Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

sciencemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 225 posts

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#71

Post by vtail »

baddox wrote: post #60
Fomite wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Every laboratory exposure-related outbreak I've encountered has been trivially easy to trace back to that event. - Most high-end virology labs are doing research on human to human transmission of corona viruses. They're a major emerging type of virus we don't understand, and a Chinese lab working on them is even less surprising. - If this was a bioweapon, it sucks .

The ones that are too difficult to trace wouldn't, of course, be included among every lab exposure-related outbreak you've encountered.

Yes - it's a good example of a survivorship bias.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#72

Post by yorwba »

topmonk wrote: post #51
allovernow wrote: post #2

There is a recently opened P4 biolab in Wuhan within miles of the seafood market in question, with researchers who have recently been working with and publishing on the topic of Corona viruses, including research on human transmission. Not to be sensationalist, and personally I think the title is alarmist, but are a number of suspicious elements to this story that are worth examining: https://medium.com/@siradrianbon…

Heres another article: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir... What also leads me to believe this may be the case is that there was (according to the article) experiments on bats being run, and in China, people often find random animals, in drainage ditches, etc., and then go on to sell them for meat. It's possible that the bats they were working on were improperly disposed of, and then picked…

> Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.

> Or at least start with an email: Dr Peng can be reached at [...], and his phone# is [...]

Have they no shame? They've found a bat immunologist (a different one than the virologist in the Medium post upstream; it's almost as if there are many experts on bat viruses), strongly suggest that this makes him the one responsible, and then ask people to contact him? This is basically orchestrating a harassment campaign. I hope they can be sued for that (defamation? IANAL).

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#73

Post by WaitWaitWha »

notadoc wrote: post #65
topmonk wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heres another article: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir... What also leads me to believe this may be the case is that there was (according to the article) experiments on bats being run, and in China, people often find random animals, in drainage ditches, etc., and then go on to sell them for meat. It's possible that the bats they were working on were improperly disposed of, and then picked…

Zerohedge? Their primary product is fear porn for clicks, how reliable of a source do you think that is?

Forget the local content, but follow the links and make your decisions with those additional resources - discard them or not. Even a click-bate site can have links that help dis/prove a hypothesis.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#74

Post by graeme »

perennate wrote: post #70
yurlungur wrote: post #52

The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc. To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.

I didn't read anything in the posted article that indicates that the China-based researchers think it came from a lab or looks synthetic. So I didn't understand why you are responding to a claim that they aren't making.

Lots of posts in this thread were making the claim about the lab. They’re less upvoted now.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#75

Post by corporateslave5 »

salemh wrote: post #66
mc32 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modified, not synthetic.

Any source you have found credible? Their is a lot of information going around in both directions.

I personally think any academics thinking parts are synthetic aren’t speaking about it

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#76

Post by perennate »

graeme wrote: post #74
perennate wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read anything in the posted article that indicates that the China-based researchers think it came from a lab or looks synthetic. So I didn't understand why you are responding to a claim that they aren't making.

Lots of posts in this thread were making the claim about the lab. They’re less upvoted now.

Ah that makes more sense, it was confusing because it was posted as a top-level comment instead of a reply.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#77

Post by dylz »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #26
erichocean wrote: post #5

"Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag" https://biorxiv-cache.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/2020.01.30.... > [ABSTRACT] We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in ot…

and China is testing HIV related drugs for treatment since well before this paper came out https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/chi... but it's just a lucky hunch, right? not like they would try to hide knowing more about it, right?

It was done for other coronavirus: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15144898

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#78

Post by flycaliguy »

rococode wrote: post #33
zozbot234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, https://old.reddit.com/user/BurrShotFirst1804 is claiming that this (preprint, unreviewed) paper is very misleading, speaking as (supposedly) someone highly familiar with at least one of these HIV proteins. Not sure what to make of either the paper itself or this response to it.

Copying /u/BurrShotFirst1804's main response here for easier reference: ===== This study is crap. My comment from another thread. This paper isn't peer reviewed or published. It's just an online journal. I've worked pretty closely with gag in my PhD thesis. Gag is the conglomerate protein that gets cut by the protease to generate the hiv capsid, matrix, and carrier proteins. Gp120 is the receptor protein. This is a r…

I’m think they might be aiming at HIV because China has also been in the news for genetically modifying two babies to prevent HIV. Disinformation designed to send people down a hole, linking stuff together to make it seem more plausible.

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#79

Post by KaoruAoiShiho »

dylz wrote: post #68
KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks honestly reassuring. - Some layman.

They don't appear to even be matching entire sequences. An analogy might be "these two web pages both contain * ! oh no!" while completely disregarding everything in the middle.

If it's as bad as it sounds, would this be a neophyte mistake or deliberate conspiracy mongering?

Re: Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally

#80

Post by Fomite »

baddox wrote: post #60
Fomite wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Every laboratory exposure-related outbreak I've encountered has been trivially easy to trace back to that event. - Most high-end virology labs are doing research on human to human transmission of corona viruses. They're a major emerging type of virus we don't understand, and a Chinese lab working on them is even less surprising. - If this was a bioweapon, it sucks .

The ones that are too difficult to trace wouldn't, of course, be included among every lab exposure-related outbreak you've encountered.

There are very, very few outbreaks where we don't eventually figure out the source.

Like, can you spin the theory that we're missing them? Sure. But there's a pretty strong absence of evidence there, despite a field that's actively looking constantly (and where showing that would further the political and scientific careers of a number of people).

Post reply on HN