The Lab Leak Hypothesis • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#131

Post by tremon » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #107

mensetmanusman wrote: post #61

Also an MIT alum, and in July I was considering the bayesian priors of the situation: Roll a dice representing all the possible bat-human interaction sites in the world. How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things? I have worked in clean room environments for years. Everyone eventually has an off day (lack of sleep, usually) where you…

Well, is there anywhere else in China other than Wuhan that could/would identify a new virus like this before it goes mega-exponential? AIDS, for example, only got flagged because a normally extremely healthy group started appearing with diseases associated with the very old and failing immune systems. And, even then, it took quite a while to figure out that it was a virus. In the middle of flu season, COVID probably…

Otherwise, COVID is just a fairly invisible bump in your mortality rates for people with comorbidities and age.

What does the age distribution look like for the Wuhan region? I think I read somewhere that the percentage of old (70+) people is a lot smaller than in e.g. Europe, which might be another data point why this wasn't flagged earlier.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#132

Post by sergiomattei » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:57 AM UTC

anon9001 wrote: post #35

coolspot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, the state-sponsored gain-of-function research towards particular properties is not an accident. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has published papers on how they were able to modify a bat virus to achieve more dangerous properties [77][88]. [77] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/ [88] - https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

How close are we to DIY viruses? If I was a teenager interested in biology, and I wanted to maybe build a "harmless" virus just to see if I could do it, how achievable might that be? I watched computer viruses go from: researchers -> tinkerers -> vandals -> criminals -> governments At this point we just assume every computer is compromised, and we carve out enclaves of varying security for whatever risk level we're w…

The bats do it for free.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#133

Post by yorwba » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 9:59 AM UTC

noctua wrote: post #120

InTheArena wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never mind that the author is dealing with a country that is committing genocide right now simply because some Muslims believe in Allah and not the state.

If I've understood it correctly, China isn't persecuting Muslims, but Uyghurs, and their main justification for it is the East Turkestan independence movement. There are plenty of Muslims in other parts of China living normal lives.

There are plenty of Uyghurs living normal lives. Don't forget that even the highest estimates of a million targeted amount to maybe 10% of the total population. There are also plenty of ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims among the eyewitnesses interviewed in Western media, as well as restrictions on religious freedom all over the country: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-uighur-m... Of course having their mosque closed for illegal religious activity and eating halal food that says 清真 instead of حلال on the packaging still leaves people with what might be considered a "normal life", even though it is different from the normal life they knew before.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#134

Post by 0-_-0 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:04 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #27

> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they…

> In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats.

This is also not the first time a lab leak caused an outbreak, the 2004 SARS outbreak was caused by a lab leak [1]

[1]: https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#135

Post by tremon » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:05 AM UTC

wbl wrote: post #109

manicdee wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge. This is where people have firearms, are trained in using them, but some circumstance led to the firearm being discharged without intent and injuring or killing someone. There’s every reason to believe that a country attempting to develop bio weapons may accidentally release that bio weapon against its own people for the same reason: mistake…

COVID is a terrible bioweapon. It's fragile, with an outer lipid membrane that has to be preserved. It's not very lethal to people of military age, and spreads readily between people making collateral damage inevitable.

Still, it appears to be very good at disrupting the enemy's economy.

Not that I think it was engineered as a bioweapon, but it does show that bioweapons don't have to be deadly to be effective.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#136

Post by andromeduck » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:08 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #104

mensetmanusman wrote: post #61

Also an MIT alum, and in July I was considering the bayesian priors of the situation: Roll a dice representing all the possible bat-human interaction sites in the world. How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things? I have worked in clean room environments for years. Everyone eventually has an off day (lack of sleep, usually) where you…

> How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things? Very often for organizations like that who have labs and offices over much of the country. Take a look at the CDC locations for instance ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for_Disease_Control_an... ) , if an outbreak were to start anywhere in the US there would be a "suspicious" CDC…

Except China has only 2 BSL4 labs and though both are in big cities by Western standards, neither are near the costal population centers in which the majority of China actually resides.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#137

Post by reissbaker » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #107

mensetmanusman wrote: post #61

Also an MIT alum, and in July I was considering the bayesian priors of the situation: Roll a dice representing all the possible bat-human interaction sites in the world. How often do you get a result so incredibly close to one of the few sites in the world that intentionally collects these things? I have worked in clean room environments for years. Everyone eventually has an off day (lack of sleep, usually) where you…

Well, is there anywhere else in China other than Wuhan that could/would identify a new virus like this before it goes mega-exponential? AIDS, for example, only got flagged because a normally extremely healthy group started appearing with diseases associated with the very old and failing immune systems. And, even then, it took quite a while to figure out that it was a virus. In the middle of flu season, COVID probably…

I do not have a strong opinion on lab origin vs zoonotic, but I think the idea that the virus didn't originate in Wuhan, or at least very near to Wuhan, is unlikely. China successfully contained COVID — enough to prevent their own population from getting much of it, at least — by implementing draconian lockdown measures for the Hubei province (of which Wuhan is the capital). I know people who had family trapped in Hubei: the highways were shut down and blockaded by government forces. Guards patrolled people entering and leaving their houses and apartments. In some cases, apartment buildings had their doors welded shut to prevent residents from leaving at all.

That didn't happen in Beijing, or Shanghai, or Guangzhou or anywhere else in China, because it didn't need to. The outbreak started somewhere in Hubei. The most likely place of anywhere in Hubei for it to have started is Wuhan, just statistically; it's the largest city, with the most people living in it (not to mention it had the first recorded outbreak). But if it wasn't Wuhan, it was somewhere nearby.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#138

Post by himinlomax » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:18 AM UTC

mabbo wrote: post #27

> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they…

The main point here is that the lab escape hypothesis has been hitherto dismissed out of hand when it ought not to be.

I agree that the natural zoonotic contamination hypothesis is more plausible to begin with, but since it has not been confirmed (as in: no natural reservoir has been identified), the less plausible but nonetheless not implausible lab escape hypothesis should still be on the table.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#139

Post by RobertoG » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:27 AM UTC

incrudible wrote: post #52

mabbo wrote: post #27

> There is no direct evidence for these zoonotic possibilities, just as there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap But there is so much more opportunity for the zoonotic possibilities. In fact, this is the seventh time we've seen Betacoronavirus cross from bats, through another animal, and then into humans. SARS came via palm civets. MERS came via camels. Four more types cause a mild cold only and so they…

> So why would Covid-19 even need to come from a lab? We (humans) had wet markets filled with animals, including the very bats that carry the base virus. It's the perfect breeding ground to create a pandemic-level virus and probably a few thousand more viruses of lesser impact. The question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered. There weren't any bats sold on the wet markets, nor h…

>>"The virologists working in Wuhan did travel all the way to Southern China to collect bat coronavirus samples and they did perform gain-of-function experiments. Viruses - even highly pathogenic ones - have escaped labs on numerous occasions. There is a plausible scenario here."

Another plausible scenario, in my opinion, is that the virus was brought to Wuhan by the virologists (in the virologist or their helpers) but never escaped from the lab itself.

If you have a bunch of people periodically going to interact with the bats, how improbable is that they get infected of something (unknowingly) on site?

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#140

Post by himinlomax » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

csense wrote: post #80

Back in March or so, I wrote a comment about this [1], citing some even earlier (January 2020-ish) HN commentary. My conclusion: Lab leak's not inconsistent with the evidence, but there's no smoking gun. China's behavior is highly suggestive of guilt -- the moving location on Google Maps, destroying records, and not permitting any outside investigation. However, China could actually be completely innocent and just do…

> the moving location on Google Maps

Note that China intentionally fudges all locations, apparently you can see that in HK (where Maps is available), locations across the border are completely wrong (in the sea, etc)