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

Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

eu.usatoday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 1001 posts

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#531

Post by DrJaws »

IgorPartola wrote: post #516
strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to…

an immediate immunization of your population would drive to a raise of suspicion and if someone found china guilty of that, would mean a world war against them.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#532

Post by kevbin »

dang wrote: post #521
kevbin wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm sorry for being incendiary. However, I think shame and guilt are excellent tools for getting a culture on track. Better than war, anyway.

In my view that vector points directly toward war. The only difference is magnitude, not direction. > a backwards culture If you continue to post slurs, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, but you can't do this here. Please don't do it again.

Thank you for showing more restraint than I did. I'm sorry for being incendiary, I did not mean to use any slurs. I've removed what I thought might be construed as slurs from my comments. I won't post further on this topic. Thank you for shaming me, I feel guilty and will do better.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#533

Post by weaksauce »

enchiridion wrote: post #437
weaksauce wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can just call it covid-19 instead of the insert racist nickname here for it and then discuss where the origin it may be from. those two things are not mutually exclusive. hell, the spanish flu is generally not thought to be originated in spain but they were the only ones talking about because the other countries had a gag on discussing it.

Maybe. Based on the circumstantial evidence and the lack of viable competing hypotheses, I firmly believe that it escaped from the Wuhan lab. What does an unstable person do with that info? It seems like calling it the "Chinese virus" is relatively benign by comparison. Does censoring do anything here?

> Does censoring do anything here?

perhaps. I mean having the leader of the free world spout conspiracy theories and give credence to them certainly hurts.

in the past you'd have crackpot conspiracy theorists spouting off their "knowledge" at the bar to anyone that would listen but most would shy away from the crazy person. now you have a mainstream leader saying crazy stuff and have a huge following of people spouting that off because you can get misinformation and half truths at the speed of sound. yeah some vetting of information should be there.

a lot of the "proof" I've seen have been from being ignorant of what scientific terms mean, deliberate mis/disinformation, and wholly not understanding cause and effect. the other thing that lets these propagate is the downright innumeracy of our societies.

my brother has gone down a dark path of this shit to the point that I am very disgusted by the "truthers" poisoning the minds of people. he used to be a decently intelligent man but he's gotten hit with the gish gallop of disinformation and lies.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#534

Post by alfor »

IgorPartola wrote: post #516
strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to…

From what I read, it’s only about researchers looking to publish something interesting rather than some complicated planned CCP plans.

It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on. Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#535

Post by boomboomsubban »

frenchy wrote: post #522
boomboomsubban wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not arguing to stop science, I don't see the benefit we're hoping to get out of aggressively researching various theories about how exactly the 2019 covid virus spread to humans.

Presumably a better understanding of the origins of the 2019 virus would be useful for predicting the likelyhood of a similar outbreak from the same source, or allow people to alter practices to reduce that likelyhood.

Our current understanding of everything you mention is already good, and there have been no indications that I'm aware of that this case happened in a way that would alter that understanding.

To show my point, even if we aggressively investigate the source and discover it did not originate in a lab, nobody would then argue that it's alright to lower security on such biolabs.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#536

Post by throwaway_r1453 »

throwawaysea wrote: post #368
WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we shouldn't be doing _gain of function_ research on the types of viruses that can cause these outbreaks. Why not? Seriously, this is the "let's just stop developing nukes" argument... someone will and whether we're prepared or not is on us.

For one, the US banned such research and specifically for SARS: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/10/17/doing-d... We should also remember that there were past lab leaks in China of SARS, including ones that led to smaller outbreaks and deaths: https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20040423/china-sars-death

Let's be accurate: This research wasn't "banned." NIH paused granting new funding pending a review [1]. After the review, it was determined that the benefits outweigh the risks and was resumed [2].

[1] - https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...

[2] - https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#537

Post by tripletao »

alephr wrote: post #276

A lot of the discussion I see on this hinges on possibility and not strongly believing the claim is false. Sure, this theory is "possible" in some sense but I rarely see anyone presenting concrete evidence for it and I don't think I've seen anyone who supports it suggest a piece of evidence that would change their mind on it. If most of the discussion on an idea is about how people dismiss it or how any evidence is b…

I believe it's quite possible (p ~ 0.5) that the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic originated from a lab accident. If the proximal animal host were identified--as it was for both MERS and the original SARS within about a year--then I'd drop that probability by at least a factor of ten. For references see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127197

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26129052

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#538

Post by fuzxi »

tasssko wrote: post #422
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic. Is this actually true? It is certainly not true for HIV, and of course is not relevant to diseases like Zika that are transmitted by mosquitos. Edit: I found the answer to my own question: https://www.kff.org/infographic/ebola-characteristics-and-co... (see second bullet point). Given that this lists Hep C, HIV, Influenz…

Why is Malaria in the list?

Malaria can be (very rarely) transmitted through blood transfusions.

https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/us_transmission.html

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#539

Post by MichaelBurge »

IgorPartola wrote: post #516
strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to…

> Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.

"Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false.

Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#540

Post by standardUser »

Graffur wrote: post #461

Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth. No source of covid-19 has been found. Similar lab leaks happen frequently. BUT.. you're not allowed to discuss it with the undertones that you're a bad person. If you say china virus you could be accused of being a racist. But if you say South African or British variant it's okay. The mental acrobats are insane. If you suggest peo…

There were several terms that came into common use very quickly and none of them included the word "China". When a president with a history of racist statements started using it constantly, and Asian Americans started to get harassed and attacked at an increased rate, it became obviously unethical (to most people) to try and replace the existing, widely used terms with one that has a racial and national component.

No acrobatics necessary.

Post reply on HN