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

The Lab Leak Hypothesis

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 244 posts

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#191

Post by nradov »

manicdee wrote: post #86
CoffeeDregs wrote: post #13

This is a good, balanced article. I've been of a similar mind for over a year now. The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research. In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense aro…

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…

Many of the "accidental discharge" deaths are actually intentional suicides or homicides but the investigators just couldn't prove what happened. And unfortunately it's common for people with no real training to possess firearms.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#192

Post by cageface »

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…

I'm about as far as you can get politically from Trump but I agree that China needs to be much more transparent and accountable about this.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#193

Post by api »

RobertoG wrote: post #139
incrudible wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) b…

A friend of mine who once lived in China quipped that maybe some low-level tech from the lab was selling animals from the lab at the wet market. Not likely, but he says given what he saw in China it would not surprise him much.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#194

Post by api »

kasey_junk wrote: post #160
himinlomax wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The President of the United States is on record as saying it came from a lab. I’m not sure how that translates to “dismissed out of hand”.

I treat Trump's grunts like the output of a Markov chain random text generator and don't consider them official signifiers either for or against anything. He blathers and lies and then contradicts himself with different lies an hour later. He's a classic bullshitter.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#195

Post by inciampati »

RobertoG wrote: post #149
inciampati wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates. If we seriously believe in zoonotic transfer, we should be looking at those populations, and understanding how orangutans and bonobos infiltrated Wuhan and transmitted the virus to unwitting human…

>>"It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates" I'm not qualified to have an opinion about that, but it seems to me that if we accept that premise, and the primate jump looks improbable, the conclusion is that the virus have to come from a l…

This is an anonymous appeal to authority, but FWIW I am a biologist and I am not convinced of any origin story. We lack evidence in every direction. Although our prior is that it's zoonotic, other experts I know acknowledge the possibility that we are looking at a lab leak. We simply don't have enough information to say.

However, there is very strong pressure to reassure the public that it's not lab-based, which would look bad for scientists and our generally pro-social efforts to help the world. I think this is misguided, because people are not stupid. They also can also observe the profound lack of evidence for zoonotic transfer, which frankly makes these assertions look like a coverup. It would be helpful if the scientific community were more honest and scientific about this issue. We should not jump to conclusions without evidence.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#196

Post by CraigJPerry »

jsz0 wrote: post #100
api wrote: post #2

I'm not convinced either way, but posting because this is an articulate well written non-sensational discussion of the idea. If it is true, it was almost certainly an accident. Nobody really benefited from this (even if China really has eradicated it, it's damaged their export-heavy economy badly), and if it was terrorists they would have claimed responsibility since that's the point of terrorism. Biological warfare…

> Nobody really benefited from this Nobody benefits but who gets hurt the least? Totalitarian regimes are inherently more capable of dealing with the problem for obvious reasons.

In 2019, I would have guessed wrong about how a hypothetical COVID-19 would play out.

I'd have pointed out that the US would unequivocally be one of the best nations at recovering from such a challenge:

    - Spent the prior 4 years warning the world that something like this could happen
    - Well prepared for this eventuality (stockpiles), have recently conducted dry run rehearsals for this exact eventuality, until recently had a funded unit of government for exactly this scenario
    - Has world leading healthcare
    - Has world leading pharma industry
    - Has money, scientists, doctors & other resources out the wazoo
    - Is a competent nation with a history of excellent execution in almost all theatres
Conversely i'd have argued totalitarian regimes would have performed the worst because of the politics of a regime like that - everything gets covered up. You'd have insufficient visibility to even begin to mount an effective response.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#197

Post by inciampati »

neuronic wrote: post #167
inciampati wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very unlikely that you'd get a one step transfer from a bat that yielded a spike protein with the level of affinity it has for human ACE2. If you look at that protein alone, the most-likely proximal hosts are primates. If we seriously believe in zoonotic transfer, we should be looking at those populations, and understanding how orangutans and bonobos infiltrated Wuhan and transmitted the virus to unwitting human…

The only thing we REALLY know is that these types of coronaviruses originate in Southern China and somehow got to the point of being suspiciously well adapted to ACE2 by the time it exploded in Wuhan. That, however, can also be achieved purely by natural causes over a long time - not just in a lab. Maybe Wuhan is simply the point at which the first very infectious form of SARS-CoV-2 occurred - not the first overall o…

It's plausible, and could be proven very easily that this happened. Presumably, some progenitor strain is out there, spreading more slowly and making less of a mess. Eventually, a SARS-CoV-2 screen will turn it up and we'll sequence it. Then we will see a strain that's diverged from all other sequences in the phylogenetic tree, with a common ancestor back further than ~1ya.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#198

Post by howlgarnish »

heidar wrote: post #166
howlgarnish wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does a virus spread primarily by aerosols/droplets travel 7 miles across a city of 10 million people? Also, the first known confirmed case has no known connections to the Huanan market or the virology institute. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200221-coronavirus-the-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

The first sentence in the BBC article. > Chinese authorities and experts are at odds about the origin of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. I'm not saying this argument is invalid in general but it's important to assume that we know next to nothing about this whole situation and that the things that we know are potentially false pieces of information pushed by the CCP. They've tried to sweep this under the rug and con…

The BBC article is a summarizing a linked study reputable enough to be published in the Lancet.

Also, the CCP is quite good at using brute force to impose its will within China, but they've been signally unsuccessful in crafting propaganda for Western consumption.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#199

Post by gdubs »

This article does a really good job, IMO, of addressing the controversy inherent in the title and the implications therein.

But rather than just reading the headline, it’s a really well written article on “Gain of Function” research, and the history of contemporary bioweapons and infectious disease institutions. Particularly the funding, beginning in the 50’s, and exploding during the war on terror. It’s simply fascinating.

The desire to place blame, the political implications (plenty bipartisan), the funding — it’s not very hard to see why this subject provokes such strong reactions. But dismissing it out-of-hand misses the opportunity to delve deep into a field that is as consequential as nuclear weapons research.

Re: The Lab Leak Hypothesis

#200

Post by firen777 »

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…

> Maybe China's people and our people got together back in March or April, they privately admitted it was an accident and privately made some concessions, on the condition we don't publicly blame them, keep everything they said super classified for at least 70 years, and they don't publicly criticize US bioweapons programs if we don't criticize theirs?

Not true. State friendly media and even state media here in China regularly push the narrative of foreign origin. They even claimed this a US bioweapon during height of their bullsh*t. And yes, a non-insignificant amount of people buy into this (data point of two: my parents).

Post reply on HN