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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

#191

Post by AlarmALlama »

jeduehr wrote: post #164
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…

Hi, I have a PhD in virology focused on emerging viruses, and a few months back I wrote a very lengthy and involved piece full of sources. And in there, I describe exactly how wrong your point 1 is. And how misguided your point 3 is. The post also won a "best of r/science 2020" award! You can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

Hi. Do you still stand by your point 3.1.1, specifically your mutation rate of 2 changes/month, given that newer variants are believed to have arisen from intense mutational events in a small number of immunodeficient people?

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

#192

Post by bruiseralmighty »

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…

Excuse me but PRC = People's Republic of China correct?

How would it be xenophobic to criticize a government? This conflation is so pervasive and toxic to the discourse.

The Chinese government does bear some of the responsibility here. The Chinese people do not. At a minimum, they actively tried to cover-up an investigation into a leak and leaned on the World Health Organization in order to do so.

This had two negative affects globally. First is the slowed response time from the rest of the World as they were assured this was mild and contained. Second is the rightfully degraded trust in the WHO which will impede ongoing and future efforts not only to stop Covid-19 but also future pandemics.

The reason right-wing media sources are the only ones talking about this is because they are the only ones with the freedom to do so. If we do not like that some of these source are implying that Chinese people as a group are to blame, then that is an invitation for more mainstream outlets to stop carrying water for the Chinese and American governments.

Be upfront, the WHO was compromised by the Chinese government. There could have been a leak, a hypothesis that is looking more likely with each passing week. If this was in fact a leak, then gain of function research could also be implicated. This produces a conflict of interest with experts in the field because their funding and research may utilize gain of function methods.

Done.

This was a known unknown over a year ago, but stifled due to political interests. The casting of xenophobic aspersions onto the right-leaning media sources who got this correct is an attempt at damage control for the same political interests.

I get it. Admitting those media sources were better when it really mattered means fewer people will get vaccinated and we may get a Trump 2.0. That is the political price of lying and getting caught. Jacketing all these conversations with underlying accusations of "well they were right but also racist" is not going to be a win. If you want to win you have to actually be better.

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

#193

Post by COGlory »

jeduehr wrote: post #167
COGlory wrote: post #106

The evidence is circumstantial, but there has yet to be any evidence ruling it out. To be clear, the lab leak hypothesis is always possible. Things can always leak out of labs, let's not kid ourselves. Some things (going by memory here) that seem to support the hypothesis: 1) Major point of differentiation for this virus is that compared to it's closest known relatives, it has acquired a furin site (eukaryotic protei…

Furin cleavage sites very similar if not largely identical to this one have also been found in nature, and have been generated in nature in very short spans of time (on the order of a few decades, which is what is suspected to have happened with SARS-CoV-2). I describe the evidence in detail in this detailed longform post I wrote on reddit a few months back: Hi, I have a PhD in virology focused on emerging viruses, a…

I read through your post and it was incomplete and hand wavy, although that makes sense because it was written for Reddit. The bias was also obvious, and remarkably unscientific in how you approached the "problems" in a deterministic manner. You cherry picked examples (for instance, saying we can detect Cas9 mutations) that make no conclusive point (for example, there are a variety of ways to add a furin site to a genome that don't involve Cas9) but are indistinguishable as proof by the Reddit audience. The bottom line is, though, you are cherry picking arguments that lay people are more or less too unaware of their cherry picked status to argue with.

As a virologist, who "engineers viruses", I also take some offense to this line: >The virus itself, to the eye of any virologist, is clearly not engineered.

I also suspect that the viruses referenced in the featured article would object to that line as well.

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

#194

Post by s5300 »

lurquer wrote: post #148
s5300 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Strange how Asian is equated with Chinese. How insulting. It’s often the typical virtue-signaling liberals who group disparate languages, races, religions, and cultures in one monolithic block. What do you mean by Asian that would encourage one to use the term synonymously with “Chinese”? Are you referring to “people with slanty eyes”? White urban liberals do this a lot... to them, all “brown” people are the same. A…

I thought about including something about this in my post, but as we're on HN, I deleted it as I didn't feel it was needed.

While you could be trolling, I'll never know - but simply put, the average person who would commit a hate crime - especially physically and publicly - is likely completely unable to distinguish/genuinely unaware of the various Asian ethnicities along with their distinguishing features. To them, it's all the same. Note, this has nothing to do with me - it's just a truth.

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

#195

Post by muskox2 »

mywittyname wrote: post #149
yumraj wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not xenophobic for people from the US.... While racism and xenophobia is real, it has been and is being used very effectively, especially by China but others too, to deflect/blunt genuine criticisms and claims. Just as an amusing example, we talk openly about UK variant, SA variant, Brazil variant - but never talk about original as Wuhan variant - it is simply coronavirus.

It's cuts both ways. Some of the UK Politicians happily throwing around "China/Wuhan virus" got butt-hurt on Twitter when people called the B117 strain the "UK Variant." We shouldn't be using that terminology for variants either. While I understand that people largely use location names for the sake of convenience, it really doesn't feel good to be a person from one of those locations.

In my opinion, location names are the easiest and most memorable way to refer to variants. The tradition is as old as the "Spanish flu"... which isn't from Spain at all.

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

#196

Post by avmich »

> 2. It's not xenophobic for people from the US to suggest the possibility of a lab leak, because the US was itself funding gain of function research on novel coronaviruses in the Wuhan BSL4 lab

It's not necessarily a Chinese lab where the leak originated from (hypothetical, of course). It could be a Russian lab - there are arguments for Novosibirsk Vector biology center as the origin of the leak.

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

#197

Post by dang »

gfodor wrote: post #65
newacct583 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Your comment was rightly flagged because you broke the site guidelines and took the thread a big step further into flamewar hell. Please don't do that. Please do review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN.

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

#198

Post by ricksunny »

eightysixfour wrote: post #129
beowulfey wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> we can afford to wait and let experts do their jobs

We can emphatically not expect the experts to do their job. Those cited as having the most expertise (virologists who undertake gain-of-function research, symbolically under the auspices of HHS’ toothless P3CO regulation framework) have the most to lose from a finding that the pandemic’s source was a lab leak. They lose all the grants and public financial support, not to mention endure unending public scorn that will haunt the their careers for the duration.

For evidence that the relevant, oft-cited scientists act precisely this way, one need no more than to look at @BlockedVirology’s retweets: https://twitter.com/blockedvirology

Scientists are human - I would highly recommend disabusing oneself of the notion that they might act contrary to overwhelming human incentives in as weighty a context as investigating the origins of the greatest pandemic in a century.

The only alternative in the face of this embedded conflict of interest in our (society’s) ability to credibly investigate the pandemic’s origins is for technically-minded individuals (who don’t run multimillion dollar virology labs) to avail themselves of the findings gathered to date on the origins (there’s lots! Just need to take a look, the contributors to the above feed are a good place to start), and advocate to their representatives for a credible & even-handed origins investigation.

Failing that, expect no origin beyond all reasonable doubt to be credibly identified in our lifetimes.

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

#199

Post by elif »

arcticbull wrote: post #127
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/

There are also cases isolated from US blood samples taken before any known infection in China's outbreak, so the racist nature of this discussion is really misplaced. In reality, statements about the origin of this virus are almost purely geopolitical speculation, and it is from these politics that racism is injected into the etymology.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/covid-inf...

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

#200

Post by VintageCool »

lhorie wrote: post #125
lazide wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a big wet market in Wuhan, pretty close to the virus research lab.

According to the below video, eating exotic wildlife dates back to the starvation conditions of the Mao years and is now mostly practiced by the rich. The conditions in which these animals are kept are unsanitary, even by comparison to a market with live animals that you might be familiar with in the US.

There was a push to end the practice after SARS-CoV-1, but they came back a few years ago.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/videos/2020/3/6/21168006/co...

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