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The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

technologyreview.com

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Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#131

Post by QuarterReptile »

djrogers wrote: post #74

> One problem with the lab leak theory is that it presumes the Chinese are lying or hiding facts, a position incompatible with a joint scientific effort. LOLOLOLOL Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor. Doesn’t the default assumption about an authoritarian government have to be that it is lying and hiding facts that would harm it?

There's no need to talk about assumptions. The WHO suppressed evidence of the disease at the behest of PRC. The WHO fortunately finds itself in the convenient position where "Trump's wrong" makes a right. But an impartial WHO investigation and a forthright Chinese disclosure are two things I would never use as bases for understanding what happened.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#132

Post by 2-tpg »

sudosysgen wrote: post #116
jkingsbery wrote: post #75

So, to summarize-the-summary: there are four possible theories: 1. Direct-jump from bat population 2. Started in bats, came to humans through intermediate animal 3. Came from frozen food outside of China 4. Lab accident. I used to think the lab accident theory was crazy, because it sounds like a science fiction movie. Not an impossible theory, just a crazy one. But according to this article, despite a year of investi…

I don't see why 1) is unlikely - people that work with bats have antibodies to bat (corona)viruses already, and we know that even in a vacuum people often have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It's even more likely since the virus was probably not adapted to human hosts initially. 2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate an…

> If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already

Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.

> it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans

All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a natural spill-over. To pose: "It could have been even more infectious" as an argument against gain-of-function is not very strong. And if we agree that China did not deliberately release a finished product, it would be weird to see optimal adaptivity.

> there is no obvious marker for genetic engineering

Gain-of-function does not create obvious marker. It is known possible to increase GoF of coronavirus using techniques that produce no markers at all. It is also tying it too closely to engineered bioweapons (vanilla SARS-COV is a bioweapon itself, even if collected from civet cats by terrorists), because the lab leak could also have been from a collected sample and accidental escape. There is no genetic engineering there at all.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#133

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

EMM_386 wrote: post #129
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part 6 is about a paper published in PLoS Pathogens. It says nothing about safety concerns.

You are pointing out one section while ignoring another. What about the last sentence regarding WIV scientists studying human-disease causing SARS coronaviruses until "permission is granted" by China's NHFCP? The one with the redacted bit at the front? I'm not sure if you are intentionally playing games with words here but let's cut to the chase. Edit: Reading through your comment history and submissions, I can see t…

> What about the last sentence regarding WIV scientists studying human-disease causing SARS coronaviruses until "permission is granted" by China's NHFCP?

What about it? This isn't any kind of warning that the lab is unsafe. It's completely normal (and good) for countries to regulate research into pathogens. Would you rather that China not require approval before labs study SARS-CoV?

I honestly don't think you understand what you are reading.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#134

Post by sudosysgen »

analyte123 wrote: post #130
sudosysgen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why 1) is unlikely - people that work with bats have antibodies to bat (corona)viruses already, and we know that even in a vacuum people often have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It's even more likely since the virus was probably not adapted to human hosts initially. 2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate an…

It's not "quite unlikely" for a virus to adapt to humans when you are digging through a lab archive of wild coronaviruses and injecting mice that express human proteins with them to see how sick they get. For example the president of EcoHealth, which sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raved in November 2019 about all the exciting work they were doing filtering bat coronaviruses and…

Hmm, that is not quite what I said.

If it did come from this research, which is being done openly with the help of many international collaborators, I don't understand how this could have happened without the virus being known to many more people, especially given the amount of time that passed from the first human infection to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!). It would be very surprising for no one else to know about it whereas normally such results are shared quite rapidly.

This is why the very person you quoted, and other people that were involved in such research that live outside of China, find the theory of a lab escape from this kind of research exceedingly unlikely.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#135

Post by 99_00 »

djrogers wrote: post #74

> One problem with the lab leak theory is that it presumes the Chinese are lying or hiding facts, a position incompatible with a joint scientific effort. LOLOLOLOL Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor. Doesn’t the default assumption about an authoritarian government have to be that it is lying and hiding facts that would harm it?

The CCP prohibited the virus's genetic sequence from being published. After a lab published it, it was shut down.

>On 11 January, Edward C. Holmes contacted Zhang for permission to publish the virus's genome. Zhang granted permission, and Holmes published the genome on virological.org that day.[1][3] The Chinese government had prohibited labs from publishing information about the new coronavirus, though Zhang later said he did not know about the prohibition.[3] The next day, the Shanghai Health Commission ordered Zhang's laboratory to close temporarily for "rectification".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Yongzhen#COVID-19_pandem...

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#136

Post by mkolodny »

flavius29663 wrote: post #128
williamdclt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it mostly is, we're just not always happy about which countries actually are in the "authoritarian" bucket

most modern governments did similar stuff in the past few decades. I 'm having trouble thinking of one that didn't. You can call them all authoritarian, but then the word loses all meaning, you would just say "any strong modern government is authoritarian"

Switzerland's government isn't authoritarian. The Swiss government is the whole adult population. Every Swiss citizen over 18 can propose and vote on laws. No subset of Swiss people can force other Swiss people to do anything without approval from Swiss voters.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#137

Post by analyte123 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #134
analyte123 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not "quite unlikely" for a virus to adapt to humans when you are digging through a lab archive of wild coronaviruses and injecting mice that express human proteins with them to see how sick they get. For example the president of EcoHealth, which sponsored bat coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raved in November 2019 about all the exciting work they were doing filtering bat coronaviruses and…

Hmm, that is not quite what I said. If it did come from this research, which is being done openly with the help of many international collaborators, I don't understand how this could have happened without the virus being known to many more people, especially given the amount of time that passed from the first human infection to detection (which was enough for it even reach Europe!). It would be very surprising for no…

The conflict of interest on their part is obviously massive. And given what we know about asymptomatic transmission and the minor symptoms in many young, healthy people, it could be weeks or longer from the initial infection (wherever it was) until anybody noticing anything unusual.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#138

Post by dboreham »

gred wrote: post #125
peytn wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The initial outbreak was literally covered up. Conditioning on that fact, common sense would place more belief on “lab leak” and less on “natural origin.” Thus, in the Bayesian sense, one might describe a lab leak as “likely” relatively speaking despite lacking direct evidence such as lab notebooks for or against that hypothesis.

Partly agree, but also keep in mind that the CCP is by nature secretive and authoritarian. IMO the cover-up still shifts the probability, but less than it might in another country where cover-ups are less "business as usual".

Note that the initial outbreak in USA was also covered up.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#139

Post by Ploskin »

2-tpg wrote: post #132
sudosysgen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why 1) is unlikely - people that work with bats have antibodies to bat (corona)viruses already, and we know that even in a vacuum people often have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. It's even more likely since the virus was probably not adapted to human hosts initially. 2) is also likely, for some viruses it took years and years, sometimes even more than a decade to find the actual intermediate an…

> If the virus was from an animal source known to the lab, we would know already Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started. > it would be quite unlikely for the virus to take so much time to adapt to humans All experts agree that SARS-COV-2 is extremely adapted to human infection. Like it appeared out of nowhere, not the gradual result of a na…

> Unless they started commanding to destroy samples, and sharing sequences of captured bats after the pandemic started.

Which is exactly what they started doing back in February (2020). The two labs in Wuhan were ordered to destroy all samples they had. So even if the theory were to turn out to be the most likely origin, we'd have no way to find out for sure.

Re: The WHO-China search for the origins of the coronavirus

#140

Post by dboreham »

to1y wrote: post #55
qwerty1234599 wrote: post #22

Obviously not. It's some random wild animal population of an unknown species, living near a bat cave in rural China.

So this particularly odd strain came from caves 900km away and settled next to a virology institute which has been studying coronaviruses for the last 15 years? Are you a betting man? If you think about it the alternative(it came from nature) is arguably much more worrying. Does it matter? Not that much. It'd just put an end to the research. This field of study has been criticized forever for this exact reason and th…

Sometimes events with a non-1.0 probability do occur.
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