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

technologyreview.com

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

#121

Post by 8note »

s__s wrote: post #53
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…

Consequences for gross negligence. Updated international laws. Possible banning of gain of function research. Stronger safety procedures.

Really it's a scape goat for gross negligence. Governments everywhere have been incredibly negligent in handling covid, and they really want to be able to pin it on china, taking no responsibility for their own response

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

#122

Post by srean »

lazide wrote: post #111
lhorie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has poor wet market sanitation practices Honest question: Is that a fair/accurate generalization to make? If Hell's kitchen episodes and accounts from food industry workers are any indication, sanitation practices in food handling establishments elsewhere are not necessarily always stellar either. And surely China has some equivalent of WholeFoods? One ought to be careful not to attribute a characteristic different…

Have you seen a easy Asian wet market in person before? If you’re comparing it to Whole Foods I’m not sure you have? The term itself is somewhat ambiguous [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market ] in that it can cover both cases. However the style common in many places in China (and many other areas in east Asia) is one where there is no refrigeration or adequate sanitation. To avoid spoilage, animals are brough…

> If you’re comparing it to Whole Foods I’m not sure you have?

From the way I read it, he is not making that comparison

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

#123

Post by T-A »

ufo wrote: post #120
T-A wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector Except nobody has been able to identify that animal. With SARS it was quickly determined to be civets, with MERS camels. With Covid, more than a year on, we still don't know. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...

IIRC it took more than a year for people to conclude it was the civets.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/302/5643/276

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

#124

Post by beowulfey »

Buttons840 wrote: post #112
eightysixfour wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like this presentation of evidence. Rarely do you see such a short acknowledgement that there are multiple contradictory theories, each having some evidence, and making no attempt to pick which theory is correct. Sometimes its wrong to present "both sides" like that. Like pretending the evidence against the moon landings is equal to the evidence for the moon landings. But if you're going to be wrong, this is probab…

well, often the benefit of listing out as much evidence as possible (basically, look at the facts on hand) is that it can help clarify WHICH theory makes the most sense

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

#125

Post by lhorie »

lazide wrote: post #111
lhorie wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has poor wet market sanitation practices Honest question: Is that a fair/accurate generalization to make? If Hell's kitchen episodes and accounts from food industry workers are any indication, sanitation practices in food handling establishments elsewhere are not necessarily always stellar either. And surely China has some equivalent of WholeFoods? One ought to be careful not to attribute a characteristic different…

Have you seen a easy Asian wet market in person before? If you’re comparing it to Whole Foods I’m not sure you have? The term itself is somewhat ambiguous [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market ] in that it can cover both cases. However the style common in many places in China (and many other areas in east Asia) is one where there is no refrigeration or adequate sanitation. To avoid spoilage, animals are brough…

To be clear, I didn't mean to compare a butcher shop to a Whole Foods, but rather to point out that not all food markets are live animal markets, and that blanket statements like "China does X" can gloss over the fact that every country has nuances.

Your link suggests that the primary factor of disease transmission in live animal markets is the exoticness of the slaughtered animals. It certainly makes sense to make a distinction based on that criteria, since, for example, I can find high traffic markets that sell live animals in North America as well, though typically they sell less exotic animals (most commonly, lobsters).

This distinction, I feel, is meaningful because of the implications: north american diet is relatively restricted in terms of meat variety (we do mostly beef, pork, chicken, maybe lamb and few other meats on fairly rare occasions - even chicken gizzard isn't commonly consumed, for example). I'm not familiar enough with China to say to what extent exotic meat consumption is cultural vs driven by necessity vs other factors.

However, I do still feel that it might be crass to say things like "well chinese people ought to stop eating weird shit and close those filthy markets", without understanding the circumstances that lead to the status quo, and consequently how they could be changed realistically. (To be clear, I'm not saying you specifically are making these types of comments, but it's not an unpopular sentiment)

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

#126

Post by 8note »

EMM_386 wrote: post #84
metalliqaz wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> The problem is evidence. What is the evidence? I'd wager our intelligence services have it. That's why many who has seen classified information is sticking with the lab theory. Forget the politics for a minute with regards to people like Trump, Pompeo, Redfield (CDC) ... they have seen information we don't have access to. How can we say they're wrong on this without seeing the same classified information?

Trump's administration couldn't keep secrets, so somebody would have blabbed if there was classified evidence.

Trump himself would give the evidence to boost his own ego on fox and friends

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

#127

Post by arcticbull »

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…

It's also not xenophobic to suggest the possibility of a lab leak because lab leaks happen regardless of who's doing the research; even at BSL-4 facilities, mistakes are made. And also because there were two separate SARS-CoV-1 leaks/outbreaks from Chinese labs which the PRC admitted to. [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC403836/

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

#128

Post by hnbad »

While interesting on a purely intellectual level, I think people unhealthily obsess over this.

Epidemiologists have warned about the possibility of a pandemic for years. They've even been pretty clear about factors that manifested in SARS-CoV-2, like it having flu-like symptoms and originating in China.

Whether the virus leaked from a lab, from a chicken or from some guy eating a bat, doesn't matter. This was going to happen one way or another and many countries, especially in the West, were incredibly arrogant thinking it wouldn't be a problem for them.

Consider Vietnam: they followed the news very closely early on and already had procedures in place that would reduce the likelihood of transmission. While Europeans and Americans were only talking about some new disease in China, they started wearing masks and tracing contacts. When we only just started recommending people make masks at home, they already had the situation under control and were providing free meals to quarantined foreigners.

We didn't take SARS-CoV-2 serious because we expected our "superior" hygiene, technology and healthcare systems to protect us even if authoritarian China had to "wall people in" to contain the spread. Surely we wouldn't need draconian uncivilized measures like lockdowns. In Germany we even maintained this arrogance when Italy had to send in military convoys to get rid of the bodybags -- of course they wouldn't be able to contain this, because everybody knows they're careless and flamboyant and disorganized.

At several points, the US lost as many people to COVID per day as it lost to 9/11. Germany is already riding the third wave with no real plans in sight and a dysfunctional vaccine rollout. New mutations are arising and taking their toll in Western countries. This isn't on China, this is on us.

So if you follow these stories out of pure curiosity, good on you. If you follow them because you desperately want someone to blame: stop. Blame your own country's government. This is on them. All they needed to do was take the experts seriously and not listen to industry lobby groups instead. Countries like Australia have understood this. Countries like Germany are too busy cutting backroom deals and playing party politics instead.

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

#129

Post by eightysixfour »

beowulfey wrote: post #124
Buttons840 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this presentation of evidence. Rarely do you see such a short acknowledgement that there are multiple contradictory theories, each having some evidence, and making no attempt to pick which theory is correct. Sometimes its wrong to present "both sides" like that. Like pretending the evidence against the moon landings is equal to the evidence for the moon landings. But if you're going to be wrong, this is probab…

well, often the benefit of listing out as much evidence as possible (basically, look at the facts on hand) is that it can help clarify WHICH theory makes the most sense

I think this is one of those areas where our day-to-day probability heuristics do not align with the actual probabilities. So, as an individual, trying to decide which theory makes the most sense is a Sisyphean task.

For example, I have seen a lot of comments that the closest natural COVID reservoir is 500 miles away, that sounds like a lot! But the average tractor trailer can cover that in a day no problem, so our heuristic needs to include how many trucks are moving between those areas, how many have come in contact with wildlife or are transporting it, etc. Since it only takes one transmission the problem rapidly becomes too complex.

Fortunately the answer has no bearing on decisions being made in the here and now, so we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs and hope we take the right steps long term if it was something that could have been avoided.

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

#130

Post by kolbe »

s5300 wrote: post #109
brigandish wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'm not sure if I'm reading this incorrectly and misinterpreting... But Asian hate crimes are waaay up since the beginning of Covid-19 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56218684 Do you not call this xenophobia? It would be my elementary understanding that this rise in hate crime against Asians may be related to the President of the U.S. aggressively referring to the virus as the "china virus" and broadcasting…

Causal inference may not be important to media campaigns, but it is to reality. Can you honestly say that you have found causal evidence that people earnestly talking about a Wuhan having a lab leak is the cause of 24 extra hate crimes in a city of 8 million people?
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