Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed • Hacker News Board

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

#721

Post by godmode2019 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:22 AM UTC

godmode2019 wrote: post #709

jmspring wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did your modeling take into account impacts on life due to lingering health issues for those that became seriously ill but did not die?

This was not known in march 2020, so no. How can one even quantity that information?

This is the most details study of long term affects. 6months vs other studies at 3 months.

Nice study.

But it didn't show where these people were from looks like hospital inpatients in the first Wuhan cluster.

Also I would like to see their results compared to non covid positive of the same age.

A member of my family got swine flu in 2009/10 they had very adverse health affects for three years after. So its not uncommon to have long term affects from flu like illnesses

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

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

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Post by plibither8 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:25 AM UTC

kjjjjjjjjjjjjjj wrote: post #644

gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

>We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak. But China knew about the virus in 2019 and kept it quiet. They silenced scientists. China is complicit in this pandemic and should pay reparations.

Exactly. Frankly, I'm tired of this tip-toed attitude - there hasn't been any sort of consequences suffered or imposed on the Chinese government for how they surreptitiously dealt with the virus, initially.

I'm not condoning or advocating conspiracy theories, but where they are wrong, they should be penalised.

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

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Post by ikiris » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:26 AM UTC

dang wrote: post #453

president wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to avoid demonizing China over this Not a productive message and this sentiment just distracts from the discussion, which is playing into China's narrative. > if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak. It's a bit late isn't it? China witheld early information about the virus and prevented WHO scientists from visiting ground zero. Silencing journalists and censo…

This comment is a noticeable step into nationalistic flamewar. Please don't do that in HN comments. That way lies hell, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dang, this entire site has slid in the past 2 years. This is hardly an isolated incident.

I barely even open it now as a result.

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

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Post by Fomite » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:30 AM UTC

alfor wrote: post #534

IgorPartola wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

While there's some use to gain of function studies (they give us what genetic markers to look for for particularly human-adapted pathogens), researchers have been concerned about laboratory accidents for a long time. Like, it was a keynote talk at a conference I was at in 2008, which estimated a GoF study had an expected number of deaths of, IIRC, 1500. Every one - obviously in the form of a long-tailed but highly consequential outcome.

One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.

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

#725

Post by Fomite » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

handmodel wrote: post #671

ajross wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year. And that, more than anyth…

Is it Occam's razor? The Bayesian probability suggests the odds that it would evolve by chance AND first become an issue right next to one of the top three bat virus research centers in the world are pretty slim. It would be like a new mosquito disease first being an issue in human population next the CDC headquarters in Atlanta instead of somewhere in Africa of South America. Sure - there are mosquitos everywhere -…

One should also note that being detected and actually starting somewhere are two different things.

"Has this been causing small, stochastically limited outbreaks for some time before we picked it up?" is a question that has dogged several recent outbreaks.

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

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Post by Fomite » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

bgandrew wrote: post #604

ajross wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year. And that, more than anyth…

The fact that they didn't find an intermediate host after more than a year of search should tell you something.

As someone who has colleagues who work in exactly this, it's not particularly surprising. Viral ecology is hard.

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

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Post by ikt » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

gscott wrote: post #572

nradov wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative hypothesis is that a human was infected near the bat caves, then traveled to Wuhan and spread it to other humans and animals at the seafood market. There's no specific evidence for that, but we can't rule it out either.

The seafood markets sell bats and other wild animals as well. When they butcher the bats, dogs eat the leftovers then someone else eats the dog. Plenty of ways for the virus to mutate. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...

probably wouldn't link to the daily mail tbh, they produce so much garbage it's impossible to just take any story they write at face value

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

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Post by Fomite » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:36 AM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #651

dillondoyle wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you're saying, but it seems slightly more nuanced. From my understanding WIV did do gain of function research. e.g. purposefully make virus' more deadly or infectious to study them. Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?). I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than th…

Every BSL-certified lab should be doing gain of function research. If leaks are a problem, then certifications should be better enforced. Burying our head in the sand and waiting for nature to kill us is a losing move.

"Should" is a pretty strong statement. GoF studies, like social media-based disease surveillance, are one of those things that has a compelling "Just So" story justifying its existence, but has yet to show that it actually does what it's supposed to do.

Also, the alternative is not burying our head in the sand. It's monitoring and studying nature, instead of forcing the issue in a lab, and investing in infrastructure and capacity that work against a broad range of pathogen threats.

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

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Post by Consultant32452 » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:38 AM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #607

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 impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

My impression is that China and China influenced corporate press in the US conflated "lab escape" with "deliberate release" so as to be able to demonize anyone who was asking serious questions. This is a pretty standard propaganda move, pretend the accuser said something that is adjacent to the real accusation but also relatively absurd, then argue against that. Never address the serious accusation.

Another example of this happening is the corporate press conflating "lab created" with "gene editing" instead of using the broader interpretation which would include things like "gain of function research" (much more likely). This allowed China and the WHO to explicitly claim they did not create the virus (by gene editing) while cautiously never really addressing whether it was created via gain of function research.

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

#730

Post by Fomite » Tue, Mar 23, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #158

My understanding of the author's central thesis is this: the US, despite its world-class virology and disease study labs, regularly has lapses in procedure that regularly lead to situations in which the public might be exposed. Given that this is happening in our own backyard, we might reasonably expect countries of similar status (like China) to experience similar lapses. That reads as reasonable to me, but raises a…

There's been a number of very short transmission chains. One of the things that's difficult for infectious diseases is that they have extremely long-tailed distributions. "This has happened before, and it got a couple people sick" is a distinct possibility. It also happens relatively frequently with diseases that have a lower pandemic potential than a coronavirus.

So the answer to "What makes COVID special?" is possibly "We failed our pandemic save."

I did some research during the early stages of the West African Ebola epidemic, when a lot of people were asking why, instead of the usual sporadic, self-limiting outbreaks of the past, we were seeing something larger and different. As it turns out, if you use the parameters people estimated from the older, smaller outbreaks, there's a small but not breathtakingly so probability of a very large epidemic. It's sort of the null hypothesis for pandemics.