[HN Gopher] Scientist finds early virus sequences that had been ...
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Scientist finds early virus sequences that had been mysteriously
deleted
Author : gumby
Score : 118 points
Date : 2021-06-23 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Bayesian_bro wrote:
| I don't see good enough evidence to show the zoological origin
| yet. I don't see good enough evidence of a lab leak origin yet
| either. I do see good enough evidence for a Chinese coverup. I
| can say for 100% certainly the Chinese are not being upfront with
| their data. What scenario would hiding data benefit? Cui bono?
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I think China is the only major country to grow their GDP for
| 2020. Does that answer your question sufficiently?
| AdamN wrote:
| They might just want to protect other secrets about the lab and
| keep everyone at arms length.
|
| My bet is that even in China (which is not monolithic)
| different stakeholders are not so sure and there's major CYA
| between the scientists, the local managers, the Beijing-based
| leadership, senior leadership at all levels. Nothing good can
| come for any of these people if they allow the investigation to
| proceed smoothly. What if it's discovered that some totally
| unrelated incident happened years ago or that somebody was
| embezzling or did shady land deals with Wuhan lab accounts? The
| truth only helps people who are not involved. Everybody
| involved is best served by keeping their mouth shut and
| blocking any investigation.
| plank_time wrote:
| Sorry but China is about as monolithic as you can get. The
| CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country.
| It doesn't allow anything except for a monolithic view.
| S_A_P wrote:
| Can someone explain in non charged terms why its 'bad' to
| investigate and or ask the right questions regarding whether or
| not the virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab? Im genuinely curious
| here. Thinking hypothetically here, _if_ it were leaked wouldnt
| we all want to do a post mortem and figure out how to prevent it
| from happening again?
| Splendor wrote:
| This is a charged topic, but I'll try to answer objectively
| without trying to argue whether the reasons are good or bad.
|
| I can think of two reasonable reasons why someone wouldn't want
| to investigate the matter:
|
| 1. It would be embarrassing for China.
|
| 2. It may be hard to properly communicate or convince people of
| the difference between an accidental lab leak vs. an
| intentional lab leak which could add fuel to a fire of
| jingoism/nationalism in other countries.
|
| Again, I'm trying hard not to make a judgement here. Hopefully
| I did a decent job.
| fairpoints777 wrote:
| It's not your problem if people take it the wrong way, points
| are valid, you don't need to dedicate half your message to
| disclaimers to appease the hyperoffended crowd - what should
| I get upset about today people
| Leary wrote:
| Strawman. Nobody, even China, argues it's bad to investigate.
| Everyone just wants the investigation to be free from political
| interference.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| If it leaked from the lab, preventing that is very easy. We
| just need to _stop doing gain of function research_.
|
| Whether or not Covid came from a lab, it's at least plausible
| that it did, and a virus just as bad could get accidentally
| released in the future. So our options are:
|
| - Continue gain of function research, and risk killing
| literally millions of people
|
| - Stop gain of function research, and lose any knowledge we
| would gain from it.
|
| Honestly, I don't know the first thing about gain of function
| research, but that's one _hell_ of a risk we 're taking with
| it. Can we maybe not try to make the viruses deadlier?
| notJim wrote:
| Is it a certainty that the lab was doing gain of function
| research? Haven't followed this closely.
| lamontcg wrote:
| There's no indication WIV was doing any gain of function
| research.
|
| WIV did collaborate with UNC Chapel Hill to do GOF research
| in America, in mice using a SARS-CoV-1 backbone.
|
| The US government send funds to WIV to study SADS-CoV in
| pigs.
|
| Circular logic is invoked to "prove" that those funds led
| to secret GoF research which has never been published or
| talked about on the basis that the pandemic arising in
| Wuhan is too much of a coincidence (and coincidences
| logically can never happen).
| AdamN wrote:
| Some/many people can't separate the accusation from it being
| shown to be true. During that period of time (years??), it's a
| distraction for those people from the other problems like
| handling vaccine distribution, relations with China independent
| of COVID19, etc...
|
| Yes, if this were a narrow academic research project looking
| into the origin that was left de-politicized until there was an
| outcome that would be great. Unfortunately this whole thing was
| born political and China hasn't done itself any favors by
| always being so hush hush.
| soperj wrote:
| It's not bad, it's just the reason people are doing it have
| nothing to do with preventing it form happening again.
| FriendlyNormie wrote:
| The fucking fact that you felt the need to even ask this. Jesus
| christ.
| legostormtroopr wrote:
| There are only 2 reasons I can think of:
|
| 1. Because Trump called for an investigation into the Lab Leak
| Theory. Since Trump is bad, everything he says and does is
| always bad. This meant that everyone who was anti-Trump said
| that the lab leak theory was 100% false, definitely a
| consipracy theory and hence.... _bad_.
|
| 2. Because the Chinese government have used the modern
| political environment to deflect all critism as racism. Because
| people often shorten "Chinese Government" to "China" in news
| (much like the US), they take it that attacks against "China"
| aren't really attacks against the country but instead racist
| attacks against the people. Since racism is bad, criticism of
| China is racism, and investigating the Lab Leak leak is
| criticism of China - it stans to reason that the Lab Leak
| theory is racism, and hence.... _bad_.
| fairpoints777 wrote:
| Well reasoned points, not sure why you are getting downvoted,
| probably the left/liberal censorship crew (my way of thinking
| or the highway, insert random accusations of racism/sexism)
| McTossOut wrote:
| No, investigation or questions are probably merited given the
| scale of this thing.
|
| Random fragments of what sounds like an investigation getting
| immediately published is the problem.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/kbqdB
| femto113 wrote:
| There's no obvious reason to believe this is nefarious or even
| "mysterious". From the WaPo article[1] on the subject here's the
| statement from the NIH (which maintains the database)
|
| "These SARS-CoV-2 sequences were submitted for posting in SRA in
| March 2020 and subsequently requested to be withdrawn by the
| submitting investigator in June 2020. The requestor indicated the
| sequence information had been updated, was being submitted to
| another database, and wanted the data removed from SRA to avoid
| version control issues"
|
| [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/coronavirus-origin-
| nih...
| pitched wrote:
| https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/hGqAvT
| codeulike wrote:
| Article is Paywalled but its basically about this twitter thread
| from Bloom Labs:
|
| https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445604029009923
|
| This technical bit is interesting - although the data had been
| 'deleted' from the Sequence Read Archive* web app by the original
| submitter, this tweet explains that they were able to recover the
| data via storage.googleapis.com:
|
| https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445615248691201
|
| _I discovered that even though the files were deleted from
| archive itself, they could be recovered from the Google Cloud at
| links likehttps://storage.googleapis.com/nih-sequence-read-
| archive/run... (5/n) ..._
|
| So technical question for HNers - what lives at
| storage.googleapis.com usually? Was that like a cloud mirror or
| was it more like the 'delete' function in the web app was only
| removing things from the index but leaving the deleted stuff
| accessible?
|
| * Sequence Read Archive seems to live at
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sra
| colechristensen wrote:
| They were supposedly storing artifacts publicly available on
| GCP's object store, an efficient way to do things for
| distribution of non-secure large pieces of data.
|
| "delete" deleted the reference to these objects but the objects
| were kept around. (This is a not-so-bad practice, if you're
| hacked and somebody tries to wipe everything, or some bug or
| fat finger deletes everything, you've deleted references to
| data not actual data)
| ve55 wrote:
| Most likely the latter: the server-side code in charge of
| deleting data did not make a call to their storage api to also
| remove the object itself. There's a good chance that is
| intentional and serves as a soft-deletion function, such that
| it could be reverted (or the data otherwise used) if needed.
| pitched wrote:
| That was my read on this too and Dr. Bloom accidentally
| hacked the NIH. The next question though is whether they'll
| change this or not? Is the guarantee that anyone can retract
| at any time important enough to make the db useful? Will the
| Chinese government mandate no one there ever use it again
| now?
| nitrogen wrote:
| _Dr. Bloom accidentally hacked the NIH._
|
| In case this is why this comment was downvoted, it's worth
| remembering that others have been charged with CFAA
| violation for basically the same thing.
| bgentry wrote:
| There was some prior discussion on this submission from
| yesterday, though it fell just short of the front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598222
|
| The source paper
| (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1) or
| Twitter thread
| (https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1407445604029009923) are
| probably better sources than the New York Times article based on
| them.
| bigpumpkin wrote:
| "Dr. Goldstein noted that the testing paper listed the individual
| mutations the Wuhan researchers found in their tests. Although
| the full sequences are no longer in the archive, the key
| information has been public for over a year, he said."
| wallacoloo wrote:
| Not to mention it was deleted in June 2020. I have to imagine
| many researchers had already downloaded the data by then and
| that there are a number of local copies that could be shared
| out if there was compelling reason to do so.
|
| If it was a coverup it was a rather poor one. It's hard for me
| to think this was nefarious, unless the intention was just to
| delay (in a plausibly deniable manner).
| mrkstu wrote:
| It isn't, by itself, conclusive at all, but the amount of
| smoke China generates around this whole thing, vs
| transparency, screams that there is fire in the middle of the
| smoke.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Is this amount of smoke uncharacteristic for China?
| tux3 wrote:
| Establishing a pattern of shiftiness would not make the
| actions in question less questionnable.
|
| If I hear a surprising claim from a pathological liar,
| I'm also less likely to believe it, not more!
| joejerryronnie wrote:
| No, but neither is fire
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the disappearance of these sequences was
| discussed more than a year ago in Bret Weinstein's podcast, among
| many other indicators of a lab leak:
|
| https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug?t=1843
|
| He's been the canary in the coal mine on numerous issues
| surrounding COVID.
|
| edit: listen from 30:43, also from 25:11:
| https://youtu.be/q5SRrsr-Iug?t=1511
| cma wrote:
| >He's been the canary in the coal mine on numerous issues
| surrounding COVID.
|
| He's also been the carbon monoxide in the coal mine, steering
| people away from vaccines
| eloff wrote:
| Yeah, I don't agree with this assessment of the risks there.
|
| The more people that are vaccinated, the shakier his argument
| becomes.
|
| Covid19 has very real, well documented risks. The common
| vaccines have very low known risks by comparison. The space
| for unknown risks shrinks by the day.
|
| That's the danger inherit with being a contrarian. Mostly you
| end up being wrong. It's a very important role though, to
| challenge accepted beliefs and create a dialog around them.
| DiffEq wrote:
| Not all vaccines are created equal.
| peter4123 wrote:
| Great point - The COVID19 Vaccines, particularly the mRNA
| ones are some of the best ever made, ~90% effective at
| preventing disease and ~100% effective at preventing death.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| You're thinking of the WIV database that was offlined 12
| September.
|
| This is new. We don't know why the sequence was deleted; the
| submitter cited "version control" reasons (data was being
| submitted somewhere else) but then deleted both known copies.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > among many other indicators of a lab leak:
|
| literally nothing in this article or in the sequences is
| indication of a lab leak.
|
| it isn't even particularly clear there is any cover up here,
| particularly since an article on the sequences was published.
|
| if there's any deliberate suppression it would seem to be to
| hide the fact that scientists were studying the virus sooner
| than previously admitted and that they should have raised the
| alarm earlier.
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(page generated 2021-06-23 23:00 UTC)