.[1] The Plague of Justinian,
| also of natural origin, is estimated to have killed up to half
| the world's population at the time. After the last year, can we
| really afford to take these risks lightly anymore?
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is actually a good point. I think you changed my mind :)
|
| Thanks for the thoughtful post
| dougmwne wrote:
| I think that may be a first for me in 25 years on the
| internet. Thanks for being so open minded!
| tomjen3 wrote:
| We need to make the penalty for this so insanely high that
| nobody, absolutely nobody ever even thinks of doing research
| that might lead to this ever again.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| Why is it an either/or? It seems like it would be possible to
| improve air filtration _and_ have an inquiry.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| No this needs more investigation. Even if the Chinese side
| might be hard to crack, the American angle needs to be fully
| evaluated. Which American scientists were at least aware if not
| complicit (including Fauci) in this entire misguided attempt at
| proactively finding the next virus? Did they actively try to
| suppress their involvement once everything hit the fan?
| fumbly wrote:
| The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function
| research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of
| pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to
| investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused
| the current one.
|
| The risks of such research have been in open debate for years,
| and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's
| not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the
| discussion about it became such a political casualty for the
| first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now
| is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start
| writing letters like the OP.
| baja_blast wrote:
| > The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function
| research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of
| pandemic prevention.
|
| Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be
| extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research
| is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's
| entire justification for conducting this research in the
| first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases
| and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic
| and did nothing towards vaccine development.
| fumbly wrote:
| "Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration
| on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion
| Global Virome Project. Shouldn't we figure out if this
| research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding
| it?"
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-
| opinions/cong...
| monday_ wrote:
| If a containment breach of a relatively harmless virus can lead
| to worldwide catastrophic consequences, you may want to know
| what procedures were breached and what institutional incentives
| are required to make sure the risks are constrained.
|
| In software terms, if you have a bug that breaks the production
| and the response is messy and slow, you absolutely need to
| spend time and effort to change your response process. But you
| also need to know how this type of a bug became possible in the
| first place.
| eplanit wrote:
| Preparation for the next event _requires_ understanding the
| origin of this one to the greatest extent possible.
|
| I think it's very wrong to shy away from inquiry of the truth
| out of fear of politics.
| ska wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to this view, but the flip side of it is we
| don't do much about currently identified pandemic vector
| risks such as swine CAFO operations; why would we expect new
| information (if any) affect our behavior any more than that?
|
| If it's expensive to mitigate and hard to quantify, it's
| always going to be an uphill battle.
| dasudasu wrote:
| Besides, forgoing any investigation is a political statement
| and indeed the preferred outcome by one major political
| player.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-17 23:00 UTC)