[HN Gopher] What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
___________________________________________________________________
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
Author : summoned
Score : 378 points
Date : 2022-06-24 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unherd.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unherd.com)
| subsubzero wrote:
| Here are two "damning" articles about the lab leak theory, for
| some reason these articles were not widely seen but highly
| recommend them if you are searching for the truth around the
| origin of covid:
|
| https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
|
| and:
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...
| csours wrote:
| There are two sources that most people talk about:
|
| 1. The Wuhan Institute of Virology
|
| 2. A particular market in Wuhan.
|
| However, all we really know is that Wuhan is the first city with
| a lot of cases. It is entirely possible that the virus, or a
| virus precursor was active in a small population somewhere else.
| Also, there are a lot of labs in Wuhan besides the WIV.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I suppose it's possible, but is it likely? Given the virality
| of Covid if it was present in another city before hand that
| city would have been the first to get a lot of cases.
| csours wrote:
| It spreads a bit more slowly in rural areas, and there could
| have been a mutation that increased fitness and spread in
| humans. There is very little that we can say MUST be true
| about the origin of Sars-Cov-2
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a
| politically unauthorized thought.
|
| If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful
| people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to
| these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of
| media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized
| politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.
| notananthem wrote:
| lol jet fuel melt zoonotic origin beams right
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Not to mention you'd see a rise in anti-Asian hate crime as
| disturbed people take out their frustrations.
| peyton wrote:
| If I don't see health authorities taking lab safety seriously by
| thoroughly and publicly investigating, why should I believe they
| take vaccine safety seriously? The framing damages credibility.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Why should you believe they take food safety seriously? Why
| should you believe they take water quality and treatment
| seriously? Or the authorities who oversee the safety of
| aerospace or airbags or what your bank is allowed to do with
| your savings? Vaccine safety is an awfully specific thing to
| double down on considering the overwhelmingly broad set of
| things that you rely on public servants for (specifically ones
| who regulate health), the very small number of times you need
| to get a vaccine in your life, and the sheer numbers and public
| nature of trials around vaccine testing.
| jahewson wrote:
| Because Western authorities have no power to investigate the
| Chinese?
| nomoreusernames wrote:
| Well, I for one am a firm believer in the Labrador-Leak
| hypothesis. Anyone who disagrees surely is not a TRUE scientist.
| Just look at the numbers. More labradors than ever before.
| Statistics never lie. Everybody knows that Labradors are dogs.
| WithinReason wrote:
| Just a reminder that the predecessor of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-1
| leaked from the lab 4 (yes, four) times. The Wikipedia page lists
| 3 of them:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
|
| Biosecurity incidents are shockingly common.
| theptip wrote:
| I think the important point is not whether this outbreak was in
| fact a lab leak, but that it is entirely plausible due to gain-
| of-function research.
|
| Even if this one wasn't a lab leak, the next one very well could
| be. The risk/reward profile of that sort of research is insanely
| unfavorable.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| There's no proof of "gain of function" experiments at all or
| specifically linked to Sars-Cov-2. It is heavily unlikely that
| such an experiment would switch a virus from un-pandemic-able
| to pandemic-able. The mechanisms to do that are entirely
| theoretical.
|
| So it's not clear at all that gain of function would have been
| able to create a Virus like Sars-Cov-2 out of a hypothetical
| bat virus. And there is no evidence any such research has been
| going on. Nor is there any evidence the virus has passed
| through the Wuhan lab in question at all.
| azekai wrote:
| This is the conversation we need to have, on an international
| level.
| EA_itsinthegame wrote:
| When Australia proposed an international investigation into
| the origins, in direct response, China started cyber attacks,
| resentencing Australian prisoners to death, and used economic
| warfare.
|
| This seems like a conversation we can not have, if China has
| any say in it. And for a natural origin spillover event, it
| sure wants to have its say...
| zo1 wrote:
| If your claims are true, then the fact that I (and others)
| didn't know this is seriously disturbing. I think a lot of
| people would have doubled down and pushed for alot more
| pressure and investigation into all of China's dealings
| across the board, if they had known.
|
| At the very least it's an indictment on our media which
| should be pointing out these curious coincidences. Instead
| I think they have other motives.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I don't know about the other two but Australian coal was
| put under sanction by china in the wake of their call for
| an investigation. This, ironically, was quite bad for
| china since it indirectly led to power cuts in some
| provinces because they couldn't use the lower grade of
| coal otherwise available.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/03/australia-finds-new-
| markets-...
|
| Power cuts later that fall:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58733193
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Doubly ironically is that this was probably the single
| most effective action Morrison took to limit climate
| change emissions!
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Whatever toy gain of function research someone is doing in a
| lab vastly pales in comparison to the enormous gain of function
| 'experiment' we are right now performing worldwide with the
| continued high transmission rate of COVID-19.
|
| Look at what variants like Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 have evolved
| into, they are quite possibly the most infectious and dangerous
| air spread pathogens known to man. These didn't come from a
| lab, we cooked them up by dropping all mitigations and
| pretending the pandemic was over instead of quashing this virus
| for good.
| dehrmann wrote:
| The only alternative to this experiment is China's currently
| policy. There isn't much of a middle ground because anything
| short of aggressive testing, lockdowns, and quarantine won't
| be enough to stop the spread.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public
| settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again.
| Contact tracing and government support for paid sick leave,
| etc. would control it even further. At no point do harsh
| lockdowns have to happen.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in
| public settings and get the effective R value down near 1
| again.
|
| But as soon as people take off masks, it starts spreading
| again. It's also getting less politically viable when
| ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60%
| in late April).
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| > It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of
| Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late
| April)
|
| This means nothing. The virus reinfects people with
| existing immunity. For example Senator Wicker from MS is
| on his _third_ infection:
| https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2022/06/13/senator-
| roger-w... Two of those infections have been in the last
| four months alone!
|
| We have to use NPIs like masking to stop the virus from
| spreading in order to stop new variants from evolving.
| There is no herd immunity. There is no natural immunity.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > we cooked them up
|
| When you say "we", who do you mean exactly? How did they cook
| them?
|
| Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| > When you say "we", who do you mean exactly? How did they
| cook them?
|
| The entire population of the western world. Every time
| COVID-19 infects a person and replicates it has the chance
| to mutate or introduce errors. If those errors in
| replication increase the fitness of the virus it will
| evolve to become a more powerful variant (i.e. gain of
| function). By continuing to allow hundreds of thousands of
| new cases and infections to occur daily we are increasing
| the chance of variants evolving. The _only_ way to stop
| variants is to stop transmission, period.
|
| > Can you explain why you believe the pandemic is not over?
|
| We are still averaging over 100k new cases a day in the US.
| And that's with almost all of the population using rapid
| tests that aren't counted in that measurement.
| Closi wrote:
| Ah yes, is this the old "let's lock down the planet
| forever" solution?
| aftbit wrote:
| Source please? Everything I've read about latest Omicrons
| suggests that they are more transmissible, more likely to
| evade immunity, and substantially _less_ severe in terms of
| hospitalization and deaths. By and large, this is what you'd
| expect to happen at the end of a pandemic, regardless of our
| response.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| You admit it yourself, I will quote you:
|
| "they are more transmissible, more likely to evade
| immunity"
|
| Intrinsic severity of the virus doesn't change the fact it
| is the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the
| world.
|
| Even if it is intrinsically less severe than previous
| variants, because we are allowing it to spread to EVERYONE
| in the world we are seeing a much worse impact. Did you
| miss that in the US alone we've had over 160k deaths from
| COVID-19 just in the last 6 months of this year? No other
| virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.
| andai wrote:
| Fun fact, Covid did leak from a Chinese lab, but it was in
| December 2021:
|
| >A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with
| the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant at a high-biosecurity facility in
| Taipei.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
| saila wrote:
| From the Wikipedia link: "A lab worker was bitten and
| infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta
| variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei [Taiwan in
| December of 2021]".
|
| From there, news articles speculate that "this will add
| credibility to the lab leak theory [if confirmed]" and this
| "gives legs to Wuhan lab leak theory," which is hardly
| conclusive.
|
| I don't see how this incident would indicate that SARS-CoV-2
| initially came out of a lab. It demonstrates a possible
| vector out of a lab, but I'm guessing that's already a well-
| known vector when dealing with lab animals, and it doesn't
| provide any evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was actually developed
| in a lab or initially spread from one.
| cbb330 wrote:
| Taipei, the capitol of Taiwan, is not a Chinese entity. This
| is a lab leak from a Taiwanese lab.
| alkjl4l4tl wrote:
| robonerd wrote:
| Taiwan is Chinese, but they're not communist Chinese. They
| are the Republic of China, not the _People 's_ Republic of
| China.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| Most Taiwanese do not see themselves as Chinese.
|
| > Republic of China
|
| Most Taiwanese would love to change that name, but China
| is threating war if they do.
| idontwantthis wrote:
| That would be a fun conflation by a Chinese advocate.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I know what you mean, but Taipei is the capital of the
| Republic of China.
| saila wrote:
| Most people are referring to PRC (AKA mainland China,
| nominally communist) not ROC (AKA Taiwan, a republic)
| when they say China (at least in the west), so your
| statement is true but not particularly helpful in this
| context.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dehrmann wrote:
| As someone in tech, what bothers me is all the attention AI
| gets for possible ethical problems, while biologists are doing
| some pretty scary experiments with potentially large-scale
| negative consequences, and they've gotten relatively little
| attention.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Biologists have well developed frameworks for judging the
| ethics of experiments that has been built up over a century
| of horrifying missteps.
|
| AI is at the "hire and fire until they get a sycophant" stage
| in the development of proper ethical review methods.
| handmodel wrote:
| It's also very weird that the same type of people who
| normally talk about corporations/governments covering up
| pollutants do not talk about how many people could die from a
| potential lab leak.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Discussion of the "lab leak hypothesis" isn't helpful and has on
| the contrary done a lot of harm. The problem is that a "lab leak"
| is understood as something evil, intentional or reckless. The
| research into bat viruses however is vital. There is also no
| evidence that Sars-Cov-2 even originated in a bat, much less
| passed through a laboratory.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _intentional or reckless._
|
| Yes, that would cover all lab leak possibilities, wouldn't it?
| If we assume the premise of a lab leak, then logically they
| either they did it on purpose or it was an accident. The union
| of intentional and reckless gives 100% coverage. You might as
| well say _" the grain silo blew up intentionally or due to
| recklessness."_ No shit.
|
| > _The research into bat viruses however is vital._
|
| Grain silos are vital to society, but if one blows up
| accidentally then wouldn't you say it's important to recognize
| the accident and enact measures to make similar accidents less
| likely in the future? The importance of grain silos to society
| is not an argument against investigating the role of negligence
| in grain silo accidents. If this research killed millions of
| people by accident, then figuring that out matters so new
| security measures can be enacted.
| mr_gibbins wrote:
| If the lab leak hypothesis is proven beyond all doubt, then it
| embarrasses China.
|
| Embarrassing one of the world's superpowers is broadly seen as an
| undesirable thing to do.
|
| Ergo, scientists producing findings backing up the hypothesis
| will find plenty of opponents whose first and only job is to
| discredit them in any way possible, from denying their papers
| publication (looking at you, ResearchGate) to publicly attacking
| them on social media (Dr. Malone).
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Lab leak theory is never going to be proven beyond reasonable
| doubt. For that to happen, Chinese government would need to
| cooperate. And it is almost an axiom that they won't, if it has
| a slight chance of making them look bad.
| 1024core wrote:
| 9/11 cost us ~ 3000 lives? And we spent 20 years fighting wars,
| killing 100s of 1000s of people, bombing the shit out of entire
| countries, and trillions of dollars in trying to exact revenge.
|
| COVID kills 1,000,000 people (and counting...), which is 333X the
| death toll from 9/11; and we just shrug and do nothing?
|
| Just doesn't compute.
| jahewson wrote:
| One is an intentional act by a group of people. The other is,
| at worst, an accident where the main actor is a molecule.
| [deleted]
| chrisco255 wrote:
| How can you ascribe motives if you don't even know the facts?
| Even if it was an accident, it would be gross negligence and
| worthy of intense investigation.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Where the main actor is a scientific institution funded by
| public and private money from multiple countries.
| 1024core wrote:
| My point is that we spent so much effort in response to 9/11,
| but when COVID happened, we didn't even care to look into
| what caused the death of 1M Americans, and just took China's
| word for it.
| rory wrote:
| The bigger problem there is the response to 9/11, not the
| response to Covid.
| alkjl4l4tl wrote:
| stetrain wrote:
| I think understanding the origin is important, but I also
| understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic
| itself.
|
| 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or
| response to the pandemic
|
| 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus
| outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with
| the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can
| be around the world in every airport before anyone has even
| identified it.
|
| So in the big picture this type of outbreak seems inevitable, not
| anomalous or inherently preventable.
|
| Understanding the origin, either by cross-species origination or
| a laboratory containment breach, is indeed important and
| significant and should be pursued, but I also understand why the
| search for that answer isn't at the top of the 24-hour news
| cycle.
| ShannonLimiter wrote:
| > 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences
| or response to the pandemic
|
| I have the opposite opinion.
|
| If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the
| Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information
| about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could
| have saved millions of lives.
|
| We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the
| belief that it wasn't airborne. This ended up being false.
|
| If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research is
| far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and
| continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great
| risk.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the
| Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more
| information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.
|
| You're assuming that the lab "designed" it like a new vehicle
| engine complete with horsepower and torque specs.
|
| Even given it was produced in a lab through chimeras and
| serial passage then they still wouldn't have known what they
| had. They wouldn't have known its characteristics in a human
| population. They wouldn't have known how long its incubation
| period was, or when peak symptoms and peak transmissibility
| happened, they wouldn't have known its virulence, or its R0
| in a human population or pretty much anything. They'd might
| have receptor binding assays against the human ACE-2
| receptor. That knowledge and $4.25 will buy you a latte, but
| it won't predict the trajectory of a pandemic.
|
| And why aren't you annoyed at the coverup that China is doing
| of its zoonotic origins and that China isn't cleaning up all
| of the trafficking in live animals like palm civets and
| racoon dogs? We know SARS-CoV-1 happened, and there was no
| BSL4 lab to blame it on, so it was definitely zoonotic, yet
| still fairly unexplained, and nothing serious was done to
| prevent it from happening again. Now the US is blaming the
| WIV lab and China is feeding its domestic population
| propaganda about how the US did it, and still nothing is
| being done to address the mechanism that we know created
| SARS-CoV-1. There's still a known virological time bomb there
| that nobody is doing anything about.
|
| And the reason why China wants to cover up the zoonotic
| origins and kick the can down the road is that it can use the
| lab leak theory to push the domestic propaganda that the US
| did, along with avoiding the political costs of clamping down
| on the animal trade. And there will be a political cost to
| doing that. Imagine if in 2009 that the H1N1 pandemic
| happened in a US pig farm and was 100 times worse, and then
| Obama tried to ban bacon to prevent a future pandemic.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I really have to ask. Did we really not have any idea how
| corona viruses spread before? If so, what other virus
| families we are unaware now and why aren't we spending lot of
| money to prepare for all of them?
| rdl wrote:
| Airborne was always known; debate was droplet vs aerosol
| (particle size and thus dwell time/radius). Not really a
| binary distinction anyway; a matter of degree.
| timr wrote:
| I agree it's not binary -- and the SARS CoV2 debate, in
| particular, became a theater of the absurd -- but the
| categorical distinction is not entirely crazy: some viruses
| are much more sensitive to drying out or exposure to the
| environment and simply cannot transmit efficiently in tiny
| aerosols.
|
| Tons of work has gone into weaponizing smallpox, for
| example. It's a non-trivial thing, even though smallpox is
| _technically_ already a virus that transmits via aerosol.
| Many viruses will exist in saliva, and will happily
| transmit through direct contact, but won 't transmit well
| via the air (mononucleosis comes to mind).
| rhino369 wrote:
| A fair large degree though. However, as I understand it, it
| wasn't a misconception unique this particular coronavirus.
| But that the entire medical field just had a longstanding,
| bad understanding of dynamics. So its not like the Wuhan
| lab was sitting on some crucial information, they almost
| certainly had the same misunderstanding.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| > Airborne was always known
|
| In the early days China even claimed even that this thing
| is NOT contagious - and yet they already started isolating
| patients at this time.
| stetrain wrote:
| I meant the consequences and response to the COVID-19
| pandemic in 2020-2021.
|
| Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences
| if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to
| research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't
| top priority during the actual pandemic response.
|
| Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I
| think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on
| the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over
| something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research
| is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe
|
| Even if it wasn't a lab leak, it could have been. So whether
| it was or was not should not change your opinion about the
| danger of this type of research.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > That could have saved millions of lives
|
| But that still doesn't change the consequences or response to
| the pandemic. That's coulda-woulda-shoulda reasoning.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Of course it does. It will impact other countries
| relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and
| level of scrutiny over this kind of research.
| corrral wrote:
| > It will impact other countries relationships with
| china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny
| over this kind of research.
|
| I think the point is that neither of those would have had
| an effect _on the pandemic_. By the time it was major
| news in the US, it was too late for any of that to matter
| _in terms of what to do about this pandemic_. Not the
| next one, or our future relations with China, but with
| _this_ pandemic.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| A) I guess I interpreted "consequences" more generally to
| also include the consequences beyond the disease itself.
|
| B) I still believe that it would have been important. If
| it escaped from a lab, then those working in the lab
| could potentially have important information to share
| with the world about it. E.g. is it airborne, how much
| does it mutate, etc. They would have been studying it for
| a reason.
| ikiris wrote:
| I'm going to be blunt here. No one with medical training
| thought this wasn't airborne.
| [deleted]
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| The communication at the beginning was that it was only
| spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the
| combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks
| would be sufficient.
|
| Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the
| WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic
| was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes
| me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve the
| supply of respirators for medical staff.
| nicoburns wrote:
| That was debunked here on HN right from the start though.
| And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I
| think the parent is right in asserting that the medical
| community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know
| for absolute certain, but it was considered highly
| likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message
| by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but
| plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better
| than them.
| dekhn wrote:
| CDC updated its site in Oct 2020 to acknowledge airborne
| spread. There is still something of an argument in the
| scientific/medical community about what "airborne" means.
| A lot of folks lived through https://en.wikipedia.org/wik
| i/1976_Philadelphia_Legionnaires... which is scary
| because if there's just another infected person in the
| building, they can infect people far away!
|
| and when the initial scientific articles about COVID air
| spreading
| (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0764_article)
| came out, many policy makers were truly terrified of
| making announcements that would cause worldwide panic.
| themgt wrote:
| July 10, 2020:
|
| _The new coronavirus is likely spreading through the air
| to some degree, the top U.S. infectious disease official
| said on Friday, one day after the World Health Organization
| urged further studies on the ways the virus is
| transmitted._
|
| _"Still some question about aerosol but likely some degree
| of aerosol," Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. National
| Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said by video
| during a panel session at a COVID-19 conference organized
| by the International AIDS Society._
|
| _Fauci on Thursday had said it was a "reasonable
| assumption" that airborne transmission was occurring even
| though there was not a lot of solid evidence behind it. The
| WHO urged more studies on the issue._
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-
| meetin...
| bragh wrote:
| Funny then how for the first few months of the pandemic the
| emphasis and public guidance was on desinfecting hands and
| surfaces and endless debates about how if masks actually
| help.
| [deleted]
| propagandist wrote:
| That was deliberate disinformation in order to save masks
| for the "frontline workers". Fauci has stated that in one
| of the hearings.
| epgui wrote:
| It wasn't disinformation. It was no secret that one of
| the reasons masks weren't recommended for general public
| use was that hospitals and clinics should be supplied as
| a priority.
|
| If you got a different impression than this message,
| blame wherever you get your news from.
| pseudo0 wrote:
| What, the US Surgeon General? https://archive.ph/KgfXW
|
| > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!
|
| > They are NOT effective in preventing general public
| from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers
| can't get them to care for sick patients, it puts them
| and our communities at risk!
|
| It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just
| about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-
| level government officials were explicitly stating that
| masks were not effective for the general public.
|
| Fortunately we have archives of all this stuff, as many
| statements (like this one) were later deleted.
| ssully wrote:
| Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in
| April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to
| hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their
| mask shortages.
| daveevad wrote:
| I'm not sure that is correct. In a subsequently FOIA'd
| email, Fauci told a colleague on February 5, 2020.
|
| > Masks are really for infected people to prevent them
| from spreading infection to people who are not infected
| rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring
| infection.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| That's a well known fact about how masks work in general,
| yes. They have a large effect on transmission _from_ the
| wearer and a comparatively small effect in preventing
| transmission _to_ the wearer.
|
| However, when you have a limited supply of masks, it's
| impossible to give them out to every potentially-infected
| person, so saving them for high-risk people (like
| healthcare professionals, who also have the highest risk
| of becoming infected themselves) is still rational.
| runnerup wrote:
| That was the worst strategy the administration could have
| used.
| leppr wrote:
| I distinctly recall a virologist on public television
| early in the pandemic saying the hands and surface
| disinfection rituals were for psychology. He was not
| recommending masks either because there weren't enough to
| go around for everyone.
|
| The debates about masks in the west, even after
| production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial
| confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it
| debated in Asia where they had masks available from the
| start.
| ikiris wrote:
| No one competent has debated that masks help.
| Lionga wrote:
| The German authority's namely RKI said they do not help
| for a long time. Until they flipped 180
| friedman23 wrote:
| This pandemic was raging inside China for months before it
| reached the US. What the Chinese government did by not
| allowing international observers and researchers and
| preventing the spread of information DID result in millions
| of lives lost. We could have had the vaccine available MONTHS
| in advance.
| thenayr wrote:
| What...literally everyone knew there was AT LEAST airbone
| risk of infection. Not sure where you got your pandemic
| information?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the
| Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more
| information about the nature of the virus and how it spread.
| That could have saved millions of lives.
|
| The lesson here is not "we need to prove it was a lab leak,"
| the lesson is "we need better visibility inside China." Which
| is also true for viruses that arise naturally inside China.
|
| Do you think that if you could prove with total certainty
| that it was a lab leak in 2019, that would change China's
| approach to secrecy in the future?
|
| > If this was a lab leak, it means that this kind of research
| is far more dangerous than we've been lead to believe and
| continuing without appropriate safeguards puts us at great
| risk.
|
| Do you think we can stop secret viral research in China if
| they want to do it?
|
| One of my frustrations with the "lab leak theory" is that it
| seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.
|
| We can't control other nations and we can't stop natural
| viral evolution. Future preparedness is the same as past
| preparedness: detect and respond. We just did a bad job of it
| with COVID-19. The lesson is: do a better job.
| ShannonLimiter wrote:
| > The lesson here is not "we need to prove it was a lab
| leak," the lesson is "we need better visibility inside
| China." Which is also true for viruses that arise naturally
| inside China.
|
| The WIV was conducting research with US financial and
| technical support. The lab in question regarding a
| potential leak was funded in part to look for early signs
| of outbreaks.
|
| If there was a lab leak and it was inadvertently caused by
| this lab, would you suggest that we continue to fund and
| provide support with no changes?
|
| > One of my frustrations with the "lab leak theory" is that
| it seems to cause fuzzy thinking about future preparedness.
|
| I can't speak to what you've seen elsewhere, but future
| preparedness should involve more transparency, safeguards
| that samples are being tested with the right safety levels
| and actual independent oversight.
|
| It seems crazy to continue funding a bad faith actor
| without those conditions.
| fleddr wrote:
| Your "no priority" stance doesn't hold ground if the article is
| to be believed. The lab leak theory wasn't just low on the
| agenda, it was actively avoid altogether.
| Trufa wrote:
| Concerning number 1) that is doesn't change the Consequence I
| agree, but the response I thoroughly disagree unless you means
| strictly short term.
|
| Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions
| experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse.
|
| So basically the only truly important response that is not
| damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen
| again).
|
| Honestly beside fringe groups I don't see any initiatives
| happening, if it was up to me I'd kick gain of function
| experiments into the same realm as chemical weapons.
| stetrain wrote:
| I meant how we were dealing with COVID-19 as it spread, not
| future consequences which I agree do matter.
|
| Once we identified and sequenced the virus, knowing the
| origin wasn't going to change how many people were on
| ventilators in hospitals.
| closeparen wrote:
| There are a variety of natural phenomena and human activities
| that are liable to create new dangerous viruses and/or bring
| humans into contact with them. Gain of function research
| presumably belongs in this category; so do certain food and
| livestock handling practices, development at the wildland-
| urban interface, climate change, and a host of other things.
|
| The question is how much incremental risk do these activities
| expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them,
| and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they
| are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the
| origin of a single event is not especially helpful in
| recalibrating.
|
| Nature breeds extremely serious viruses all by herself; a
| depressing possibility here is that humans just don't have
| that much influence over the risk of another pandemic no
| matter what we do.
| jtbayly wrote:
| > The question is how much incremental risk do these
| activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of
| curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The
| risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging
| them, knowing the origin of a single event is not
| especially helpful in recalibrating.
|
| If only we had responded this way to the virus.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I don't even think it's that different from nuclear. The fact
| that Iraq had no WMDs (and I have doubts that anybody in the
| intelligence community really thought they did) got swept under
| the rug too, after a ton of civilian deaths there and military
| deaths on both sides. People just make stuff up and then it's
| too late.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| We already had intense media speculation about the source of
| the virus at the start of the pandemic because _people wanted
| to know_. It would have been nice to have a proper
| investigation at the start of the pandemic as they may have
| caught evidence before it could have been destroyed.
| [deleted]
| user3939382 wrote:
| I guess I'm more cynical, maybe even conspiratorial. My theory
| is that NIH was possibly, even if indirectly, contributing
| funding to the research that caused the outbreak, and that the
| major corporate media networks are there to shill for the
| establishment forces in the government and hushed this story as
| not to humiliate Fauci and the NIH.
|
| I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a
| number of times and each time, the propaganda machine on reddit
| came out to damage control for Fauci.
|
| The larger problem, beyond whether we funded this or not,
| whether or not it was a bat, is that the media and leaders in
| the government have repeatedly shown themselves to be
| completely undeserving of trust and so you're left guessing
| what the truth is with whatever limited information you have
| access to.
| [deleted]
| hammock wrote:
| > I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the
| pandemic itself.
|
| You list some reasons, and I have in my mind a different
| reason.
|
| There was a media blackout on the lab leak hypothesis because
| China put the kibosh on it, and since the US is dependent on
| Chinese exports for healthcare, PPE, defense and other critical
| supply lines, we did not want to piss them off.
|
| Direction to the media for this blackout came from the US State
| Dept, and Mike Pompeo confirmed as much in semi-public comments
| that I will link if I ever find them again.
|
| edit: this isn't the source I was thinking of, and it fingers
| the IC not State. I will keep looking
| https://www.newsweek.com/mike-pompeo-intel-officials-wuhan-l...
| 127 wrote:
| Wasn't SARS-1 stopped largely with contact tracing? You're
| saying that understanding the origin of the virus does not help
| the production of a vaccine in any way?
| stetrain wrote:
| Knowing where the virus is, how it spreads, and its genetic
| sequence are of course important. But I don't think CNN
| running segments about whether it came from a lab or a bat in
| 2020-2021 would have helped with any of those points.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Big difference between the two: with SARS-1 you first got
| symptoms then become contagious, with COVID-19 it was the
| other way around. Obviously the second one is much harder to
| control, and if that had not been the case there is a fair
| chance that the pandemic would have been stopped in the
| initial phase.
| malikNF wrote:
| Wait the article says there's 200k cases in the U.K everyday now?
| Why is google reporting way lower? [1]
|
| [1]https://i.imgur.com/u6KABa5.png
| peteradio wrote:
| You are misquoting, its estimated infections not cases. Not
| everyone who has an active infection gets a test and reports
| it, in fact its a small fraction.
| __alexs wrote:
| Presumably it's based on the ONS estimates.
| abainbridge wrote:
| I guess it is because the UK stopped doing as much testing.
| Presumably Google is reporting the number of positive tests (or
| something) and many people with covid don't bother getting
| tested any more.
|
| The ONS is still doing random sampling and extrapolating to say
| how many people in the country are infected. "Around 1.7m
| people in the UK had coronavirus in the week ending 18 June" -
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51768274
| Melatonic wrote:
| While I 100% am most invested in the idea it was from some type
| of wild animal (probably a bat - scientists have been warning us
| for YEARS that when we encroach and destroy habitats of animals
| we are pushing our luck for exposing new diseases) I did/do have
| a pretty niche theory that I saw almost nowhere else. So to be
| clear - obviously - I do not actually think this is likely:
|
| September 2019 there was a large explosion at one of Russia's top
| viral research labs (supposedly also bioweapons) in Siberia due
| to large natural fires in Siberia - link below
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49727101
|
| Officials then declare the explosion and lab not to be an issue
| and everyone moves on.
|
| Is it not possible that something was accidentally leaked from
| this lab? I am not implying intent here - just that we could be
| dealing with an accident caused by the huge, huge fires. This is
| the same lab that later develops the Russian COVID vaccine.
|
| At the time the only other reference I could find to this was a
| joke made by a comedian in Russia which they very quickly cracked
| down on:
|
| https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/04/07/russia-opens-crimi...
|
| I posted about this once before on Hacker News and got a TON of
| downvotes. Not trying to spread misinformation or something here
| at all.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Your Russia theory is on par with the one from the Chinese
| government saying the virus came to Wuhan from the US via some
| frozen food.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| A hypothesis is something that can be disproven. Lab leak was
| never a hypothesis. It was never more than a talking point. Even
| just looking at the inconclusive evidence, there was zero
| indication it was true (the genetic changes between covid 19 and
| it's natural cousins were random for instance, not targeted as
| they would be for a man made pathogen).
| affgrff wrote:
| Lab leak does not require that the pathogen is man made.
| sixQuarks wrote:
| Let's not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last
| year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and
| YouTube
|
| This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on
| "fact checkers".
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by
| political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully
| clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even
| though their agencies already had those plans in place for
| years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies
| without evidence.
| rtkwe wrote:
| The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with
| the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why
| it received so much push back.
|
| Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if
| they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak"
| I'd say that's still pretty accurate.
| rhino369 wrote:
| It was tightly coupled to that stuff by fact checkers and
| other opponents to silence any questions.
| polynomial wrote:
| Despite being made of flimsy material, some of these straw
| men are actually quite effective, it seems.
| rtkwe wrote:
| A lot of what I saw were channels pushing both at the same
| time. An accidental leak of an attempted bioweapon or
| something like that was pretty popular in some circles.
| enchiridion wrote:
| That's not a justification. You're just saying that some
| speech you approve of was tied to some speech you disapprove
| of, so both should be censored.
|
| No speech should be censored.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The owner of a service has no requirement or duty to carry
| _anyone 's_ speech. A person's freedom of speech doesn't
| override anyone else's freedom of association. So a private
| company can censor or reject any speech using their service
| unless otherwise mandated by law (common carrier etc).
| adamrezich wrote:
| ok, so what's the impetus for censoring it then
| giantrobot wrote:
| It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright
| _mis_ information, or just something the service owner
| doesn't want to carry. Discussion a lab leak hypothesis
| is not the same as claiming COVID leaked from a bioweapon
| laboratory or was intentionally leaked for <reasons>.
|
| That being said, social media sites _flagging_ posts is
| very different from outright censorship. It 's not
| uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed
| from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some
| topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior
| and flagrant TOS violations.
| adamrezich wrote:
| > It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright
| misinformation
|
| so, the vast majority of social media then? what makes
| this issue so special? why did all of the major social
| media networks censor/"flag" anyone publicly speculating
| only certain speculations about this issue?
| eric_cc wrote:
| Practically everybody knows this already and yet this
| comment shows up every time freedom of speech is
| discussed.
|
| Censorship is bad even when legally permissible. And we
| should still fight corporations acting unethically even
| when the law is on their side.
| giantrobot wrote:
| What is unethical about not wanting to carry speech you
| don't agree with, is inflammatory, or outright
| misinformation?
| eric_cc wrote:
| Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views
| that they don't agree with gives them power to truly
| shape society by controlling acceptable discourse.
|
| What they deem outright information may in fact be true.
| And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is
| important. We need people to learn to process information
| not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn't
| you want people to rally around tooling people to learn
| math?
| giantrobot wrote:
| > We need people to learn to process information not
| protect them from it.
|
| Flagging misinformation _is_ attempting to educate
| people.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Lets not forget most "discussions" of the lab leak hypothesis
| are racist screeds about an _intentional_ lab leak or other
| conspiratorial bullshit. No social media site can really flag
| posts in a nuanced way. So everything gets flagged.
|
| Post flagging didn't just happen in a vacuum because social
| media was against some particular viewpoint.
| tim333 wrote:
| I've followed quite a lot of the lab leak discussion and I
| wouldn't say that's true. If anything the most popular people
| to point fingers at are Daszak and his associates who are
| mostly pretty white.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Ever considered the possibility of discussion being stifled
| due to intentional "false flagged" information. We don't want
| an idea being talked about. Let's just create a socially
| unacceptable similar conspiracy theory, then censor
| everything related.
|
| Think Alex Jones talking about nanobots in the vaccines, well
| now you can't be taken seriously with any vaccine related
| discourse or you get lumped in with the nanobots, 5g crowd.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| ...Except, Alex Jones is pretty much the opposite of a
| false flag - if anything, he's one of the duly appointed
| flag-bearers of that political slant. If you're bringing
| him up in a discussion about "false flags", it goes to show
| just how little relation the term has with reality.
| quattrofan wrote:
| aftbit wrote:
| One thing I've noticed as a result of the pandemic: there are
| many people who think that Listening to Experts is the same thing
| as Doing Science. Everyone who has strong feelings about the lab
| leak hypothesis (in either direction) would do well to remember
| the Litany of Tarski: If SARS-COV-2 escaped
| from the WIV, I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 escaped
| from the WIV; If SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV,
| I desire to believe that SARS-COV-2 did not escape from the WIV;
| Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
|
| Just because the CDC or some other experts say it didn't happen
| doesn't mean it didn't. Just because Fox or some other conspiracy
| theorist says it did happen doesn't mean it did.
| vic_nyc wrote:
| "Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken
| through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time
| since April. " -> where are they getting this data? All data
| online is showing about 18K cases per day.
| WalterGR wrote:
| The gang's all here.
| animanoir wrote:
| Too good to be truth. People will always blame others, even
| animals, never themselves.
| karmasimida wrote:
| They claimed they can investigate without Chinese cooperation,
| then complained in the end that Chinese obfuscation prevented
| them from getting their conclusion?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because _surely_
| nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on
| purpose. They're worthless as biological weapons, and the risks
| are insane.
|
| Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the
| Wuhan lab does regularly.
|
| And then when our prime minister merely suggested an
| investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars
| of our exports to them.
|
| Because clearly, that's how innocent governments with nothing to
| hide act.
|
| Immediate, massive retaliation for merely suggesting that someone
| should look into things.
|
| But everybody should believe the Chinese government! They told
| you: it came from a pangolin in the market. Why would they lie?
|
| They lied about the reason for the punitive tariffs, sure, making
| up some insane story about centrally orchestrated "dumping".
|
| Okay, so they lied. But not about Wuhan! That would be
| unethical...
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| They lied, and it's been documented - but that cuts both ways.
| They also lied about wild animals being sold at their market.
|
| From Bloomberg:
|
| _When an international group of experts organized by the World
| Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year
| to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the
| ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market,
| which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally,
| at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially
| believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.
|
| The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and
| kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that
| had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to
| data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two
| vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg
| reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded
| COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan
| stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two
| markets."
|
| It seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want
| the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public
| knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or
| regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately.
| It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of
| cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the
| virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an
| obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."_
|
| https://news.yahoo.com/virologist-suggests-coronavirus-origi...
| warning26 wrote:
| I think the more likely case is Hanlon's Razor -- Chinese
| government officials figure it _could_ have leaked due to their
| lax safety standards, and just don't want to look into it for
| fear of someone conclusively proving this.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Even if it wasn't the lab leak this time, it seems like an
| awfully dangerous practice for limited scientific value.
| SkittyDog wrote:
| > ...because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new
| SARS virus strains on purpose. They're worthless as biological
| weapons, and the risks are insane.
|
| If we wait until the _next_ pandemic hits, we will be months or
| years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop
| treatments. Millions more people will die because we 'll have
| been caught on our back foot.
|
| Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistically more likely
| to mutate, over time, in particular ways. So it's possible to
| make _pretty good_ guesses about where future would mutations
| might occur. So if we deliberately create those mutants in a
| laboratory, we can study which strains look particularly
| virulent and /or dangerous.
|
| Yes, there ARE risks to this strategy, in terms of lab leaks.
| But the vast majority of virologists and epidemiologists have
| known for decades that deadly worldwide pandemics of novel
| Coronaviruses are an inevitably in the 21st century... It's
| just a matter of time. We will definitely see several more
| pandemics, at least as damaging as COVID-19, befor the century
| is out.
|
| So even without a lab leak, we would only save ourselves a
| couple more years before nature did the job, itself... And it
| will keep happening, over and over with new Coronaviruses, for
| the foreseeable future. The human race can do very little to
| slow it, let alone stop it.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| It's because there was a series of scientific papers that pointed
| very strongly to a zoonotic origin:
| https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148...
| EA_itsinthegame wrote:
| The Proximal paper was used by Chinese disinformation bots to
| skelch any debate about a lab leak. I take that as a Streisand
| effect. Same when Fauci strongly and publically rebuked the
| Indian bioinformatics pre-print paper talking of the GP-120 HIV
| inserts. That is how I came to know about those inserts and
| their interesting history.
|
| So strangely, the grossly unscientific propaganda effort that
| was the Proximal Origins paper may have had the reverse
| effects, at least, it had on me.
|
| Anyone contributing to this virology conspiracy (why they were
| put in charge to lead the investigation and theory building,
| and not the way more qualified biosecurity experts?), including
| voluntarily, like Angie Rasmussen, has Chinese propaganda
| tainted blood on their hands.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| What's your scientific criticism of the paper?
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Also, it's not either/or. COVID could have come from
| nature, captured and studied in a lab, then escaped.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Indeed. It could also have come from nature and while it
| was being studied in the lab, a similar strain made a
| jump to humans.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Did you click on the link and read the thread?
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Yes but in that case, why would it emerge in Wuhan,
| hundreds of miles away from Southern China, where
| Coronaviruses actually exist in nature ?
| warning26 wrote:
| Considering this literally happened before at the Wuhan
| lab (among a group of sample collectors), this is, I
| think, the most likely scenario.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| I agree. What is the previous case you mentioned, do you
| have a citation ?
| warning26 wrote:
| Ah, of course! I was thinking of this incident
| specifically, though it seems I remembered the details
| wrong; the miners who died seemingly did so _before_ the
| WIV got involved:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-
| pharmaceuticals/...
|
| _> From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many
| as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The
| institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of
| eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from
| the site._
| ikrenji wrote:
| not for wuhan but lab workers got infected with
| coronaviruses in the past...
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
| EA_itsinthegame wrote:
| It makes conclusions it cannot make. It is biased research
| with a foregone conclusion. It was used as ammo by
| propaganda campaigns. It abused science in the most gross
| way, by making speculation sound like scientific consensus,
| making other scientists afraid to speak out. It uses weasel
| words. Its researchers had severe compromised integrity.
| Its researchers are involved in a coverup. And there is
| more.
|
| But as a piece of propaganda attacking truth and
| investigation it was a heavy duty piece. I do hope it was
| motivated by CYA and securing funding, not in cooperation
| with the Chinese, because if so, it would come close to
| treason for me (giving material aid to the enemy's effort
| to destabalize your nation).
|
| Glad that Nature went along with it, so we may gauge how
| deep the corruption goes.
| epgui wrote:
| That's not how you do scientific criticism. Your comment
| is unsubstantiated opinion/accusation.
| mw888 wrote:
| It's an order of magnitude more information than you or
| the other commenter provided. Saying: "Wrong, I don't
| like that." is saying nothing at all. Be specific you
| fool.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| If you know anything about how arguments work, and you
| actually read the parent to the comment you attack you
| would see that saying "that's not actually how you do it"
| is a perfectly fair response.
|
| What EA_itsinthegame posted was a series of disconnected
| statements that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of
| the layout rules in a html rendering engine. It's
| certainly not anything approaching a criticism of the
| tweet thread as it never even manges to quote from it.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Would that exclude a mishap during a specimen-gathering field
| trip?
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Did you read the thread?
| martythemaniak wrote:
| Two years and I have yet to read an explanation of what this
| hypothesis is. Were they careless with a natural virus? Did they
| modify viruses? Did they release a nature virus on purpose? Did
| they accidentally release a modified virus? What's modified even
| mean here, studying random mutation? Engineering things?
|
| It's Schrodinger's Argument. It's all of them and none of them
| and it always shifts depending on who you're talking to. So I've
| concluded it's the largest, dumbest motte-and-bailey argument
| there is.
|
| But at least we can all agree, whatever it is, there's no
| practical lessons to be taken from it.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| > at least we can all agree...
|
| No, we can't all agree. On anything.
|
| Given that the Chinese have shut down investigation, how would
| you expect anyone to tell you exactly how it happened?
| bell-cot wrote:
| The article tries to define it:
|
| > an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip
|
| Which, yes, is incredibly vague. I give them credit for at
| least ruling out the "Evil Chinese Scientists intentionally
| create and release deadly virus!" bullsh*t.
|
| One plausible "lab" scenario: A baggage-hauling laborer caught
| the proto-COVID-19 virus in a bat-filled cave during a routine
| "collect samples of germs from bats" expedition, then
| unknowingly spread it back in Wuhan.
|
| My opinion: For useful-fact-oriented folks, the Lab Hypothesis
| is mostly a tedious waste of time. For those motivated by hot-
| button emotions, attention-seeking, etc., the most lurid and
| cartoonish versions of the Lab Hypothesis are by far the best.
| If they can conjure such images in the minds of their audience
| - withOUT having to spell them out, for reality-checkers to
| attack - then all the better. Hence the remarkable scarcity of
| Lab Hypothesis explanations.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| When the first sentence is factually incorrect, it's tough to
| read on. The UK doesn't have 200k cases a day, it's less than a
| tenth of that.
| peteradio wrote:
| Estimated infection != cases.
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| The figure is based on this study, which currently puts it at
| 241K cases per day: https://health-study.joinzoe.com/data
| Izkata wrote:
| Their source links to https://health-
| study.joinzoe.com/post/covid-incidence-uk
|
| Which says:
|
| > According to the latest COVID Symptom Study app figures,
| there are currently 1,472 daily new cases of COVID in the UK
| on average over the two weeks up to 04 July 2020 (excluding
| care homes) [*]. The data suggests no decline from last week
| (1,445 cases). The latest figures were based on the data from
| almost 3 million users, 11,639 swab tests done between 21
| June to 04 July (a full regional breakdown can be found
| here).
|
| The 241K number is total gibberish. The 7-day average of new
| cases in the UK topped out at about 214K at the beginning of
| January, at the top of their Omicron wave, and has been
| nowhere near that since. It's around 13K right now.
| kgwgk wrote:
| How is that link relevant? We're not in 2020.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Is it?
|
| I assume it's based on the official surveys:
|
| https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan.
| ..
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/24/covid-infectio...
|
| "Overall, it is estimated 1.7 million people in private
| households across the UK had the virus last week - the highest
| figure since the end of April."
|
| With less than 20k cases per day you would need to accumulate
| them for 3 months to get 1.7 million cases.
| mathieubordere wrote:
| A lab specialized in investigating Coronaviruses in the city
| where the first outbreak was, is at least suspicious imo. The
| fact that the Chinese authorities weren't exactly helpful (to my
| knowledge) in debunking the lab-leak hypothesis is extra
| suspicious. But then again, if they really would have wanted to
| cover it up, they might have looked for another city to point to
| as the source of the outbreak, I don't know how feasible that
| would have been though.
| affgrff wrote:
| It is a little suspicious, but also not too far fetched: Where
| would you put a lab researching Coronaviruses? Somewhere near
| where it exists in the wild.
| water554 wrote:
| No. It's not where they exist in the wild. The closest
| related virus (RATG-13) to n-cov-2 come from northern china
| (Yunnan), where they were imported to the Wuhan virology lab
| to study. What a coincidence!
| BeefWellington wrote:
| Firstly, Yunnan is in the southwest of China.
|
| Secondly, other Coronaviruses have appeared in southern
| China -- notably the original SARS' first known case was in
| November of 2002 in Guangdong.[1] Wuhan is well-placed
| (relatively centrally) to do that kind of research.
|
| Thirdly, RaTG13 likely isn't the closest related known
| virus anymore.[2][3]
|
| [1]: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20030411/sars-
| timeline-of-ou...
|
| [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
|
| [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/14/science/bat-
| coronaviruses...
| rory wrote:
| Quality comment. That person is confused about a couple
| things, but the main point that Wuhan is 1-2000km from
| the most likely places to find such a virus in the wild.
|
| It could have been brought to Wuhan in a human, in an
| animal to eat, in an animal to study, or in a culture. I
| don't see how newer evidence eliminates any of those
| possibilities.
| nickff wrote:
| Well, the level of coincidence also depends on the number of
| coronavirus research facilities, and the number of cities. If
| there aren't very many coronavirus research facilities, and
| there are many cities, it becomes an unlikely coincidence.
| jmyeet wrote:
| There are obviously some conspiracy theory versions of this but
| the main origin of a more sane lab leak theory is by exclusion,
| which is to say that it existed because no other theory had
| definitive proof.
|
| The most obvious alternative candidate is zoonotic origin. To
| many this is still the leading theory and it's likely the most
| plausible. But the smoking gun for zoonotic origin is finding the
| wildlife population of origin. This hasn't happened yet. Given
| the attention, that's a little weird but it's not that weird.
| Sometimes it takes years.
|
| The most plausible form of the lab leak theory is that this was
| an accidental leak of a strain they had. Even that raises
| questions. If it's a strain they had, where did it come from? You
| run into the same issue as zoonotic origin. Could it be the
| result of gaint of function or similar research that would've
| modified a wild virus? That's possible too.
|
| The only evidence here is circumstancial. China had, for example,
| not cooperated with WHO early on in investigations. Any
| investigations have been limited in their terms of reference.
| There was a DNA database of coronavirus strains that was taken
| down in 2019. Kind of weird timing but no tdamning. When I last
| looked into it this hadn't been examined by third parties. Maybe
| that's changed now?
|
| So what's happened? Nothing. Because there hasn't been
| significant movement here on this or any other theory.
| kernal wrote:
| >We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of
| Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd
| experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could
| prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the
| threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast
| Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it
| was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible:
| spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident
| in a laboratory or during a research field trip.
|
| > Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and
| emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen,
| journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.
|
| >All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the
| reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the
| book then cancelled at the last minute -- at the behest of their
| health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did
| the other mainstream US and UK networks.
|
| The mainstream media is the enemy
| gumby wrote:
| What I really want to know is "so what?" I mean, it would be
| great to learn _about_ the origin and then take steps to reduce
| the chance of the same thing happening in the future.
|
| But it appears most people just want to point the finger and that
| no change would result.
|
| In fact one could imagine potential improvements for either case,
| some of which might be worth doing regardless of the actual
| origin.
| rory wrote:
| The change is that western countries could put a halt on
| transferring incredibly dangerous technology to mainland China,
| since they have developed a track record of carelessness and
| coverups.
|
| (Wish I didn't have to say this, but this is not a racial
| comment-- BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the US are filled with
| ethnically Chinese people and have much stronger safety
| records.)
| Cupertino95014 wrote:
| > Reviews were mostly bad -- in both senses of the word. That is
| to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases,
| the authors said things that made clear they had not read the
| book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two
| virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies --
| and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit
| to, especially a scientist.
|
| If you call yourself a "scientist" you have an ethical duty to
| follow the evidence wherever it leads. Perhaps not in the formal
| sense of a doctor's Hippocratic oath, but in the tradition of
| Galileo and Copernicus.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from
| the media and the scientific establishment in finding out how it
| started.
|
| It is the biological weapon that cant be proved it is a
| biological weapon.
| affgrff wrote:
| There is an episode of Lex Fridman's Podcast with Jamie Metzl on
| the topic: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K78jqx9fx2I Metzl is
| highly confident of a lab-leak. However, lab-leak doesn't require
| that the virus has been tampered with and I somewhat agree that
| is important to know if the virus escaped due to inadequate lab
| safety.
| fortuna86 wrote:
| Exactly. People yelling "censorship" forget that the lab leak
| theory was mostly about how COVID was engineered as a
| bioweapon, which still remains a conspiracy.
| initplus wrote:
| On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used
| to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less
| outlandish lab leak for months.
|
| Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still
| bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a
| single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered
| bioweapon.
|
| The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory
| was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.
| pb9494 wrote:
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The unfortunate fact is that the only plausible consequence of a
| public acceptance (by government officials) of the lab-leak
| hypothesis, is that funding for research into viruses would get a
| lot more restrictive. Maybe not less funding, but it would go to
| far fewer labs, which have the highest levels of containment.
|
| The profession which knows enough to settle this question, thus
| has a massive conflict of interest. We cannot expect bankers to
| say that the response to the GFC should be to break up banks. We
| cannot expect generals after a war to say that they screwed up.
| We cannot expect intelligence agencies to say that they should
| have less power and more oversight. Scientists are human, they
| want to keep their job and not have to move to another city to do
| it.
|
| What is actually going to happen, is nothing, until and unless a
| second lab leak kills a lot of people.
| tehjoker wrote:
| It's amazing that ppl still consider China a "bad actor" when
| they fairly promptly (a little delay but still months of lead
| time) warned the world and completely stopped the virus within
| their borders to this very day. The bad actors are the western
| governments with millions of dead on their hands trying to point
| the finger anywhere else.
| jaywalk wrote:
| If your post was meant as sarcasm, you should probably call
| that out.
|
| If it wasn't... wow.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bparsons wrote:
| I am surprised at how little publicity Jeffrey Sachs comments on
| this issue has garnered.
|
| There is a good interview here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZa5k87ByOk
| spamizbad wrote:
| I will just say this:
|
| Interest in developing and deploying nuclear power dramatically
| declined after Three Mile Island and the Chernobyl incidents.
| This lead to an increased reliance on carbon-based energy sources
| like Coal and Natural Gas, likely killing hundreds of thousands
| over the years.
|
| I think skittish virologists rightly concluded that a lab-leak
| mea culpa would have a similar effect on virology and perhaps
| broader medical research. The author disagrees, but history has
| shown us what happens.
|
| If Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had been covered up and left
| to conspiracies the earth would be several degrees cooler right
| now.
| sto_hristo wrote:
| Total nonsense. Chernobyl was covered up by the most brutal and
| inhumane regime ever. It's this exact cover up and lack of
| responsibility that disgusted a lot people and lead to the
| hatred and fear nuclear energy is drowning in.
|
| There will always be cavemen that will fear what's beyond the
| cave exit, but they are powerless, albeit vocal, and are not
| responsible for the stagnation of nuclear research.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| Excuse me, but scientists are not public policy makers. Their
| job is to follow the evidence, not publish based on what they
| think will happen if they do.
| spamizbad wrote:
| Scientists are members of society too. They are not
| automatons.
| oyashirochama wrote:
| And typically scientists are part of the portion of
| commettes that are unelected that help determine policy
| designs in the US.
| UIUC_06 wrote:
| They have one job. It's called "science." They go to school
| for that.
|
| Other people, including the voting public, have the job of
| determining policy based on what they find.
| voakbasda wrote:
| If scientists do not publish their unbiased results and
| instead bend their results to fit personal or public
| expectation, their credentials should be revoked in the
| name of science itself. There is no greater crime against
| humanity that to conceal or compromise scientific truth.
| dekhn wrote:
| Let us know when you have an "unambiguous truth detector"
| so we can start to revoke credentials. In the meantime,
| let's understand that scientists frequently allow their
| personal biases to leak into their papers.
| voakbasda wrote:
| I'm not talking about absolute truth. I am pointing my
| finger at those "scientists" that falsify or cherry-pick
| data sets, do not publish results that contradict their
| organization's agenda, and similarly commit flagrant acts
| of dishonesty.
| dekhn wrote:
| Ah, well, the best you can do is read RetractionWatch and
| see that a subset of those scientists have been
| identified, and fired.
| [deleted]
| jahewson wrote:
| If they follow this particular line of evidence (which
| requires them excepting their own gross negligence) then not
| only would they be out of a job but may find themselves in
| jail.
|
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when
| his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton
| Sinclair
| fguerraz wrote:
| It's not that the origin story is not important, it's not that
| people don't care, it's that it is a distraction.
|
| It doesn't help solve the crisis.
|
| The article makes the comparison with a nuclear bomb. This is a
| bad comparison. If we were attacked by a sentient creature, we
| could reason with it and mitigate further damage or escalation.
|
| In the case of a virus, it's good to know to prevent future
| pandemics maybe, and there is an academic interests, but it
| doesn't help with the current situation.
| 127 wrote:
| Hiding the cause also prevents anyone from fixing the cause.
| specialp wrote:
| Finding the root cause of an unprecedented disaster might not
| reverse the history of that disaster, but it would help prevent
| future similar disasters. Now we are clearly aware of the
| costs. It isn't a distraction to look into the cause of a
| disaster as we are able as a society to work on many different
| problems at the same time.
|
| It does help with our current situation of being very
| vulnerable to highly contagious respiratory diseases. COVID is
| probably never going away. To have another one join if this
| could have been prevented would be far worse for us.
| phatboyslim wrote:
| The origin story is paramount to preventing future outbreaks
| and to the loss of, and disruption to, our way of life. The US
| took the same position on combating terrorism when it rooted
| out Al-Qaeda. To stop future loss of life, the root cause needs
| to be identified and dealt with. I vehemently disagree with the
| assessment that the origin is not instrumental to the defense
| of future outbreaks.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| No it is not, because it is undisputed that viruses can
| evolve to infect humans.
|
| If we had 100% solid proof SARS-COV-2 originated in a lab, it
| would not change our approach to detecting or mitigating
| future outbreaks. We _always_ have to prepare for either.
|
| It's not like it never occurred to anyone before that
| dangerous infectious agents could escape a lab. It was a
| well-known possibility and was incorporated into U.S. federal
| pandemic preparedness planning since at least the George W
| Bush administration.
|
| An accidental leak from a lab must still be detected, and
| once detected, public health measures initiated. The
| procedures are the same as for a natural origin.
|
| The fundamental lesson from COVID-19 is that we cannot let
| our guard down. The Trump administration did in many ways,
| and so were not able to detect or respond fast enough.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > The Trump administration
|
| It was Trump's fault!! /s
|
| So what you're saying is we should be more concerned with
| defense and accept that viruses will be engineered. I don't
| disagree with this line of thinking but I also believe we
| must be on the offensive too. We can't just accept that
| labs will build viruses.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| It seems like you are using the US War on Terror as a good
| example? It didn't stop the loss of life, it just changed the
| arena. Orders of magnitudes more people died as a result of
| that than from the attack that spawned it.
| notacoward wrote:
| > It doesn't help solve the crisis.
|
| It doesn't help solve the crisis _and_ it doesn 't change
| attitudes toward gain-of-function research. The pandemic
| itself, regardless of origin, highlighted the possible
| consequences. Even without a connection to research - and even
| more so with the mere possibility - it heightened concern about
| lab safety, and made the risk/reward calculations around GoF
| research even less favorable than they already had been. The
| community of people capable of performing or funding such
| research was already on top of it - again, regardless of
| origin. Public finger-pointing is only likely to rile up
| nationalist sentiments which would _interfere_ with
| establishing better procedures and protocols governing
| virological research.
|
| The lawyers and diplomats have some work to do, but (especially
| in light of today's news) I suggest that the rest of us
| including the media have some higher priorities for how to
| spend our time/energy.
| robbomacrae wrote:
| I think this is correct. I also think the point being made is
| that we SHOULD spend more time learning lessons and applying
| them to try and prevent some of the future pandemics. Imagine
| if we can prevent just one out of the next 10 pandemics through
| investment here. That would be millions of lives saved!
|
| Part of the problem with the covid pandemic is how much we let
| our guard down. For example, the Global Health Security and
| Biodefense unit -- responsible for pandemic preparedness -- was
| established in 2015 by Barack Obama's National Security
| Advisor, Susan Rice [0].
|
| This was then disbanded under Trump and its head Timothy
| Ziemer, top White House official in the NSC for leading U.S.
| response against a pandemic, left the administration [1].
|
| Jon Oliver has a good segment on why we need to focus on
| preventing future pandemics [2].
|
| [0]: https://time.com/5806558/administration-officials-fight-
| crit...
|
| [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-
| health/wp/2018/0...
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v-U3K1sw9U
| bredren wrote:
| If this is true, it seems like science trying to have it both
| ways.
|
| Usually, there's desire for media to share scientific evidence
| in ways that are engaging to the public to recognize our best
| scientific conclusions.
|
| What I'm taking from your portrayal is scientists know best
| what ~"helps the current situation."
|
| Despite the origin being important, and that the public wants
| to know about it science doesn't want evidence on this matter
| and doesn't want it covered by the media or for it to influence
| the thinking of the public.
|
| These seem like political behaviors, not scientific ones.
| eric_cc wrote:
| > it is a distraction. It doesn't help solve the crisis.
|
| This is extremely naive. Do you really believe it won't happen
| all over again?
|
| The real crisis is not Covid. It's how easy something even
| worse than Covid could be started today.
| rob_c wrote:
| But don't worry the 'scientific hive mind of the internet' will
| now come to correct this, except it's no longer a pointlessly
| political topic. It's fairly set in stone the blame lies with the
| chinese state.
|
| Also it's extremely unlikely to kill you if you're under 50 to
| the point of being not a statistically significant cause of death
| (unlike guns). But we still need to acrew so much national debt
| that we might as well have put humans in a space colony as a
| species...
| mountainriver wrote:
| We need some sort of international protocol on how to do gain of
| function research. Something like putting these labs in remote
| places with strict quarantine protocols. This whole business of
| doing stuff like this in city centers is absolutely insane
| juanani wrote:
| stillbourne wrote:
| I was full of holes.
| status200 wrote:
| I have tried to get a biologist / someone with more scientific
| knowledge than me to either help peer review, confirm or debunk
| this paper by Steven Quay:
|
| https://zenodo.org/record/4642956
|
| It seems so scientific and created a buzz when it came out, it
| has been the most thorough explanation of the lab leak theory,
| but I never saw a decent discussion that either helped confirm or
| debunk the ideas within.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think it's kind of rubbish but 140 pages long and most
| serious scientist have better things to do than going through
| all that.
|
| But at a glance he seems to be using bayesian analysis in a not
| very valid way.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's on the trash heap of nutter conspiracy theories that didn't
| pan out.
| daxfohl wrote:
| We're in a post-truth society. Whether something is true or not
| is irrelevant.
| dekhn wrote:
| With the lack of any really strong unequivocal data supporting
| any real hypothesis, I think people got tired of arguing about it
| and recognized that throwing around huge claims with massive
| implications was probably irresponsible.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| If a claim has massive implications, then it would be even more
| irresponsible to not recognize that possibility. The world
| can't learn from the past if we're not able to even consider
| what might have happened in the past.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That won't stop a number of them from trying to warm it up
| again every now and then.
| alkjl4l4tl wrote:
| synergy20 wrote:
| Based on what China's reaction to the source-chasing-efforts, I
| have no doubt it is where this is originated.
|
| Wuhan is a huge city with the only lab on earth that works with
| SARS, virus-leak is not uncommon in China over the
| years(including SARS-1 that was leaked a few times but was
| contained quickly), after COVID China issued lots of new policies
| including stricter lab management, and new leadership from
| military to be in charge of Wuhan lab, and hide the initial
| samples of COVID, and started a diplomatic propaganda to paint
| USA as the virus maker.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Lack of transparency in China proves nothing. CYA is standard
| operating procedure there, regardless if there is any guilt or
| not. Up and down the chain they will cover for each other, if
| not for the simple reason they themselves don't know what shit
| their superiors or underlings are up to...
|
| And it is entirely rational, even when they believe that there
| hasn't been a lab leak, to shut down any investigations into
| it, because all such work or information would just add fuel to
| the fire, regardless the "objective" outcome.
| duxup wrote:
| > But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from
| the media
|
| How do we determine this? Isn't that just normal?
|
| So many stories are just unseen until someone can prove
| something. If they haven't been able to then there you go, it's
| not much of a story.
|
| Yeah there's lots of speculation in the media but it comes and
| goes and no surprise that something so far unproven faded from
| view.
| Tycho wrote:
| "What happened to it" - as far as I can tell it has passed into
| common acknowledgement.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first
| tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:
|
| 1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on
| furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses.
|
| 2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known
| sequence.
|
| We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find.
| Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal
| affiliated with the lab in Wuhan emerged.
|
| Then, we found 2!! with a plausible explanation of why no one had
| found it earlier -- you had to turn on "patented sequence search"
| on NCBI blast, which is turned off by default. An easy mistake to
| make. As a professional biochemist for a decade I had no idea
| that blast had a patent sequence search, much less that it was
| turned off by default (which, btw is a sensible setting).
|
| The scientific method says given a model it should make
| independent predictions (ideally unlikely) which are later
| verified. The evidence for a lab leak should be considered
| relatively strong.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Someone should contact the patent holder and let them know
| they're being infringed upon. ;)
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| That would be, ironically, moderna. Will the patent court
| award them negative damages?
|
| On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial thinking,
| it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin sequence
| appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a furin
| cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would do an
| NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences. Maybe they
| are more knowledgeable than me and _did_ know that patent
| search was enabled (or maybe they were used to ripping off
| parents :| -- I 'm anti-patent myself so this is not an
| indictment of the general process). Then that library of say
| a few hundred sequences is applied. Then the grad student,
| say, drops the 96-well plate with the virus samples, and gets
| infected -- It should not be surprising that the moderna
| sequence is the winner in the competition amongst the viruses
| in that grad students body because moderna has engineered
| that site to be a _very_ effective site, and we know that
| having the furin cleavage site is correlated to virulence, so
| "natural selection" kicks in.
| EA_itsinthegame wrote:
| Is the founder of Moderna meta-scientific for claiming that
| COVID leaked from a laboratory? Or would that be too
| ironic?
| Izkata wrote:
| > On a more serious note, to stave off conspiratorial
| thinking, it should be "not crazy" that a moderna furin
| sequence appear. If I told a biochemist to go and insert a
| furin cleavage site into a virus, that grad student would
| do an NCBI blast search and get a list of all sequences.
|
| The weird part is, prior to 2020, a BLAST search _only_
| results in Moderna patents. There wasn 't anything there
| for them to copy from.
|
| https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-
| the...
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I presume moderna had a small army of DNA synthesizing
| robots to cover and optimize the shit out of that
| sequence from whole cloth.
| antiverse wrote:
| Back up a bit. What the fuck is "meta-scientific"?
| __alexs wrote:
| It's a polite way of saying that it was nonsense.
| rwmj wrote:
| But the comment seems to go on to say it's not nonsense.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| It means pseudo-scientific bullshit
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| It's literally a hypothesis. It's in the name.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| I'm using it to refer to applying the scientific method to
| the process of science itself.
| EA_itsinthegame wrote:
| You are intellectually and scientifically dishonest by
| presenting the lab leak like this.
|
| Take your own theory and argument for it. You could only
| stare at a honest list of for and against regarding the lab
| leak, and conclude that lab leak is meta-scientific.
|
| When you call for evidence, remember the information
| blackouts and destruction of samples ordered by the
| Chinese. Chinese citizens and scientists were dissapeared
| for following the science and doing proper journalism. To
| conclude their legacy as meta-scientific is ugly. That is
| not my science, but maybe that is your job here...
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Are you replying to the right comment string?
|
| Metascientific means a scientific investigation into the
| practice of science. There is no value judgement there,
| it's a description of how the investigation is being
| conducted.
| dang wrote:
| Your comments have been breaking the site guidelines. We
| ban accounts that do that. Could you please review
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and
| stick to the rules when posting here? That means no name-
| calling, no personal attacks, and generally avoiding the
| flamewar style.
| SilasX wrote:
| That seemed to be an unnecessary label in the context of
| your post, especially since it's also just a normal
| scientific hypothesis.
| hbarka wrote:
| It's like metadata. If metadata is data about data, metasci
| is science about science.
| jessaustin wrote:
| It could be that "Meta" the company is nothing about
| nothing?
| kolanos wrote:
| From June 9:
|
| > Over two years after the coronavirus was first detected in
| China, and after at least 6.3 million deaths have been counted
| worldwide from the pandemic, the World Health Organization is
| recommending in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is
| required into whether a lab accident may be to blame.
|
| > That stance marks a sharp reversal of the U.N. health
| agency's initial assessment of the pandemic's origins, and
| comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to
| dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese
| officials on the defensive.
|
| [0]: https://www.wivb.com/news/world/who-covid-origins-unclear-
| bu...
| flobosg wrote:
| You can BLAST that furin cleavage sequence and find matches in
| other non-patented sequences, though. Here's one from 2011
| (bases 286 to 304, reverse complement):
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/DN616748.1
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| >> The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was
| first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two
| predictions:
|
| When and where were those two predictions published? Can you
| give a link?
| fabian2k wrote:
| I don't find any arguments around the furin cleavage site
| convincing. This kind of cleavage site is pretty small and the
| number of variations that have good efficiency is limited. The
| presence of a specific furin cleavage site is not clear
| evidence of genetic manipulation.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Evidence comes with context. We're asserting that something
| like this would be found. Then we found it! After not finding
| it initially, even. The inability to find it initially should
| tell you something about the general evolutionary drift
| around these sites to begin with.
| ttpphd wrote:
| Sorry but the post above is unscientific sophistry. Science is
| about weighing competing theories by examining the relative
| strength of evidence. The evidence is strongly in favor of
| zoonotic origin. What's posted here is an exercise in
| confirmation bias, not rigorous scientific thinking.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Aren't you assuming that you're being shown all the evidence?
| ttpphd wrote:
| I'm very clearly and obviously doing the exact opposite
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Given that I used to believe the zoonotic hypothesis the
| assertion of confirmation bias is a bit surprising to me.
| ttpphd wrote:
| The comment this is a reply to is what's known as rhetoric.
| The goal of rhetoric is to persuade the audience in the
| absence of logic or evidence.
|
| The comment is offering "testimony of conversion" which is
| not scientific.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| I haven't been fixated on this by any means but I remember
| reading an article months back that looked at the timeline and
| locations of the early cases and compared them against the
| locations of the market and the research facility. I came away
| thinking that the animal market hypothesis seemed much more
| likely than the lab leak.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yep - there are a ton of such points of evidence. The strict
| "lab leak" proponents have essentially made an unfalsifiable
| hypothesis akin to the intelligent design people's "God of
| the Gaps" where each time there's new research that disproves
| a core assumption, that just means the conspiracy goes
| deeper.
|
| I linked it above, but aside from the fact that every other
| pandemic we've seen came about the same way, there's a ton of
| specific evidence from this pandemic:
|
| https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-
| neglected-g...
|
| Including the timeline/locations of the earliest cases:
|
| https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk
|
| One thing the lab leak crew haven't been able to answer is
| how there could possibly be two different lineages at the
| market -- which you'd 100% expect from multiple spillover but
| is essentially impossible if your working theory is that an
| infected lab worker brought it to the market.
| secondcoming wrote:
| Brought what to the market? Themselves or animals from a
| lab?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| > _Infected_ worker
|
| To be honest, I hadn't even encountered the idea that lab
| employees were what, selling infected animals at the
| market? Is this a real thing people are arguing? Who even
| comes up with this stuff.
| secondcoming wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily need to be a lab employee, it
| could be someone reponsible for disposing of dead animals
| choosing to make a quick buck
| coupdejarnac wrote:
| That's been my pet hypothesis for a few years, but I
| wouldn't argue for it. I just base it on some of the
| disgusting, unethical things I saw while living in China.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| There is also allegedly a Wuhan CDC facility meters away from
| the market where disposal of lab animals happened (I cannot
| confirm this myself), so if that's true, that's certainly
| another possibility.
| gmiller123456 wrote:
| Rather than just saying "we found..." and expecting people to
| take it at that, provide sources. If I went and looked up
| everything anyone claimed, that's all I'd ever do.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| TameAntelope wrote:
| We did not "find" 1 from any rejected DARPA grant proposal,
| that's nonsense and completely unsupported by the actual grant
| proposal. You _cannot_ presume one leads to the other, that 'd
| be like trying to cite a patent on a perpetual motion machine
| as conclusive proof perpetual motion machines exist.
|
| I would argue that continuing to state what you have here
| qualifies as disinformation, and think HN should remove it
| immediately, lest HN become yet another breeding ground of this
| kind of anti-intellectual memetic drivel.
| edvards wrote:
| Can you tell more about 1 and 2, maybe with some sources added?
| this is pretty big
| Izkata wrote:
| 2: https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-
| the...
|
| Search for "moderna" then scroll up a bit.
| dekhn wrote:
| "Using BLAST is easy". Yes, it's very easy to use BLAST to
| convince yourself of something that is not correct. It's a
| power tool being used by idiots most of the time, no wonder
| fingers get cut off.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Before implying it's not correct, do the math yourself.
| Calculate the relative drift among natural sequences and
| see if the moderna sequence is an outlier. How many
| single point mutations would it take to get from a known
| sequence to the moderna one.
| dekhn wrote:
| Do what math now? I spent 10 years as an academic doing
| bioinformatics, with deep expertise in BLAST (I helped
| demonstrate that BLAST E-values accurately represent
| homology).
|
| If you look, he shows some pages with resuults where the
| E-value is 282. Normally, an evalue should be 1e-2 or
| better (ideally 1e-6) before you start making ANY claims.
|
| I've seen hundreds of examples where a person did the
| math, convinced everybody they were right, and either
| subtle errors or mistaken assumptions meant the work was
| useless. These days, if somebody starts with "Here, I'll
| show you how to use blast to demonstrate that the lab
| leak hypothesis is true", my priors say "most likely just
| garbage".
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| But this is not a homology exercise with natural
| selection. I can show you where I did a blast search,
| panned for "select amino acid substitutions of interest"
| and from the library out popped out a more efficient
| enzyme.
| dekhn wrote:
| Sure, show us.
| flobosg wrote:
| The amount of people that use BLAST every day and cannot
| define E-values (despite being explained in its FAQ! [1])
| is baffling.
|
| [1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Web&PAG
| E_TYPE=B...
| dekhn wrote:
| Yep! In my work we had a golden labelled set of known-
| homologous proteins, as well as sets of unknown-
| relationship and known-not-to-be-homologous (based on
| superfamily). We blasted all-vs-all and after dealing
| with a number of BLAST issues finally demonstrated that
| the searches produce false positives at the expected
| rates. I gained a lot of respect for the folks who
| implemented the statistical framework behind blast
| E-values.
|
| I had another advisor who thought they were good at
| homology, so they'd take protein matches with an E-value
| of 10 (almost certainly random chance) and munge the data
| to make up a story. Most of my work was about using very
| stringent blast searches to make profiles, but all that
| work is superseded by HMMER now.
| Zeratoss wrote:
| Please dont spread misinformation.
|
| The HIV paper has been withdrawn and was total bunk.
|
| See comments on the paper:
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
| ?...
| NationalPark wrote:
| Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the
| evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies
| a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries
| and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are
| deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news
| appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any
| papers published on this or is it just in the book that the
| authors of this article are selling? I'm not sure if I'm
| confusing this author with a Matt Ridley who seems to be an
| eccentric but minor British noble who writes about fringe
| climate change ideas?
|
| Edit: Ok I figured out the source of the claims, it's the Alina
| Chen (I didn't realize she was co author) stuff. And it is
| indeed the Viscount Matt Ridley himself!
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| You can find the primary source for the DARPA leak on hn; if
| you care to verify that the sequence comes from a patent
| yourself directly from primary sources, you can find
| instructions on how to do that on hn too. I've done the
| search myself, it's real.
|
| I can't provide direct sources for the fact that these
| predictions preceded the discoveries, but I can tell you they
| ran through my head, and others I talked to, and the lack of
| a sequence match bothered me. If you want to get meta-meta-
| scientific I would not be surprised if there was at least a
| blog post by someone out there saying "if it was a lab leak,
| where's the sequence match?" Out there that preceded the
| sleuth who found it hidden in plain site (behind an NCBI
| search option)
|
| Edit: I have not read the ridley/chen book, I know most of
| the stuff from when they were emergent reports by reading
| this site and applying my intuition as a former biochemist
| (and some of my actively working biochemist friends) ti judge
| relative merits of hypotheses.
| etcet wrote:
| If you've done it could you link to or provide instructions
| on how we may reproduce your findings rather than just
| saying "the truth is out there"?
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Yeah, sorry, here it is:
|
| https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-
| the...
| Bromeo wrote:
| I assume the DARPA leak is this thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644428
|
| ~700pts, ~450 comments, with the source published 23.
| September 2021.
| adamrezich wrote:
| man I forgot all about this. so much has happened in the
| past couple years it's been impossible to keep it all
| straight.
| corrral wrote:
| 2020 and 2021 were each at least five years long.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Fortunately, 2022 has been pretty quiet and uneventful.
| macondo wrote:
| sumy23 wrote:
| This article from Vanity Fair does a good job collection the
| circumstantial evidence surrounding the lab leak theory:
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-
| no...
|
| The tl;dr is that there is a group called EcoHealth Alliance
| that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)
| making novel coronaviruses by modifying the furin cleavage
| site of coronaviruses taken from bats. The WIV (along with
| EcoHealth Alliance and also potentially the Chinese military)
| was also making chimeric viruses from the viruses responsible
| for SARS and MERS. They were then using these viruses to
| infect "humanized" mice (mice with human lung tissue). The
| head of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, was one of the
| first to denounce the possibility of a lab leak (without
| disclosing the work he was doing at WIV of course). Daszak
| was later kicked off the Lancet's COVID-19 commission because
| he refused to share old progress reports on the work he was
| funding at WIV.
|
| All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it's really a bit
| suspicious that this outbreak started just a few kilometers
| where this exact type of virus was being created.
| encoderer wrote:
| Thank you for the write up. I'll add a funny line from Jon
| Stewart: if an outbreak of chocolate goodness happens
| outside Hershey, Pennsylvania you don't need to search for
| the bat that ate the cocoa bean. It's the factory, stupid.
| [deleted]
| letmevoteplease wrote:
| "We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into
| SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the
| EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal
| ("DEFUSE") that was submitted to the US Defense Advanced
| Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (25). The 2018 proposal to
| DARPA was not funded, but we do not know whether some of the
| proposed work was subsequently carried out in 2018 or 2019,
| perhaps using another source of funding.
|
| "We also know that that this research team would be familiar
| with several previous experiments involving the successful
| insertion of an FCS sequence into SARS-CoV-1 (26) and other
| coronaviruses, and they had a lot of experience in
| construction of chimeric SARS-like viruses (27-29). In
| addition, the research team would also have some familiarity
| with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation
| mechanism of human ENaC a (19), which was extensively
| characterized at UNC (17, 18). For a research team assessing
| the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS
| of human ENaC--an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host
| furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an
| important target organ (lung), of the target organism
| (human)--might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS
| to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line
| with other work performed previously."
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119
| dekhn wrote:
| A loose conspiracy of a bunch of social media
| scientists/journalists? Wouldn't the overall size and
| diversity of the field mean that there would be at least a
| few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives?
|
| You should just read the book. It's not very convincing. The
| most likely explanation for the lack of interest in
| identifying the origins is primarly a lack of data.
| Speculating about conspiracies does not help the discussion,
| either.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| aksss wrote:
| > at least a few dissenters presenting more factual
| alternatives?
|
| Are there not?
| dekhn wrote:
| There are dissenters, but it's definitely unclear their
| claims are more factual.
|
| My point is that it's really impossible to run a loosely
| organized large-scale conspiracy. There are too many ways
| for the conspiracy to fall apart.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| That's, like, just your opinion, man.
|
| Meanwhile the natural sources hypothesis has made one
| prediction not found yet (animal zero) and the lab leak has
| made two. Unfortunately, judgements about this are made
| difficult because "relative believability" is inherently
| subjective, so we can endlessly argue about the relative
| merits of competing hypotheses it is while the biggest
| suspect is under suspicion of having destroyed key data --
| because they did suppress information in the early stages
| (and are refusing credible audits now). Meanwhile, entropy
| is happening making further revelations from bioinformatics
| progressively unlikely. Shrug.
| [deleted]
| khazhoux wrote:
| Jon Stewart's classic lab-leak rant on Colbert's show:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=178s
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| I dig it because it's like a summary of half of the Marvel
| movies, where the protagonists spend the entire adventure
| solving a problem they caused themselves.
|
| Like, without the Thanos thingy, iron man is not a bloody hero,
| he is a villain. He is responsible for so much death and
| destruction it's not even funny. Black Mamba, killer. Black
| panther ? Maintains in place a political system that clearly
| allows any psychopath to access absolute power. Hulk, a time
| bomb. Thor ? He let his genocidal brother of the hook as soon
| as he is nice for 2 minutes. Spiderman ? Give an deadly bot
| swarm to the first father figure that smiles at him. Dr Strange
| ? Accept the request to GHB the planet and almost destroys it
| because a kid ask for it for 30 seconds.
|
| It's a well known trope in sups stories, but for some reasons a
| lot of viewers really believes they are heroes. Even as a kid I
| though Batman was stupid for spending times fighting one
| criminal at a time with all his money.
|
| Now, we are seeing a lot of this in today's IRL world.
|
| Progress is saving you by giving you drugs for all the diseases
| it increases: diabetes, cancer, obesity, hormonal dysfunctions,
| etc. It's giving you a car so that you can you can go work in a
| remote place you would never have to work to without progress.
| It gives you software to organize your day to fit all the thing
| you would not have to do without progress.
|
| Ok, it's tongue in cheek. I love progress.
|
| But still.
| jessaustin wrote:
| It is common for popular fiction to replicate themes and
| situations that people observe in life but cannot freely
| discuss.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| Jon Stewart has a rare talent of imparting both logic and
| comedy simultaneously. Ridiculously awesome guy.
| walls wrote:
| There's all these tornado research facilities in the same place
| we keep getting tornados!
| [deleted]
| jaywalk wrote:
| Unlike a virus, you can't just grab a tornado and move it
| somewhere else to study it. If you want to study tornadoes,
| you have to be where tornadoes occur.
| danesparza wrote:
| Thank you for this. I hadn't seen it.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an
| increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic
| origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown:
|
| https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g...
|
| Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation --
| it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that
| position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural virus that
| escaped or an engineered one, how different lineages showed up at
| the market, which lab it allegedly escaped from since the WIV
| campus is much further from the market compared to the CCDC, etc
| etc).
|
| China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy
| madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing
| such a half-assed investigation but unfortunately they would have
| done the same whether the virus came to be via the same animal
| trade that caused the last SARS outbreak or if there was some
| secret Wuhan project.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For
| example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere
| in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported:
|
| _" Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day
| of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from
| drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens
| were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-
| CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a
| cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western
| wing, where many shops sold animals."_
|
| The Unherd article also claims: "There is no evidence of
| exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior
| to the Covid outbreak." But CNN reported:
|
| _Research helped [Michael] Worobey come up with a map of the
| earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That
| so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with
| no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless
| lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling
| evidence that community transmission started at the market," he
| wrote.... "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan
| and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite
| strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking
| into the neighborhoods around the market.... So many of the
| early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in
| a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other
| places where it would be more likely for early cases to be
| linked to if the virus had not started there.""_
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-t...
|
| Interestingly Worobey actually signed a letter demanding the
| lab leak theory be investigated. But he now believes there's --
| in his words -- "a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan
| Market as the most likely place the pandemic started."
| dekhn wrote:
| The unherd article just advertising for the author's book.
| This is a cry for attention.
| eduction wrote:
| These are simply not contradictions. To restate what you've
| posted:
|
| -Unherd says no infected animal has been found on sale in
| China.
|
| vs.
|
| -Disease detectives found Covid positive environmental
| samples at the animal market
|
| --------
|
| -Unherd says no market traders were found to have been
| exposed to Covid
|
| Vs
|
| -A researcher found 100 Covid cases from the same month in
| the vicinity of the market.
|
| -------
|
| Animals vs environmental samples. Infected animal traders vs
| infected people living near the market. It's apples and
| oranges and does not support the claim that the Unherd piece
| misstated the things you quoted.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yep. Ridley and Chan wrote their book when the lab leak idea
| was vaguely more plausible, but even then it really
| overstated the evidence. It's aged very poorly.
| Symmetry wrote:
| I don't think anybody doubts that the first superspreader
| event happened at the Hunan market. The question is whether
| the first human/animal crossover happened there. With a high
| _k_ disease like Covid-19 you might very well have a chain of
| transmission many links long before it starts going
| exponential as in, for example, what contact tracers
| uncovered about how the virus first got into France.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Unfortunately, tons of people dispute it still. There's
| prominent people insisting Covid was in Italy in mid 2019
| among other ridiculous things. Unfortunately they're common
| travelers with the more intellectually honest lab leak
| folks so it's hard to separate them.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Of course it is zoonotic in origin. Otherwise it wouldn't have
| been novel. Viruses don't appear from thin air.
| kneel wrote:
| >Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation
| -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for
| that position are even arguing
|
| No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF
| research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very
| proximal to the origin of the outbreak.
|
| The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails
| showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak.
|
| https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...
| mikeyouse wrote:
| You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being
| weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation
| promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was
| a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus,
| which the emails "released" by the House adequately
| demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails
| have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given
| as evidence of conspiracy instead of just people learning
| more about a novel virus.
| ChemSpider wrote:
| > all of the people in those emails have updated their
| priors to favor zoonosis,
|
| According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists
| changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really
| be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why
| that?
|
| None of them can explain what made them change their mind
| on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new
| knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.
| epistasis wrote:
| > None of them can explain what made them change their
| mind on this short time frame in spring 2020.
|
| Really? Can you point to interviews with these people
| that have no answer when asked why they change their
| mind?
|
| It's quite a strong statement to say what you said, and
| it would surprise me to see an entire group of people
| refuse to answer a question. That would be quite
| something.
|
| But I suspect a more likely description of the scenario
| is that you just don't want to accept their judgements,
| and replace their actual answer with "no answer." I'd
| love to have my suspicions proven to be wrong! Show the
| evidence.
| _jal wrote:
| So, more weird insinuation.
|
| Got it.
| epistasis wrote:
| You are downvoted, but it appears to me that you are
| accurate in your assessment. I haven't followed this
| debate much, but every time I look I to it I see weird
| insinuations, misrepresentations, and "obvious"
| assertions that are not in any way obvious. It seems like
| a gigantic waste of time, like debating creationists.
| I'll wait for my scientific peers to blow the whistle if
| any of the claims have credibility.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| > None of them can explain what made them change their
| mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there
| new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to
| say.
|
| Again, this isn't true. Plenty of them have explained it.
| Just not up to the standards of the conspiracy theorists.
| This goes beyond the "lab leak vs. natural origin" debate
| and is now, what, including American scientists in
| covering up the lab leak to aid the Chinese?
|
| Spell out specifically what you are implying here.
| lamontcg wrote:
| A lot of them thought that no sarbecoviruses had a furin
| cleavage site and when they were first exposed to the
| issue by the headlines they assigned an overly high
| estimate to the FCS as being evidence of human tampering.
|
| Then other experts pointed out that isn't uncommon at
| all, and they all adjusted their thinking.
|
| "Woah, that's a million to one odds, that can't be by
| chance!"
|
| "No, it's actually really common, here's a pile of
| similar viruses with an FCS."
|
| "Oh, nevermind."
|
| Experts can leap to conclusions and run their mouths off
| just like everyone else, doesn't take some radical world-
| wide conspiracy that "got" to them (other than the
| radical conspiracy theory of "well-informed truthful
| information").
| cameldrv wrote:
| I don't think that there are any Sarbecoronaviruses other
| than SARS2 that have an FCS. This paper from 2021
| supports that conclusion [1]. There are other
| Coronaviruses that have an FCS, but not
| Sarbecoronaviruses, and none of them use PRRA. Those
| twelve amino acids have essentially come out of nowhere.
|
| [1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/
| lamontcg wrote:
| None of the FCS in that paper are the same: RRAR, RTAR,
| RSVR, RVRR, RSGR, RRSRR, RRSR, RAKR, RAHR, RRKRR. There's
| clearly an awful lot of functional sequences that we know
| of that produce an FCS and uniqueness there isn't
| special.
|
| You're right that I wrote sarbecoviruses when I meant
| beta-coronaviruses. We still don't know of any
| sarbecoviruses with an FCS, but MERS has an FCS and the
| bat beta-coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5 have an FCS.
| mw888 wrote:
| This is garbage appeal to authority designed to make people
| embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from
| your comment and was simply told to trust this source you hid
| any arguments behind. It's not fostering discussion and it's
| strawmanning those you disagree with.
| dekhn wrote:
| The fundamental premise here is that most people who are
| arguing about COVID origins simply don't understand enough
| about known factual biology to make informed arguments. The
| appeal to authority is important because, in the case where
| we're not particularly knowledgeable, we should use
| authorities as guidance on how to reason.
|
| I agree with what the parent said although I wouldn't say the
| evidence is "overwhelming". The important point is: China's
| government is so secretive we can't tell if they were
| intentionally covering something up, or just destroying all
| the evidence without any knowledge of what it said, to avoid
| people speculating from the documents.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Another important fact. China has everything to lose from
| cooperation and nothing to gain. An unfortunate reality in
| geopolitics is to give no control to other countries of
| your own fate. If they were to grant access and attempt to
| be completely forthcoming, how are they to know that some
| group wouldn't attempt to fabricate evidence or muddy the
| waters further.
| elif wrote:
| What makes you put on evidence in quotes?
|
| The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute
| of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central
| fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact
| alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.
| rzz3 wrote:
| Sure, but Occam's is a logical shortcut, not a method of
| scientific conclusion. I personally suspect a lab leak
| origin, but I can't say I have conclusive evidence. I just
| find it extremely likely based on a myriad of circumstantial
| evidence, and a lack of any conclusive evidence of natural
| origin.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I find it extremely unlikely given what I know about
| biology and how viruses and epidemiology works.
|
| Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard
| operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't
| do anything wrong, maybe especially then.
|
| The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started
| really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen
| jumping from an animal species to Humans, without passing
| through a lab whatsoever.
| nescioquid wrote:
| Like rzz3, I am suspicious of a lab leak (but reserve
| judgement). You say the lab leak is unlikely, but do you
| know better than the WHO? From the article:
|
| > In this we are in line with the US government, the G7,
| the World Health Organisation and the general public, all
| of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak
| from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that
| deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two
| weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important "to
| evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-
| CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory
| incident".
|
| China's behavior is suspicious, but as you point out
| there could be any number of reasons for this. However,
| that's hardly a basis for exoneration. In either case,
| China's behavior is surely a confounding factor in
| understanding what actually happened.
| ikrenji wrote:
| it is really not extremely unlikely. mainly because it
| happened multiple times previously in china with sars
| epidemic. there is a precedent
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/
| mikeyouse wrote:
| This is exactly what I mean about insinuation.
|
| Spell out specifically what you think a deleted database
| proves and the sequence of events that would lead to it being
| deleted.
|
| The timeline of this stuff is extremely important to
| disproving some of the sillier claims. This database that's a
| "Central Fact" was deleted several months before the first
| case of a virus with an unmitigated R0 of >5.
|
| They would have to know there was a novel coronavirus
| spreading for _months_ before the rest of the world. Aside
| from the rest of the obvious ways everyone else would know,
| DNA phylogeny of all known cases disproves this.
|
| The conceit falls apart immediately.
| jahewson wrote:
| That's a very well researched article you link to, but
| assumptions are tricky things:
|
| > The fact that there were two distinct lineages early on is of
| critical importance, as this could imply a hidden community
| transmission for months (lineage A could've evolved into
| lineage B) before the outbreak at the Huanan market.
| Alternatively, the two lineages could have evolved in an animal
| reservoir from a shared MRCA before separately jumping into
| humans at the market. Option one is compatible with a lab leak
| scenario, option two is not.
|
| Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the
| virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could
| easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and
| leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis
| rests on this assumption.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| > Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the
| virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could
| easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them,
| and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed
| analysis rests on this assumption.
|
| They were two lineages of the same virus, commonly seen in
| repeated spillover transmission. Explain specifically how you
| think they would "leak" both of them together - because the
| theory in your comment eliminates the option of an infected
| worker spreading the lab virus.
| gojomo wrote:
| Overfocusing on the market cluster is an error. First, because
| viruses travel easily - so even if 100% of early cases were
| around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab
| worker. And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster
| caused authorities to search for every case there, and _ignore_
| cases elsewhere - just as in the US, authorities missed early
| community spread because they didn 't even consider/test people
| who hadn't recently returned from China.
|
| If the crossover was zoonotic, and didn't involve
| EcoHealth/WIV/etc institutional actions, it should've been
| possible to find intermediate hosts, or viruses, in an earnest
| search.
|
| Instead of finding those - in any of the hypothesized animals,
| anywhere from bat caves to Wuhan - we've instead found yet
| another bat virus that's closer-to-SARS-CoV-2 (BANAL) in
| exactly the Laotian caves where EcoHealth was collecting
| hundreds of viruses to bring to Wuhan (& elsewhere) for study
| _and gain-of-function-enhancement_. Researchers were routinely
| making such viruses more human-adapted, and researchers had
| _specifically_ had sought money to add the same 'furin
| cleavage' functionality that a BANAL-like virus needed to
| become SARS-CoV-2.
|
| It's not just China that was suspiciously half-assed in the
| early days, when the evidence either way for lab-leak or
| zoonosis could have been clearer. Fauci & Collins at the NIH
| were suspiciously half-assed too, & sent a clear message to
| everyone dependent on US federal research funding: "don't
| entertain this speculation if you want to be on our team".
|
| Fauci was energetic in sending that message even when he was
| still downplaying the risk & saying masks couldn't help. That
| is: they were prioritizing narrative control over either
| investigation or pandemic control. Very fishy!
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Lab-leak was a sensational "whodunnit" and the entire purpose
| of promoting it (true or not) was to distract from the far
| more important "what should we do about the pandemic." The
| people pushing for this distraction A. wanted to do nothing
| (economy in an election year) and B. once they realized that
| doing nothing was unwise, needed to cover for having pushed A
| too hard, with too many "aged like milk" statements and
| actions. It was the public health policy equivalent of
| shouting "look, a squirrel!" Re-focusing the narrative away
| from the squirrel and back onto the pandemic wasn't only not
| sinister, it was a gigantic face-palm that it had to be done
| in the first place.
|
| That's also why interest evaporated: the two real reasons to
| push the story both expired in 2020. Now all that remains is
| idle curiosity. As far as I'm concerned: indulge. Go nuts.
| Now that you aren't worsening a public health crisis by
| pushing an election agenda, it really is just a fun little
| detective story, and I'm as curious as the next guy.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed
| in the post..
|
| > _First, because viruses travel easily - so even if 100% of
| early cases were around the market, it could have reached the
| market via a lab worker_
|
| There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster
| of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section.
| I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated
| lineages came to be present there after human-human
| transmission.
|
| > _And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster
| caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore
| cases elsewhere - just as in the US, authorities missed early
| community spread because they didn 't even consider/test
| people who hadn't recently returned from China._
|
| Not remotely true. I'd encourage you to read this paper:
| https://zenodo.org/record/6299600#.YjSWqDUxmUk
| gojomo wrote:
| The prior linked post is a gish-gallop of overconfident
| motivated reasoning.
|
| "Two lineages" in rapid-succession is weird - but no better
| explained by two zoonoses (that left no hints in any animal
| population) than two lab-leaks.
|
| Worobey et al's analysis is at the mercy of Chinese data
| sources, and even if _all_ early cases were exclusively in
| the market, and even the live-animal section, that doesn 't
| disprove lab origin.
|
| It might slant things slightly against it - but when no
| other animals, anywhere from Laos to Wuhan, have revealed
| any of these supposed intermediate forms - that somehow
| zoonosed _twice_ , only _after_ reaching Wuhan, with a
| dangerous new viral feature Wuhan researchers had proposed
| splicing into bat viruses?!? - the slant remains very much
| in the other direction.
|
| But you don't have to trust me; even the WHO now wants a
| better investigation of the prematurely-suppressed lab-
| origin possibility:
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/09/who-sago-
| cov...
|
| There's a field-wide _omerta_ about gain-of-function risks
| - who wants to ruin their relationship with the NIH, &
| admit research that's pretty typical across many leaky labs
| worldwide, may have killed 20 million people (and
| counting)?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| > _" Two lineages" in rapid-succession is weird - but no
| better explained by two zoonoses (that left no hints in
| any animal population) than two lab-leaks._
|
| I mean, everyone can stop reading here... This is
| patently false. Multiple Spillover is a readily
| reproducible phenomenon that perfectly explains the dual
| lineages.
|
| Again, spell out specifically the route how two distinct
| lineages would be present at the market under the lab
| leak scenario.
|
| > _It might slant things slightly against it - but when
| no other animals, anywhere from Laos to Wuhan, have
| revealed any of these supposed intermediate forms - that
| somehow zoonosed twice, only after reaching Wuhan_
|
| You literally only need one animal shedding virus - it's
| how literally every other pandemic started. The market
| was shut down weeks after it was clear that a pandemic
| was underway and only after that did the authorities
| start looking for infected animals. Absence of evidence
| here isn't remotely a substitution for evidence of the
| absence.
|
| > _with a dangerous new viral feature Wuhan researchers
| had proposed splicing into bat viruses?!? - the slant
| remains very much in the other direction._
|
| This part is just false and belies your lack of
| understanding of the science and the direction of
| causality. The reason scientists proposed studying the
| FCS is because it was identified a decade+ ago as both
| dangerous for zoonosis and readily possible with natural
| mutation.
|
| All of these virologists studying coronaviruses weren't
| doing it out of the blue, but because everyone knew that
| it was the single greatest zoonotic risk we faced.
| gojomo wrote:
| A lab worker who was careless (if not
| depressed/malicious) could just as easily carry out two
| variants as one.
|
| One animal shedded... two variants of virus? How did the
| animal get it, when no other nearby wild or market
| animals in the (lackluster) investigation around Wuhan,
| or since elsewhere, have shown candidate SARS-
| CoV2/precursor viruses?
|
| They proposed adding the FCS to existing viruses where
| FCS hadn't been seen before - and yes, the motivation was
| because that was considered a potential natural risk. But
| that doesn't mean it was a natural inevitability. Isn't
| the proximity of the proposal, "add FCS to a bat
| coronavirus to see how much worse it makes it", to the
| appearance of SARS-CoV2 at least a _little_ suspicious?
|
| They & others have published lots of work that
| specifically made existing viruses more transmissable, or
| more severe - often in labs with a history of leaks. This
| can be done via evolutionary pressures - serial passage
| forced-evolution - or via explicit engineering of new
| chimeric viruses.
|
| Coronavirus crossover was theorized to be a major risk,
| after SARS/MERS. That didn't mean that actually outracing
| nature to make the hypothesized worse viruses in
| accelerated lab processes was a good risk-reducing idea!
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| > One animal shedded... two variants of virus
|
| Maybe, but more likely two different ones out of the many
| millions of poorly documented animals in the East Asia
| animal trade. Certainly more plausible than a single lab
| engineering two very distinct linages for no good reason.
|
| > That didn't mean that actually outracing nature to make
| the hypothesized worse viruses in accelerated lab
| processes was a good risk-reducing idea!
|
| Presumably you can link to the papers published about how
| they did just such work, or evidence it in some other
| authoritative way since you make the assertion so boldly?
| gojomo wrote:
| How would two different non-bat animals shed two
| different (but closely-related) bat viruses, in a market
| with no bats, and far away from the bat caves where
| related viruses are documented? And further, manage this
| with _no_ evidence of any other animals infected with
| related viruses in that region, nor along the trade
| routes any such animals /viruses must have followed?
|
| Those were the _two_ luckiest bat-viruses ever!
|
| On the other hand, the research lab across town had
| collected hundreds of such bat viruses from far away -
| suspiciously never fully catalogued.
|
| EcoHealth belatedly reported in late 2021 _to the NIH,
| its funder_ that it had already, prior to May 2019:
|
| * created a new, chimeric SHC014-WIV1 virus that was more
| virulent in human tissue than the (relatively benign)
| natural WIV1 virus
|
| * took a natural virus that was already highly deadly,
| MERS, & added new binding sites
|
| You can read an overview from The Intercept at
| <https://theintercept.com/2021/10/21/virus-mers-wuhan-
| experim...>, or a (partially-redacted) suspiciously-late
| EcoHealth report to the NIH at <https://www.documentcloud
| .org/documents/21089573-priority-gr...> which describes
| these experiments.
|
| Note also that per The Intercept, an EcoHealth spokesman
| had previously denied any such MERS gain-of-function
| experimentation had occurred - claiming instead it was
| only "suggested as an alternative and was not
| undertaken".
|
| So: EcoHealth lied.
|
| What if someone's secret budget, or pre-grant
| investigational work, had helped WIV do _exactly the FCS
| addition_ they 'd already asked for funding to do? That'd
| be a sufficient, and straightforward, way to get a SARS-
| CoV2-like virus from less-human-adapted viruses in
| nature.
|
| And while this route isn't proven - perhaps because those
| involved have been suspiciously uncooperative - this
| hypothetical origin has more supporting evidence than
| "luckiest bat viruses ever snuck to Wuhan from a thousand
| miles away, zoonosed in Wuhan twice in rapid succession,
| leaving no sick animals or people anywhere else, despite
| a giant search".
| epistasis wrote:
| > There's a field-wide omerta about gain-of-function
| risks - who wants to ruin their relationship with the
| NIH, & admit research that's pretty typical across many
| leaky labs worldwide, may have killed 20 million people
| (and counting)?
|
| Claims like this, without evidence, reallt detract from
| any other point you want to make. Because it seems that
| your thumb is pretty heavy in the scale, without any
| evidence.
| gojomo wrote:
| When there are massive institutional incentives to
| proclaim X, it is only wise to discount, somewhat,
| proclamations of X.
|
| In Vanity Fair's lab-leak theory story, there was an
| illustrative detail:
|
| *> Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO
| ["Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight"]
| framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said
| a longtime agency official: "If you ban gain-of-function
| research, you ban all of virology." He added, "Ever since
| the moratorium, everyone's gone wink-wink and just done
| gain-of-function research anyway."
|
| A whole field wants certain research to happen, with
| minimal limits. They don't want to admit, or even let
| themselves believe, that their peers' accident killed 20
| million people. It's a hard pill to swallow!
| epistasis wrote:
| That's reading an awful lot into an unattributed quote,
| which includes a direct refutation attributed quotes
| right above it.
|
| It's clear that there have been moratoriums on GoF
| without stopping "all of virology," so whatever was meant
| by this "wink wink nudge nudge" is really unclear.
|
| Also, in the prior paragraph, the reporter talks about
| "details of proposed experiments being secret" but that's
| just standard practice for literally all government
| funding of science. As if they shouldn't be secret for
| some reason in this case.
|
| If this the sort of weak sauce, I mean, come on.
|
| Just a bunch of weird insinuations, and having read more,
| saying there's "omerta" on this seems even less likely.
|
| How about at least a little bit of real meat?
| pbreit wrote:
| No heavier than your thumb on the zoonosis scale.
| epistasis wrote:
| Where have I put my thumb on the zoonosis scale?
| tripletao wrote:
| These "two distinct lineages" are separated by exactly two
| single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). For comparison,
| omicron differs from the original Wuhan virus by more than
| fifty SNPs. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of
| an SNP per human-to-human transition.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/15346306072207
| 1...
|
| It's overwhelmingly likely that something around two months
| of cryptic spread occurred before the market super-spreader
| event, regardless of whether the origin was natural or
| research-related. That's plenty of time for these "two
| distinct lineages" to develop. They could also have
| developed at the market, either in a single transmission
| with two mutations, or in two transmissions with an
| intermediate lineage that died out before it could be
| sampled.
|
| Were you previously aware that the two lineages were just
| two SNPs apart? It's bizarre to me that the "two lineages"
| have received so much press as evidence of natural
| zoonosis, when they could have arisen so easily in human-
| to-human transmission.
| pbreit wrote:
| Two lineages do not preclude lab origin.
|
| And the data collection was absolutely biased to the
| market.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > There were two distinct lineages at the market
|
| No there were two distinct lineages in two separate
| crossover events, the market was just one of them.
|
| Which is even worse for the lab-leak hypothesis.
| tomp wrote:
| What's your explanation for the fact that Moderna patented the
| very specific 19-nucleotide sequence that codes Sars-COV-2
| furin cleavage site in 2018?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Just think about what you're claiming here with this silly
| question. You honestly think _Moderna_ patented a sequence
| multiple years ago, and then what, shared their research with
| the Chinese to unleash a virus and create demand for a
| vaccine they hadn 't invented yet? Why in the world would
| they patent it before that?
|
| It's literally the dumbest nonsense.
|
| A more direct refutation though is that the authors were
| extremely out of their depth and didn't remotely understand
| the results from their BLASTing. The moderna sequence is the
| reverse complement and doesn't even encode proteins. In the
| DNA repair context for which Moderna the patent covers, it
| codes for a specific (Non FCS protein) and can even be found
| in birds. Did Moderna invent birds too?
|
| https://twitter.com/emmecola/status/1468569894245572612
|
| https://twitter.com/MGerdol/status/1496130768854212624
| salawat wrote:
| ...The entire point of patents is the spread of knowledge.
| What, you think researchers, people that are by definition
| expected to be well acquainted with the cutting edge state
| of the art, _aren 't_ trolling patent streams for
| inspiration?
|
| I'm not even that much a cutting edge guy (I try to bring
| yesterday's innovation that no one noticed to people not
| even aware they should be looking at it) and I dig through
| the odd patent that catches my interest.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Yes, Chinese academia and business has no history of IP
| theft!
|
| To be clear I agree with the rest of your sentiment. I
| think the nucleotide sequence as evidence is very weak.
| It's the same amount of randomness as a 42 bit sequence
| assuming independence in both
| tomp wrote:
| Thanks for a sensible counterargument!
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| Patent, by definition, is shared and public knowledge (but
| not a public ownership)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| > Did Moderna invent birds too?
|
| Maybe they did...
|
| https://birdsarentreal.com/
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| No. This is how you end up with flat earthers.
| jahewson wrote:
| The answer is that the Sars-COV-2 cleavage site, while novel
| for a coronavirus, is not novel biologically. It's seen
| elsewhere and corresponds to the inverse of the human protein
| MSH3, which plays a role in certain cancers.
|
| It is not, as some people here are alleging, related to SARS-
| Cov-1.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| You realize COVID-19 is the second major SARS coronavirus
| outbreak the world has seen, right?
|
| Much of the research on the spike protein for COVID-19 came
| directly from SARS 1 research a decade ago. The fact we were
| able to have vaccines ready in 12 months is because of this
| research on SARS 1 and the spike protein.
| culi wrote:
| Uhhh do you think it MIGHT have something to do with the fact
| that Sars-COV-1 had already caused an outbreak and the WHO
| already had already placed these viruses on their watchlist
| of viruses with the most potential to cause a pandemic...
|
| EDIT:
|
| > The SARS-related coronavirus was one of several viruses
| identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2016 as
| a likely cause of a future epidemic in a new plan developed
| after the Ebola epidemic for urgent research and development
| before and during an epidemic towards diagnostic tests,
| vaccines and medicines. This prediction came to pass with the
| COVID-19 pandemic.
|
| https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/after-
| ebola-...
|
| EDIT2:
|
| The research effort to predict future outbreaks evolved into
| some really cool stuff like this:
|
| https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/
|
| Inevitably one of these will result in another outbreak and
| inevitably there will have been a lab trying to study it in
| preparation and inevitably another big-brain is gonna find
| some patent or paper that predates the outbreak and use it as
| "evidence" for their conspiracy
| vfclists wrote:
| Doesn't the article have a table of contents?
|
| What happened to plain HTML documents with a table of contents
| at the top that enables to get an idea of the structure of the
| document and jump back and forth between the sections?
| [deleted]
| walrus01 wrote:
| > China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the
| conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and
| performing such a half-assed investigation
|
| It definitely seems that the default reaction of any
| authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to
| clamp down on things and restrict information _whether or not
| it 's necessary_.
|
| One needs to only look at the many examples of various
| scandals/disasters that have gone very briefly viral on Chinese
| language social media before the censors get to them (often
| within 8-12 hours of the breaking news) before everything gets
| deleted.
| bragr wrote:
| >whether or not it's necessary
|
| The thing is they've studied the revolutions of 89 and the
| more recent ones too. They know they don't know what will be
| the thing that will finally get people out in the streets so
| they clamp down on everything. Who could know before hand
| that Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire would trigger
| the Tunisian revolution, and that that would help trigger the
| Arab Spring? China is very worried about potential Mohamed
| Bouazizis.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohamed_Bouazizi
| robonerd wrote:
| > _It definitely seems that the default reaction of any
| authoritaian /police-state environment like mainland China is
| to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or
| not it's necessary._
|
| That tactic loses them the benefit of the doubt across the
| board. As long as their default reaction is to suppress
| everything, my default assumption is that they're guilty of
| every accusation they suppress.
| remram wrote:
| That's fair but doesn't help us find out what happened
| though.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| richm31415 wrote:
| nraynaud wrote:
| And saying that China would have an interest in spreading the
| virus seems fishy to me too, they almost decapitated the
| Communist Party by having a giant dinner at the onset of the
| pandemic.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID
| almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the
| amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that
| are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading
| propaganda.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| You post this viewpoint all the time, I've seen you comment
| it before. Which report are you referring to exactly?
| aksss wrote:
| China gives its critics plenty to work with. And, no, critics
| of China are not automatically or even likely racist and
| xenophobic.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Guide to politics.
|
| If you don't support A. This means you are B,C,D...Z.
| msla wrote:
| > And, no, critics of China are not automatically or even
| likely racist and xenophobic.
|
| Especially since some people refuse to distinguish between
| people talking about the PRC and people talking about
| people of Chinese ethnicity. It's an obvious enough tactic
| once you're looking for it, but damn if it can't throw a
| smoke grenade into the discussion.
| trhway wrote:
| Hard to see lab-leak as intrinsically anti-China giving that
| it was NIH financing those GoF experiments which produced the
| coronavirus in Wuhan. That same story for example is pushed
| in Russia, who is making friends with China, as anti-
| American. So basically the story is interpreted as anti-
| something depending on your political orientation.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| To be clear - the NIH never financed any GoF experiments in
| Wuhan. There was a proposal that was never funded, and even
| in that proposal, the GoF work would happen in Baric's
| North Carolina lab.
| trhway wrote:
| To be clear - during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to
| EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying
| the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human
| subjects included" checked. EcoHealth naturally kept
| about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever"
| because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was
| much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+
| (in those original experiments they were able to increase
| virality of the deadly, yet low viral original SARS by
| inserting spike protein to allow for ACE2 based cell
| entry - the hallmark of the coronavirus - and after that
| the research was moved to Wuhan
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-
| of-...).
|
| It was the 2018 proposal for additional money - EcoHealth
| naturally trying to double dip - for those GoF
| experiments in Wuhan to insert very human specific gene
| sequences into the coronavirus which was rejected as
| "Hell no, that is too risky!" by .. wait for it ...
| DARPA. Well as DARPA rejected it was still funded after
| that by the Fauci's NIAID.
|
| And the rest is history - in November 2019 the
| coronavirus magically "naturally" jumped onto humans
| supposedly in the Wuhan market a thousand kilometers from
| the natural habitat of its closest natural siblings. We
| are all free to choose our Morpheus' pill, blue or red :)
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Aside from he rest of the weird conspiracy insinuation
| I've come to expect - you should probably know that
| horseshoe bats are endemic to the caves around Wuhan and
| were studied by virologists in the hills above the
| biggest animal trade in Hubei.. So it's probably best if
| you stop making the silly claim about them being 1,000km
| away if you want to bolster your case.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7824899/
| trhway wrote:
| If you didn't notice you're pushing the 2021 work by that
| same Wuhan institute. It is as trustworthy in that matter
| as that EcoHealth Aliance's owner/PI Daszak's conclusion
| that the coronavirus wasn't of their making.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yes, the WIV does indeed study the bats that we're
| questioning. I'm not sure what point you're trying to
| make? The claim you're questioning is "There are
| horseshoe bats near Wuhan".
|
| Do you think they just invented the bats? I mean...
| they're on video...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovnUyTRMERI&t=185s
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The rest of the comment is the same exact meritless
| insinuation I've replied to 100 other times in this
| thread. It's tiring replying to people who don't
| understand the first thing about biology or virology
| because you have to retrace _so much ground_ just to get
| them to the point where they can comprehend why they 're
| 'not even wrong'.
|
| But sure, I'll bite. Aside from the completely false
| claim there aren't horseshoe bats near Wuhan. A small
| grant (only $1.5M was ever paid) to a lab studying
| coronaviruses after a huge coronavirus outbreak (SARS)
| isn't remotely interesting and especially isn't evidence
| of a lab leak. And the "human subjects" was literally
| just to run PCRs on people who live near bats to try and
| catch viruses early.
|
| More to the point, it's not difficult to see whether a
| virus was engineered or manipulated with GoF research and
| this one wasn't. So all of the silly distractions about
| right-wing bogeyman like Peter Daszak secretly funding
| Chinese bioweapons are irrelevant.
| trhway wrote:
| dang wrote:
| Could you please make your substantive points without
| name-calling and swipes? It's against the site
| guidelines. It's also not in your interest, since it
| weakens your case.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| trhway wrote:
| thank you, i appreciate it, overwatching Big Brother :)
| Sometimes one just gets carried away.
| trhway wrote:
| >A small grant ... isn't evidence of a lab leak
|
| The grant is evidence of research not of the leak.
|
| >And the "human subjects" was literally just to run PCRs
| on people who live near bats to try and catch viruses
| early.
|
| we don't really know what was done with the "subjects".
| The IRB document would have been useful here. When you're
| doing GoF by specifically increasing human targeting
| virality by creating chimera viruses in the lab, the
| "PCRs on people who live near bats" sounds a bit sideway.
|
| > it's not difficult to see whether a virus was
| engineered or manipulated with GoF research and this one
| wasn't.
|
| really depends on how GoF is done. So far such
| conclusions in this case came from the people coopted and
| prompted by Daszak while those people weren't aware of
| the conflict of interest that Daszak has here.
|
| >So all of the silly distractions about right-wing
| bogeyman like Peter Daszak secretly funding Chinese
| bioweapons are irrelevant.
|
| that is strawman argument. The facts of Daszak
| involvement is clearly and widely documented. As to his
| motivation or final target - it is clearly a matter of
| interpretation and scale of fantasy of the one doing
| interpretation, and as i already mentioned in Russia for
| example it is interpreted as US building bioweapons.
| (Note: in my interpretation i see no bioweapons or the
| likes, just a somewhat dangerous research performed with
| a bit of corner cutting, and instead of looking into the
| mistakes and how to make such research safer - i think
| such research is unavoidable - the issue got highly
| politicized with no any useful outcome as a result)
| jpeloquin wrote:
| > during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth
| Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the
| coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human
| subjects included" checked.
|
| Is this is the grant you're referring to? https://reporte
| r.nih.gov/search/me9X23pZWEigATS-4XTBfA/proje...
|
| From your comment it was unclear to me what the human
| subjects component was. It appears to have been
| population surveillance using PCR and antibody testing,
| with the intent to detect prior infection by previously
| unrecognized coronaviruses. Which is low-risk.
|
| From the public project details, it is not clear that the
| scope of the work as described to the NIH included gain
| of function experiments. Perhaps you were referring to a
| different project description? And of course EcoHealth
| Alliance may have done gain of function experiments that
| were not described in their proposal.
| harshreality wrote:
| Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird
| insinuation.
|
| Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly
| synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it
| wouldn't be SARS-family.
|
| Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't
| synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have
| been serial passage in humanized mice, _considering that 's
| what Daszak and co had literally proposed years before the
| outbreak_.
|
| Arguments that because the original SARS-CoV-2 wasn't perfectly
| optimized to bind to ACE2, it obviously didn't come from a lab:
| Obvious nonsense. Why would you expect serial passage through a
| small number of humanized mice be as effective at optimizing
| binding to ACE2 as an epidemic sweeping through tens, then
| hundreds of millions of humans?
|
| The Laos expedition is interesting, but having only just
| skimmed it I'm not yet convinced it means anything. Any samples
| with very similar spike proteins collected AFTER SARS-CoV-2
| became an epidemic could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 had
| recombined with existing bat coronaviruses, rather than being a
| zoonotic _source_ of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
|
| The sloppiness and drumbeat nature of these anti-lab-leak
| essays makes me not trust them. The lab-leak argument is
| speculative, sure, but we've sent people to prison for murder
| based on speculative inferences from circumstantial evidence;
| meanwhile, none of the arguments _against_ lab-leak are solid.
| rzz3 wrote:
| Very well put. One thing I'd add, is that this entire debate
| regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized,
| and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific
| interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly
| viable given the evidence we currently have.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _and I feel few people actually have legitimate
| scientific interest in discovering the truth_
|
| Not to be glib, but what _would_ be a legitimate scientific
| interest in discovering the truth?
|
| That this _plausibly_ could have been of natural origin
| would seem to override any value in discerning where it
| _actually_ came from.
|
| If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring
| naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but
| that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event
| anyway, albeit farther in the future.
|
| If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are.
|
| Or, in other words, what would we do _differently_ if it
| were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay,
| so we 've made human-origin less likely. We still have to
| deal with naturally-occurring in the future.
| est31 wrote:
| You raise good points, but note that not everyone is
| rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many
| people are, even in the 21st century.
|
| If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something
| previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH
| funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many
| aspects of biological and medical research.
| incrudible wrote:
| You underestimate the time value of _not_ having a
| pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years
| in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is
| not exactly something that happens in nature.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge
| section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.
| byecomputer wrote:
| I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take
| lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and
| inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of
| Virology is on it. For reference[1].
|
| [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_
| webp,q_...
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market
| ,+Fazha...
|
| It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus
| piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for
| itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters
| and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus
| proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily
| make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data'
| maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of
| the rivers and also very close to the lab.
|
| That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm
| confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's
| pretending to be.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| You do realize that your two points are in direct
| contradiction?
|
| You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV
| (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much
| later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts
| are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks
| like the market was the center of spread?
|
| In any case, they directly address this;
|
| > _Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no
| association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel,
| visits, or contacts there) still centered around the
| Huanan market and could not have been subject to
| ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in
| Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There
| are no other epidemiological links to any other place in
| the city, other clusters only started forming later in
| Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more
| representative of the city's population density._
|
| > _It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute
| of Virology (the alleged 'escape' laboratory working on
| CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of
| the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more
| than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness
| clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December
| 2019._
|
| As for:
|
| > _It 's not at all far-fetched to think the virus
| piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for
| itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters
| and infected lots of people._
|
| You still need to explain how there are two distinct
| lineages at the market among the first cases!
|
| Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is
| useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be
| weighed.
| pbreit wrote:
| Two lineages does not preclude a lab leak. And only B was
| centered at the market. The market hypothesis is lacking.
| byecomputer wrote:
| > You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV
|
| Yes, an article comparing two possible originating
| locations should obviously show both on that graphic
| (especially when both places are well-within the frame of
| the image); I can't see any good reason for the author to
| have omitted that.
|
| > but then you also grant that it looks like the market
| was the center of spread
|
| Yes. And that's not contradictory to the lab leak idea,
| because people aren't trees and they go places after
| work. I think it's entirely reasonable to hypothesize
| that the virus escaped from the lab on a person and ended
| up successfully taking root in a less-than-sanitary wet
| market just across the river. If two-headed turtles
| started showing up at a Popeye's 20 minutes away from the
| Turtle Experiment Laboratory, would you say that Popeye's
| was the source of the two-headed turtles?
|
| > You still need to explain how there are two distinct
| lineages at the market among the first cases!
|
| Again, there's no reason both theories can't be true
| here. The caged, dirty animals definitely seemed to be
| the virus' first stronghold, but that doesn't mean that
| the new bat virus couldn't have come from the New Bat
| Virus Laboratory 20 minutes away from the wet market.
|
| > Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of
| is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be
| weighed.
|
| My point is that it made the bias of the author nakedly
| apparent. It's an pro-wet-market argument piece, not an
| objective look.
| themitigating wrote:
| Is each theory equal in terms of probability based on the
| evidence? That's much more important than stating that both
| could be true
| pb9494 wrote:
| kristjansson wrote:
| GIGO
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| > I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific
| interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is
| perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.
|
| This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it'd
| be a career making move if you could prove something that
| juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren't
| completely certain but rather comparing probability & the
| limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis
| is increasingly unlikely. That doesn't make the news and it
| especially won't convince conspiracy theorists when there's
| a raging political battle.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the
| other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus
| itself.
|
| The for or against lies with the lab and the staff
| working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open
| and honest investigation to either prove or discount it.
|
| So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere
| else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was
| lab leak.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of
| natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave
| signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that
| possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that
| it was a natural virus which had been collected and
| subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the
| former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
| tim333 wrote:
| Modern molecular techniques don't really have to leave
| signs. Indeed scientists synthesised a copy of sars-cov-2
| from the sequence data a few months after the sequence
| was published:
|
| "it is possible for researchers to reconstruct the virus
| in a lab, using either fragments of virus from patients,
| or fragments of DNA that are synthesised chemically by
| biotech companies. "
| https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/19172
|
| It seems you can basically type any sequence you want and
| have it made up.
| cameldrv wrote:
| This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a
| seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1].
| Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group
| at WIV.
|
| Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015
| or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence.
|
| In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the
| sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology
| to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast
| cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up
| in Nature [2].
|
| If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using
| this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an
| RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor
| and copy and paste.
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en
|
| [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9
| byecomputer wrote:
| > insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can
| literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.
|
| Saved a lot of money this year making Covid-19 at home
| using the SARS viruses I already have. Takes like 2
| seconds
| scarmig wrote:
| > That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a
| natural virus which had been collected and subsequently
| escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too
| attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
|
| For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab
| leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their
| effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and
| little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak
| hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to
| a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized
| mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it
| in the city the virology lab was based.
|
| The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in
| Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the
| strong theory weaker.
| chasil wrote:
| What I will tell you is a thing that I have read, and I
| hold close:
|
| Forgive one another, and you will be forgiven.
|
| In order to forgive, we must have the truth. Without it,
| we are in a fog of blind judgement and accusation.
|
| Clarity of the source of this misfortune allows us to
| forgive.
|
| I cannot say that I hold the full pantheon of the origin
| of these words to be true, but the four books that
| imparted this teaching to me have left an indelible
| imprint, and I cannot escape their mercy, justice, and
| hope.
|
| I have read many other books, of course, and I believe in
| compassion. Though great calamity has befallen us, we
| might find any who have acted wrongly to be worthy of
| forgiveness.
|
| When we grow beyond apprehension of recrimination, blind
| to fear of punishment for a cataclysm caused by ourselves
| and others, and only seek to salve our unwilling harm,
| perhaps then we will be able to say "move!" to a
| mountain, and it will move.
|
| Yes, I have loved these books. Sometimes, they are my
| only solace.
| [deleted]
| acdha wrote:
| They're not going to have a video of it jumping, no, but
| they can look as probabilities as they've done. This has
| ruled out the bioweapon theory which got a lot of chatter
| a couple years ago, and it's shown that zoonotic origin
| is heavily favored as the likely candidate. That doesn't
| rule out something like a natural virus infecting a
| worker who made a lab safety error but it hasn't made
| that look extremely likely, either.
|
| For anyone honest, the big question here is how we
| prevent this from happening again. The conclusions seem
| pretty solid: be careful about pushing humans into wild
| animal populations, better surveillance for emerging
| diseases, and continue pouring money into research on
| things like rapid test and vaccine development so
| response times can shrink.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird
| insinuation._
|
| Trying to refute evidence rejecting a theory is not
| equivalent to proving a theory, though. It's just broken
| reasoning.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_.
| ..
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the
| divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if
| those spike proteins had been recombinated.
|
| Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out
| there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but
| wild speculation like that is not very productive.
|
| For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic
| virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab
| undetected. Additionally and alternatively scientists have to
| undergo something like this "serial mice passage". Which is
| not proven that it could work. And then they would need to
| somehow let the virus escape through an accident even though
| they knew it could be dangerous. And it would have to
| accidentally be able to infect Humans extremely well (which
| is a tall ask still). It's just... highly improbable.
| pbreit wrote:
| Less probable than such a coronavirus originating in Wuhan
| of all places?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| The WIV was in Wuhan due to the proximity of
| coronaviruses and other bat-borne diseases like
| rhabdovirusus.. this line of logic is akin to blaming
| shark research centers in South Africa for nearby
| attacks.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| > For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable"
| zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it
| into a lab undetected.
|
| That's not a necessary condition and it's ridiculous to
| think that's the only hinge by which the hypothesis stands.
| Another far more plausible idea is that a mistake occurred
| somewhere and it was covered up. This has occurred before
| in authoritarian regimes before.
|
| An input to a molecular clock is a mutation rate, which I
| imagine would be hard to quantify given the unknown source
| and the possibility of gain of function research.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Of course it is a necessary condition. In order to leak
| from the lab, the virus has to be collected and be
| propagated in the lab. And all the rest isn't plausible
| if they knew the bat virus they had in their vials had
| the potential to cause a pandemic. But it must have had
| some rare "talent" that was as yet undiscovered.
| Otherwise nothing of the "lab leak" hypothesis makes
| sense. You can't "gain-of-function" just any virus and
| end up with a killer pandemic.
|
| You can interpret a molecular clock or a phylogenetic
| tree qualitatively, and you would expect to see multiple
| samples with the protein in question, but which have
| individually acquired so many mutations that they must
| have diverged before the dynamic. That would mean the
| protein sequence in question predates the pandemic by a
| long shot, unless you think the Wuhan lab tested the
| Virus in Laos...
| dpbriggs wrote:
| I guess the disagreement is around the word "undetected".
| It's possible some failure was covered up and I trust the
| Chinese government to be capable enough to do that.
|
| > virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab
|
| That's a weaker statement than the one I replied to. I'm
| referring to the how it's necessary that it needs to a
| "pandemicable" virus that enters a lab "undetected" and I
| guess leaves the lab "undetected". There's several
| possible ways the virus could have made it into Wuhan:
|
| - Improper handling occurs somewhere in transporting the
| samples from bat caves (w/e) to the lab.
|
| - Improper handling of samples in the lab.
|
| - Improper disposal of samples in the lab.
|
| - Entering a more speculative area; bat samples are used
| in experiments and improper handling or disposal occurs.
|
| - Deeper into speculation: Improper handling/disposal of
| viruses used in gain of function research.
|
| And when any of the above occurs, use the state's
| staggering power to cover it up.
|
| > You can interpret a molecular clock or a phylogenetic
| tree qualitatively
|
| I'm sure that could work but I imagine the error bars are
| quite wide as otherwise that's definitive proof and we
| wouldn't be discussing this online.
|
| > unless you think the Wuhan lab tested the Virus in Laos
|
| Nice attempt at absurd rhetoric. Strengthens the argument
| doesn't it?
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian
| regimes before.
|
| To be fair, cover ups aren't exclusive to authoritarian
| regimes.
|
| Futhermore, in this case, The West seems to be willingly
| and shamelessly towing the Communist Party line. Can we
| add conspiracy to the smell being given off?
|
| Science should be obcessed with truth. Geez. Looks like
| science isn't immune to cover ups and conspiracy either.
|
| "What is the source?" will take a place next to "Who
| killed JFK?".
|
| p.s. Slightly off topic, but off the media sources
| mentioned (e.g., CNN) how much of their revenue comes
| from Big Pharma or Big X that wouldn't fare well if lab
| leak could be supported?
| peteradio wrote:
| JFK was an obvious government coverup not sure why you
| would choose to group the two.
| themitigating wrote:
| Obvious?
| ethbr0 wrote:
| I like that the two sibling comments above are
| "Obviously, everyone knows {polar opposites}."
| peteradio wrote:
| To be totally honest I don't even believe in my comment
| but it felt like the right retort, I have literally know
| clue what OP is saying. Can you flag balderdash?
| neaden wrote:
| You know we know exactly who killed JFK and it's not
| controversial by anyone who seriously looks into it
| right?
| dekhn wrote:
| What does "date divergence of genomes using a genetic
| clock"? I am curious to learn about such a tecnology. If
| you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock that
| is highly non-quantitative.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It is quite quantitative, just not very precise. Good
| enough to tell you if a Virus emerged more than a couple
| of years ago or not.
| dekhn wrote:
| Can you give me a link to a good example of that
| (ideally, non-covid)? my understanding is that it's only
| good for relative rates over evolutionary time so I'd
| like to see a counterexample.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's a completely common technique - the same way we're
| tracing the current Monkeypox outbreak.
|
| https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-
| events/epidemiological-up...
|
| And is useful from an anthropological perspective on
| older outbreaks, also for Monkeypox;
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92315-8
|
| The rate of mutations, especially for a virus as
| transmissible as Covid is a very strong signal.
| dekhn wrote:
| Thanks- personally, based on my experience in functional
| genomics, they have far too many assumptions to be
| trusted as "clocks", even relative ones.
|
| Here's the second paper's methods: a molecular clock
| signal was estimated on the ML tree using TempEst v1.532.
| BEAST v1.10.433 was used for Bayesian MCMC analysis to
| estimate temporal nodes. As recommended in Patrono et
| al., we selected the simplest model: strict clock and
| constant population size with a HKY substitution model
| and four Gamma categories7. An MCMC model was run with
| 50,000,000 generations and a burn-in of 25,000 sampled
| trees. All other parameters were by default. BEAST
| executions were completed checking chain convergence and
| sufficient sampling of the posterior space (ESS > 200)
| with Tracer v1.7.1. The final chronogram was generated
| using TreeAnnotator v1.10.433.
|
| I'd call these "time-scaled trees", not molecular clocks.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Their accuracy is completely subject to stable mutation
| rate and frequency of sample -- with that second paper,
| they were working with ~10 samples from 15 years ago vs.
| thousands of samples with hourly granularity and entirely
| traceable transmission chains in the early days of Covid.
| Completely different capabilities arise with Covid-level
| specificity.
| dekhn wrote:
| Thanks, I'll have to give this some deep thought, it's
| news to me that having that much more data gives you high
| resolution in real time.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's more a matter of decreasing the error bars on the
| rate of substitution, to have extremely specific dates
| for the oldest infections in each clade and the ability
| to run real-time backtesting to make sure your
| assumptions are solid. The rate of spread of Covid was a
| curse but was important to this type of work -- when we
| were looking at contact tracing and trying to assess the
| rate of substitution on mutations, it was useful to know
| that e.g. on Jan 1st there was no Covid in NYC and on Feb
| 1st there was.
| uoaei wrote:
| > "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to
| somehow make it into a lab undetected.
|
| This is the opposite of what I understood the lab-leak
| theory to be: that an initially-zoonotic virus was
| identified and bred in a lab until someone working at that
| lab with lax security standards accidentally brought it out
| of the quarantine. This is plausible at face value.
|
| I think a lot of the really extreme vitriolic reactions to
| lab-leak theory are conflating it with the accusations that
| a secret cabal purposefully engineered and released this
| virus to sow harm and discord. But that's not at all the
| connotation of "leak" IMO -- leak implies a lack of
| intention.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| There's a spectrum... The zoonotic virus would need to
| have some rare "talent" to start with. Then there is the
| ominous "breeding" part, which many people describe as
| reckless or evil. In any case this isn't done in Humans
| but rather some kind of humanized model (and it's not
| clear that could work at all). Which is why it is quite a
| coincidence or accident that this process would end with
| a virus so well adapted to Humans that it is able to
| cause a pandemic. It's like winning a chess tournament
| after training for a Marathon.
|
| It's only plausible if you know very little about
| biology. Very few people who know a lot about viruses
| believe that this is possible and even those usually say
| the zoonosis hypothesis is more likely.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > It's only plausible if you know very little about
| biology.
|
| Not trolling, series question: what would these same ppl
| say about the monkey pox outbreaks? Why now? Why so
| random?
| peteradio wrote:
| > Gain-of-function research is medical research that
| genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance
| the biological functions of gene products. This may
| include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or
| host range.
|
| Isn't the goal to end up with an infectious agent? I
| don't understand why it seems so implausible that they
| would succeed? Why would someone give a lab money for a
| truly impossible task?
| peteradio wrote:
| Don't fall into the trap of taking the opposite stance of bad
| arguments.
| kazz wrote:
| > _As you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims
| to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with
| new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise
| unheard ideas, people and places._
|
| Ahh yes, definitely the mission statement of a reputable source.
| barneygale wrote:
| UnHerd has a following among conspiracy theorists, but its
| journalism is pretty good! E.g. here's an interview with Sajid
| Javid (UK minister for health)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7yZZKlg-m8
| mikeyouse wrote:
| This isn't journalism by contributors to Unherd - it's an
| (unconvincing) OpEd published on Unherd by two people who are
| promoting their book.
| Fargoan wrote:
| I would like to find all the comments of people saying it was
| xenophobic or whatever bullshit to suggest it was a lab leak. And
| then I can say "I told you so"
| buttocks wrote:
| echelon wrote:
| This turns the issue into a political one and ignores any other
| parties that might have been involved.
|
| The only thing we should care to do at this point is learn as
| much as we can about where the virus originated. Everything
| else makes the task of finding the origin harder.
| ok123456 wrote:
| yes china bad. Thank you for your contribution to the
| discussion.
| pphysch wrote:
| Weird non-sequitor. Chinese people don't obsess over and
| celebrate those sad days just like American people don't obsess
| over and celebrate the innumerable crises and human rights
| abuses of their own, say, the MOVE bombing. A little empathy
| goes a long way.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| knorker wrote:
| What happened is that they are clearly lying to us, and they hold
| all the evidence. What do you want us to do?
|
| Either they're lying to cover up a lab leak, or they're lying up
| to but not including about lab leak.
|
| Multiple near-nuclear events happened during the cold war,
| averted several times only by a single Soviet soldier using his
| common sense. We didn't find out about that until much much
| later.
|
| Give it a few decades, and we can hope to find out.
|
| Gulf on Tonkin, anyone?
|
| It's not that I don't care, it's that it's not a fight I believe
| can be won this decade.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I think this article is a very good example of the sort of
| pseudo-compelling argument. It's like one step along the road
| between 4chan conspiracy to Tucker Carlson. It's lots of stuff
| that sound like reasonable arguments, but are actually not. It
| starts by couching itself in the actual concensus - other people
| concluding that's a possibility! - Yes, that's true, but what
| they're concluding as a possibility out of a cautious appraoch,
| you're pushing as actually being true. Then they start marking
| their own homework - we published our book and everyone
| reasonable and smart said it was great, and everyone who
| disagreed clearly didn't read it. Now we go to the greatest hits
| - the big bad mainstream media.
|
| Now we start mis-representing our opponents. All we want is an
| open scientific debate! But it's too controversial! That might
| not at all be true, but we're going to say it anyway. It might be
| that the actual scientists decided that there weren't merits to
| your argument to justify inviting you to debate it, but who cares
| - let's just say they're afraid of controversy.
|
| People are _threatened_ by our work. We 're not extremists! We're
| moderates! We're perfectly reasonable people who are just going
| to slip in this laundered conspiracy theory that Fauci funded the
| Wuhan lab. But don't worry, let me quote this anonymous scientist
| to back up every worst accusation you could make of scientists.
|
| Everyone is covering this up because of vested interests you see!
| If you look up the author you'll see that he comes from this as a
| complete neutral outsider making cold-eyed judgements of the
| evidence. He's definitely _not_ from the exact far right nutter
| idealogue ecosystem that you 'd expect him to be from.
|
| There's a nugget of truth in the article - the lab leak is
| _possible_ as an explanation, and that China isn 't to be trusted
| to investigate. There's _nothing_ in this article that actually
| advances any evidence beyond that. The rest of it though is just
| the same thinly veiled conspiracy theories that have been going
| around since Trump going on about "The Chinese Virus".
| choward wrote:
| Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds to someone who isn't
| partisan and doesn't watch mainstream media? Besides the
| blatant lies like saying Fauci didn't fund the wuhan lab you
| use political terms like labeling people right wingers because
| they don't agree with you. That's the same strategy as the
| mainstream media you are defending. Then you mock people for
| wanting an actual debate. You need to get out of your bubble.
| Stop mindlessly believing everything you see on CNN without
| question.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| The guy writes an article accusing _everyone_ who disagree
| with him of being corrupt and you take offence to me calling
| him right wing? Bizarre.
|
| Here's the problem- you accuse me of mindlessly believing CNN
| (no idea what that had to do with anything, both I and the
| author are British) but the truth is that I'm just applying
| the same level of scrutiny to the author as you would have me
| apply to CNN.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Note this also:
|
| >> Imagine if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile had
| killed 21 million people. It's hard to believe the world would
| shrug and say: let's not bother finding out how it happened.
|
| In other words, somebody did this and we have to find out who
| it was!
|
| So much about just asking questions, I guess.
| mlcrypto wrote:
| mikestew wrote:
| _It has been proven true by anyone with common sense._
|
| I've heard enough bullshit passed off as "it's just common
| sense" that anytime I hear someone use that as an argument, I
| take it to mean they don't have any argument other than the
| random thoughts rattling around in their head.
|
| That's not to say I don't think the hypothesis didn't have some
| merit. But I could just as easily "it's just common sense" the
| other side of the argument, too.
| alkjl4l4tl wrote:
| Siira wrote:
| The Bayes theorem suggests an overwhelming probability that
| the virus was leaked, just by it being located near such a
| big lab. Further evidence has actually bolstered the lab leak
| hypothesis. So it seems correct to say that it is common
| sense to believe in the hypothesis, unless you believe lab
| leaks are extremely rare.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
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