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Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

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Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#61

Post by abecedarius »

metalliqaz wrote: post #37

it's not xenophobic, but xenophobic people really love to talk about it. that's the problem with the discourse. of course the irony is that it doesn't even matter. We already know China (1) tried to cover it up, screwing the rest of the world, and (2) has poor wet market sanitation practices that seem designed to cultivate these kinds of diseases. Those issues are already bad enough.

> xenophobic people really love to talk about it

Guilt by association + Overton Window enforcement.

I guess you're pointing this out and not endorsing it?

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#62

Post by danielrpa »

newacct583 wrote: post #46
loveistheanswer wrote: post #23

Judging by the comments in this thread, it seems a lot of people are still unaware that: 1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural" 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a…

> 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak Inherently? Of course not. But does xenophobia motivate a lot of this argument? It certainly seems to. Look at how quickly proponents of this nonsense jump from detached discussion about the possibilities to outraged condemnation of the PRC. Just read the discussion here in this thread. If you only wanted to discuss the lab and t…

Just because the motivation for the argument is bad, it doesn't mean that the argument itself is bad. I think you agree by saying it's not "inherently" xenophobic.

All we need to do to take xenophobia out of this discussion is to not be xenophobic ourselves. The xenophobes may talk to themselves. But let's make sure we are talking about this problem instead of falling for the "guilty by association fallacy".

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#63

Post by endisneigh »

engineer_22 wrote: post #58
endisneigh wrote: post #42

Every time this comes I ask - "so what?" So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what? The article attempts to answer this: > The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab ac…

The conflict over the investigation is justifiable. It's necessary to understand how the virus got started. If it's lab-grown we will want to be very careful to scrutinize each other's labs. If it's natural we will want to be very careful to scrutinize wild game. The implications of any scenario are broad and complex, but clearly we don't want a repeat of 2020 if we can avoid it. Another point: just because there's s…

Thank you for your comment, but your comment is precisely the kind of comment I disagree with.

What difference does it make? Let's say that it's both lab-grown and wild game. OK, so that means we should scrutinize both. OK, then. Now what?

No amount of scrutiny can prevent an accident from occurring. It's not as if this pandemic happens every year. We're talking about a once in a century event. Not to mention some countries prevented the virus from spreading within their own countries very effectively, and others, well, did not.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#64

Post by [deleted] »

loveistheanswer wrote: post #23

Judging by the comments in this thread, it seems a lot of people are still unaware that: 1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural" 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a…

[deleted]

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#65

Post by gfodor »

newacct583 wrote: post #33
gfodor wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Occam's Razor doesn't really apply to this one, because each side has different priors on which theory is actually the "simplest." Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely and b) China would be highly incentivized to root out since it would disprove the lab hypothesis, it implies patient zero was probably in Wuhan. If…

> Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely Um... why? The virus has to jump species somewhere. If the first documented case was in Shanghai, you could make the same argument. I think what you're trying to say is that the jump had to have happened in Yunnan, because that's where that particular bat sample was found. Bu…

Your argument is clearly being made in bad faith because you are creating a strawman in your final point. The claim is not that the virus was one that was engineered and deliberately dropped by a despotic government. Given that you don't have a basic understanding of the good faith hypotheses being promoted, I'll have to assume you are at best ignorant at worst a state actor.

edit: lol at getting flagged for this.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#66

Post by engineer_22 »

ericb wrote: post #47
endisneigh wrote: post #42

Every time this comes I ask - "so what?" So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what? The article attempts to answer this: > The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab ac…

On the one hand, yes, many who ask this seem to have something political in-mind, so on that score, I kind of agree that there's no "there" there. Aside from that, though, we can consider international treaties against gain of function research? International inspections? Have a debate on whether this type of research is allowed? Create improved international procedure standards for Biolab safety? I mean, it has kill…

You're off by an order of magnitude.

Total deaths in WW2 estimated at approx 70 million. [1]

Johns Hopkins estimates COVID-19 deaths are approaching 3 million. [2]

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

[2] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#67

Post by loveistheanswer »

eightysixfour wrote: post #55
loveistheanswer wrote: post #23

Judging by the comments in this thread, it seems a lot of people are still unaware that: 1. Gain of function research primarily uses samples collected from nature, and seeks to stimulate their evolution in as natural a way as possible to learn how viruses evolve in nature. If such viruses were to escape the lab, they would appear "natural" 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a…

I feel like people are doing a poor job distinguishing between "engineered" and "leaked." There is, from my understanding, reasonable evidence to conclude the virus was not engineered from the perspective of "we took genes from one virus and moved them to this virus," but there's no evidence disproving the idea that it was the result of gain of function research. My personal feeling is that these statements are true:…

>I can say the vast majority of us are not qualified to answer the question either way though.

It's also worth noting that even the leading experts can get these things wrong, as was the case with the Sverdlovsk lab leak.

Soviet authorities covered it up by blaming local meat markets, and leading US experts concurred with them, only to reverse their conclusion 6 years later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak#Acci...

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#68

Post by endisneigh »

ericb wrote: post #47
endisneigh wrote: post #42

Every time this comes I ask - "so what?" So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what? The article attempts to answer this: > The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab ac…

On the one hand, yes, many who ask this seem to have something political in-mind, so on that score, I kind of agree that there's no "there" there. Aside from that, though, we can consider international treaties against gain of function research? International inspections? Have a debate on whether this type of research is allowed? Create improved international procedure standards for Biolab safety? I mean, it has kill…

> I mean, it has killed more people than WW2. Maybe a root cause analysis and better procedures are justified?

Yes, I agree. However I believe what should be analyzed is why certain countries failed to contain it. Whether it was a lab accident or wild game doesn't really matter. There's no way the entire world could prevent accidents or people from interacting with wild animals.

At the end of the day the most effective thing is to ask why it spread as much as it did in your own country.

There are politicians in our (USA) own country that denounced COVID even as recently as this January. People who fabricated data (Cuomo), who peddled poor science (Trump), etc. etc.

Don't misunderstand me, China definitely deserves their share of the blame, but I just believe that share is small. Ultimately the USA's response to COVID could've been much, much better by pretty much every metric imaginable.

And let's just act like COVID is over, either.

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#69

Post by brigandish »

metalliqaz wrote: post #37

it's not xenophobic, but xenophobic people really love to talk about it. that's the problem with the discourse. of course the irony is that it doesn't even matter. We already know China (1) tried to cover it up, screwing the rest of the world, and (2) has poor wet market sanitation practices that seem designed to cultivate these kinds of diseases. Those issues are already bad enough.

> but xenophobic people really love to talk about it

All too often I see this used as the standard for labelling someone a xenophobe and it becomes a classic case of begging the question. Since we all agree it's not xenophobic to speak about it, perhaps it's time we wait for actual xenophobia before making what should be serious accusations?

Re: Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out

#70

Post by tacitusarc »

metalliqaz wrote: post #27
zthrowaway wrote: post #11

We should really be considering this if we want to make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Unfortunately this theory coming out during the Trump era made people knee-jerk shoot it down for political reasons, and you can also say the CCP is very invested in making sure they don't have pie on their face if this ends up being what truly happened.

The problem is evidence. What is the evidence? As far as I can tell, what we have is either circumstantial (for example, the location of the first detected cases) or outright hunches (the virus seems to be more adaptive than expected for normal corona viruses). Compare that to what we know: it's a SARS variant, in a place where SARS outbreaks have already occurred in the past, with DNA showing it came from pangolins,…

It originated in a city with a research lab that was criticized for bad safety practices. That lab performed gain of function research on coronaviruses, and the strangest element of covid-19 is the spike protein furin site, which enables the infectivity in humans, and is not present in other coronaviruses.

Or we can take the Bayesian approach, and look at the base rate of novel pathogens coming out of China over the past 70 years and determine how many were lab leaks versus not, and realize the majority were lab leaks.

This doesn't mean it for sure was a lab leak, but it does mean it should be investigated, which is all any one reasonable has been saying for the past year anyway.

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