The Lab Leak Hypothesis • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#181

Post by collyw » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

MilnerRoute wrote: post #64

travisoneill1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of wet markets in China, but very few virus labs. Out of all the wet markets in China, the virus just happened to originate at the one right next to the virus lab? That alone is enough evidence to make the lab escape theory the most likely origin. Though it's far from certain.

Snopes.com points out that the market wasn't "right next to the virus lab." It was in fact a full seven miles away. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

A couple of examples of Snopes intellectual dishonesty.

Mixture https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

Mixture https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/harris-believe-biden-accus...

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#182

Post by mabbo » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

InTheArena wrote: post #38

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…

Except this is not just a USA story. The reality is that China is shutting down any research into the origins of the virus - at least by doctors not loyal to the government. They are arresting journalists who don’t tell the story they want to tell. In the vacuum of information, it’s fair to point out that the market not being the source means something else was - and - there was a lab that had the closest variant to…

Hey, if you want to say the Chinese government are corrupt, genocidal assholes, I'm with you.

What they want to cover up is any hint of fault. They want everyone to stay in line and question nothing, regardless of anything else.

I just don't think there's any real evidence of this being a man made pandemic either.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#183

Post by collyw » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:20 PM UTC

MilnerRoute wrote: post #65

travisoneill1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those millions of peasants living near bat caves would have traveled to thousands of markets all over China, but the virus originated at the one market in China that is basically across the street from a virus lab? It's not impossible, but my money is on the lab.

The lab was not "across the street." It was a full seven miles away. https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

A whole 7 miles away? Wow It's almost as far as i go to my office every day. Or to some shops in the town centre. Or various other "everyday activities".

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#184

Post by collyw » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:25 PM UTC

peteradio wrote: post #68

ivanhoe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be way easier and more logical to start the infection on a foreign soil? All the previous similar epidemics were successfully contained before reaching Europe, and if there was not for quite serious fuck ups in the beginning (Italian dude not even showing up on the meetings, etc.) perhaps even this one could have been stopped early on. So if it was China wanting to hurt US, then they'd have to be seriousl…

Not really wanting to play devil's advocate too much longer ... but if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector? I'm not sure if these things can be fingerprinted, would intelligence anyway trace it to China? Perhaps (to China) a clear oops backstory is more preferable to a murky "this thing definitely came from China but how?" backstory…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZoKM7zOUnU

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#185

Post by collyw » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

DonaldFisk wrote: post #156

peteradio wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really wanting to play devil's advocate too much longer ... but if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector? I'm not sure if these things can be fingerprinted, would intelligence anyway trace it to China? Perhaps (to China) a clear oops backstory is more preferable to a murky "this thing definitely came from China but how?" backstory…

> if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China It may well have: Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-... Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the occurrence of COVID-19 cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v... (SARS-CoV-2 was also detected in blood s…

Given that it took a year for the virus to have any effect in Spain, then all of a sudden it was very intense, wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

There are a lot of false positives with PCR (0.8 - 4% according to this article https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...), so that makes a lot more sense than the virus being more or less dormant for a year then going wild.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#186

Post by sradman » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

fasteddie31003 wrote: post #9

I think the closest natural virus was 95% similar. 5% seems pretty far for mutations. Is there a historical track record for finding the natural virus to a 99.9% similarity?

> Is there a historical track record for finding the natural virus

SARS-1 [1]:

> The viral outbreak was subsequently genetically traced to a colony of cave-dwelling horseshoe bats in Yunnan, China.

The Guardian reference [2] states:

> Hence the efforts of Chinese scientists – led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China – to trace the source of the outbreak. Scientists initially suspected that civet cats, sold in markets in China, were the source of the virus but later turned their attention to bats, which they realised were the prime source of the virus. Civets were merely an intermediary.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syn...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/10/sars-virus-bat...

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#187

Post by mabbo » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:33 PM 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 question of how it got to Wuhan all the way from Southern China remains unanswered.

It's also important to remember that the related virus we're talking about in southern China was identified in 2013. More than six years before the outbreak.

It didn't stay still. It hopped around, bat to bat, maybe to other animals. We don't have the history of the virus since then. It could have very well made the jump the humans or some other animal, years ago but only recently made the last few mutations to become the beast it is now.

Plus, it's a virus. It didn't take one path, it took all of them that it could. Each virus created a million more, repeat ad-infinitum.

So the idea that there's some mystery to how it traveled to Wuhan doesn't bother me. Viruses get around.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#188

Post by reissbaker » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #143

MilnerRoute wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the full text of the cables were released, it proved they'd been heavily (and misleadingly) edited. IT Wire attributed that to political actors trying to create a specific story line. https://www.itwire.com/health/us-leaked-parts-of-cables-to-p...

The article you're citing is misleadingly edited and contains only a single claimed quote from the cables, which is actually two separate sentence fragments that are many paragraphs separated from each other, strung together to look as if they composed a single sentence. Also, one of the sentence fragments is in fact a misquote, edited to make it appear that it's talking about a shortage of technicians, when in fact…

To dive deeper down the rabbit hole, I read WIV's 2017 paper on their coronavirus research that the cables reference. https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... TL;DR they constructed chimeras from multiple versions of bat coronaviruses to create different variations in the "receptor binding domain," specifically the genes encoding the spike protein and ORF8a. They also analyze ORF8b and ORF3b sequences, specifically noting versions of ORF3b they've studied can "antagonize interferon function" (interferons boost immune system response) and discussing their own previous studies on ORF3b. The aim of the chimeras is to create a virus targeting the human ACE2 receptor like SARS-CoV did. They succeed — noting that some of their variants "have a stronger effect than SARS-CoV" — and also note "It is very interesting to investigate in further studies whether [one wild virus variant's] ORF3b and other versions of truncated ORF3b such as [their chimeric virus variants] also show [interferon] antagonism profiles."

Reading a paper from NIH on COVID-19 sequencing — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7180649/ — guess what gets implicated?

"The SARS-CoV-2 genome was reported to possess 14 ORFs encoding 27 proteins ... When researchers compare the SARS-CoV-2 with the SARS-CoV at the amino acid level, they found the SARS-CoV-2 was quite similar to the SARS-CoV, but there were some notable differences in the 8a, 8b, and 3b protein. [Emphasis mine.]"

I don't know a lot about this subject. But as a layperson, it seems a little suspicious that WIV was making SARS-like coronaviruses in Wuhan, where the outbreak started, from bat viruses collected from Yunan, where the closest living relative of COVID-19 is from, and experimenting specifically with the proteins that are the most-novel in COVID-19 as compared to SARS?

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#189

Post by sleepysysadmin » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

Here's an article from August 2019.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ebola-henipah-china-...

The RCMP arrested 2 Chinese nationals who illegally sent highest risk viruses to Wuhan. Their security clearance was revoked and the University cut ties with them. the university stopped paying them immediately. Reassigned their students. Let that sink in... the university didnt fight at all.

Meanwhile the lab and public health was claiming that all policies and procedures were followed and they were innocent and yet nothing changed. They never got back into the lab. There's obviously no link at all to covid19, or is there?

In fact that 'investigation' never ever completed. There's no coincidences. The CBC reported on it because they caught wind of it via non-government sources. The students are the ones who originally broke the story. So why is the government tight lipped on this one?

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#190

Post by throw2101051304 » Tue, Jan 05, 2021, 1:42 PM UTC

Oh please, these reporters can't even get the story of Dr Li Wenliang straight, and still call him a whistleblower even though the timeline happened as follows:

30th December 2019 - Li Wenliang, an eye doctor sent a wechat message to colleagues warning there might be SARS going around

31st December 2019 - Wuhan made public statement about a "pneumonia of unknown cause", which was subsequently picked up by WHO https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

2st January 2020 - Li Wenliang was invited to the police station and asked to not spread rumours about the new illness

Let's review this timeline. Wuhan had made public of a "pneumonia of unknown cause" on the 31st December 2019, yet Li Wenliang is still called a whistleblower by many media news outlets https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-51403795

If anyone also want to mention Taiwan warning the WHO earlier than 31st December 2019, one need to just look at WHO's official statement here https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/transcr... (just search Taiwan).

What's my point in all of this? Well, from what I am seeing is that we are constantly presented with manufactured fake information wrapped in well articulated articles that is bought by the masses. How can we trust what any of these guys write when the evidence is circumstancial at best? I mean it's like me saying "gee, this Nicholson Baker claims he is not a satan worshipping paedophile, but what if..."