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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

#291

Post by newacct583 »

bruiseralmighty wrote: post #192
newacct583 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 negat…

With all respect, this sounds very much like "It's not xenophobia if your fear of the foreigners is justified".

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

#293

Post by newacct583 »

danielrpa wrote: post #62
newacct583 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

> Just because the motivation for the argument is bad, it doesn't mean that the argument itself is bad.

Inherently? Of course not. But in practice it tends to act as a good prior for detecting bullshit. How many of these people would really be making the same argument in this way had the virus appeared in Bonn or Montreal?

And again, to repeat: in this particular situation we have a very acceptable, very convincing, very obvious hypothesis for covid origins that simply does not require trafficking in badly-motivated argument.

At the end of the day there's no strong evidence, we all agree on that. So I choose to believe something obvious that fits the data and patterns previous events, and others... choose to believe that a (literal!) conspiracy is afoot acting to cover up wrongdoing by an evil foreign nation. And that's bad.

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

#294

Post by troyvit »

endisneigh wrote: post #249
ckw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the virus was a product of gain of function research, the primary purpose of which is to reduce the risk of pandemics, then the research becomes much more difficult to justify. The argument I guess becomes then, yeah, periodically we’ll cause a pandemic, and millions of people will die, but we’ll be so much better at dealing with diseases that arise naturally, as SARS and MERS did, that on balance it will be worth…

OK, so what. What can we do to make China stop doing this research if they want to? Are we going to go to war over this? No. Are we going to have an embargo with China? No? So effectively this becomes a situation of "oh yeah they should've not had that accident, oh well." In the USA we've had the same problem ourselves (lab accidents with pathogens), and we banned gain of function research and ended up removing the b…

Why does it have to be a "we" vs "China" discussion at all? Why don't we think non-politically about it for a minute and recognize that as a global species we have a chance to learn as much as we can from a pandemic that affected us globally so that we can try to do better when the next one inevitably comes along?

And yeah, maybe China doesn't wanna think that way, but let's find out first, and second find out why.

On the other hand there are some great ways to think about this politically. If by "we" you mean the U.S. we don't really have a leg to stand on as far as respect from the international community right now anyway, so any fight we bring to China is basically one on one.

Other countries besides the U.S. would be able to wring significant concessions from China if they chose to a) believe collectively that it was China's malfeasance that caused the pandemic, and b) stood together to demand a response.

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

#295

Post by newacct583 »

thedrbrian wrote: post #183
jeduehr wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually occam's razor would say that the many many many more instances of bat-human contact throughout the Chinese countryside are likely responsible, not a lab leak. Did you know that people use Bat Guano (literally bat shit) eyedrops to cure visual ailments in rural china? Among other risky practices. Bat guano is often handled with bare hands and used to fertilize fields without proper sanitary practices. The man…

And despite the tens of thousands of people rubbing bat turds in their eyes the first cases come from people living in the middle of a massive city. I just find it incredibly suspicious that the massive city with a BSL4 lab doing research into bat viruses is where a bat virus first turns up.

> And despite the tens of thousands of people rubbing bat turds in their eyes the first cases come from people living in the middle of a massive city.

Uh... yeah. Because massive cities have, y'know, more people mixing together with more varied activies. It would be very surprising indeed if a new pandemic just happened to pop up in a tiny hamlet in rural Tibet. But cities are absolutely where we expect to see this happen.

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

#296

Post by chimprich »

jeduehr wrote: post #217
rPlayer6554 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry man, but wouldn't you be able to just reply directly if you feel inclined to disagree with the parent. I'm not saying HN is entitled to your opinion but it feels a little lazy and disrespectful to the parent to say "you're wrong" then drop a link off site to a massive general summary of the situation in order to respond to a few specific points. Especially since point 3 has a source from a decently reputabl…

Hi, I actually ended up responding below to point 3 in particular but I also respond to it in my original post. Very few, if any of these arguments are novel. The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to ac…

Thanks for posting this - really interesting and valuable in my view.

> The reason you will find extremely few people with actual credentials in the science we're discussing in these discussions is that working scientists don't have the time or will to get into these debates with people who wouldn't have the faintest idea how to actually conduct the research they're criticizing.

We have such a big problem with public perception of science. I think many people are willing to be educated, but internet forums tend to degenerate into arguments between people who think they know a lot more than they do (even in (especially?) places like HN).

Controversial idea: I think in the future we should pay researchers to spend x% of their time just interacting with people on internet forums answering questions and correcting misperceptions. The amount of disinformation out there is staggering.

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

#297

Post by arcticbull »

refenestrator wrote: post #254
arcticbull wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

The fact that this particular theory reaches the front page of hacker news every week, despite zero evidence besides the existence of a lab.. hey, we're just asking questions, here, right? Frankly, it would be irresponsible NOT to provacatively suggest this thing we have no evidence of, repeatedly.

Yes it sure would be irresponsible to ask questions about the...

(1) BSL-3 lab doing bat coronavirus research...

(2) on gain-of-function projects...

(3) one block away from the epicenter of a coronavirus pandemic with bat ties...

(4) that nobody's being allowed into...

(5) when they have a history of coronavirus lab escapes.

I'm not saying we know this is what happened. I'm saying it's not a far-fetched position and there's a lot of experts who agree. I hear there's even an MIT Technology Review write-up about it.

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

#298

Post by lostinquebec »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #289
loveistheanswer wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It’s worth noting that in both the Sverdlov case and in this one, world scientists are only being given access to the situation in an extremely controlled fashion. A primary reason we can’t say more on what happened in this case is the CCP’s tight control over access that could help clarify the situation. Which will always look suspicious, whether it was actually a completely natural virus or not.

I don't understand how this works, so forgive my ignorance.

Wouldn't the Wuhan lab be able to disprove this really easily? How often do they sequence viruses? Couldn't they show categorically that COVID-19 is not a descendant of a virus they were working with/on?

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

#299

Post by drran »

phyalow wrote: post #230
rsync wrote: post #153

Once again, I will ask for (what I believe is) an interesting piece of context ... How many labs like this one are there in the world ? Are there 20,000 of them ? Are there 7 ? Of the labs like this one in the world, how many of them are doing GoF research on coronaviruses ? 1200 of them ? 1 of them ? This won't be conclusive but given the reasonable heuristics that I work with, having a sense of these proportions wo…

According to Wikipedia there are 56 BSL-4 labs globally, I cant find any good references on the amount of labs (BSL-3/BSL-4) doing GoF research on coronaviruses, but I cant imagine it is a significant amount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_... There is one fascinating article I came across published by Nature in 2017 which has all sorts of innuendo given the state of facts on the ground t…

How many of them had a major incident between September-December 2019?

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

#300

Post by neolog »

endisneigh wrote: post #243
neolog wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American Airlines can't reduce its risk by reading Delta's FAA incident reports?

That situation isn't analogous, but American Airlines would reduce its risk more by reading its own incident reports compared to Delta's, yes. In general focusing on one's own failings is superior to focusing on another's. Are you serious?

> reduce its risk more by reading its own

Ok but they can do both, right? I mean, I can improve my performance by looking at my own performance, but also watching others.

Moreover, the US can exert a lot of pressure on other countries to meet certain standards and reduce risk. Knowing what went wrong will help determine standards.

It's not like lab-leak-causes-disease only happens once. This happens all the time, just like aircraft incidents. If incidents weren't investigated and tracked, planes would be riskier than they are.

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