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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

#311

Post by jeduehr »

chimprich wrote: post #296
jeduehr wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh yeah I think that's a great idea. NSF has been toying with this kind of thing for a while, and they've put mandatory public-facing time in some of their grants. There just aren't all that many good venues for it. But I think the principle is fabulous, and we should fund more places for it to happen.

The National Science Policy Network has a good Q&A site where credentialed scientists answer public questions about their subject area. I forget the URL but a google search should turn it up in a few pages.

There's a similar one called the Science Creative Exchange where scientists sign up to talk to writers in hollywood and work through scripts and make the science in fiction more accurate wherever possible.

I love both of these and have spent lots of time on them in my (ever dwindling) free time. But I'm also the guy who's commenting on a HN post when I should be studying for the biggest exam in my career (USMLE Step 1), so I'm not the best example.

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

#312

Post by btilly »

lostinquebec wrote: post #298
NineStarPoint wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As long as they don't have an audited central database of all viruses that they sequenced, they have no way to demonstrate that they showed you all of their virus lines.

And if they had such a central database, we'd have probably heard about it by now.

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

#313

Post by jeduehr »

rebelos wrote: post #250
jeduehr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't they do the same for the SARS-CoV-1 leaks that happened in Beijing over a decade ago, then?

That's a terrible counterargument full of logical holes coming from someone who's supposedly a "PhD in virology". But you're also a green account that's so rabidly and suspiciously coming to China's defense throughout these comments that I literally assign no credence whatsoever to anything you've said. Several other scientists here have already eviscerated the arguments in your r/science post as well. I don't know w…

Hey you can literally look up my name in the post I linked and find all the evidence in the world that I am who I say I am.

https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

James Duehr, PhD

Here's my google scholar page: https://scholar.google.com.co/citations?user=8wCwbNUAAAAJ&hl...

Here's my PhD thesis: https://search.proquest.com/openview/8e7e18ee1e41133ae74a719...

Sorry I'm a green account but I forgot the password to the HN account I made like 10 years ago. I mostly lurk so I haven't logged in in a looong time. Since before password managers became convenient or commonplace. Like 3 email addresses ago.

I also wrote a pre-formed response to the criticism that I shouldn't be trusted in my original post, you can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

and the associated in-depth footnote (For the really hardcore sticklers among you) here (#10): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0...

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

#314

Post by seoaeu »

lostinquebec wrote: post #298
NineStarPoint wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

How would you know they provided a complete list of viruses they were working on? Couldn't they just leave off anything incriminating?

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

#315

Post by [deleted] »

lostinquebec wrote: post #298
NineStarPoint wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#316

Post by sneak »

nbardy wrote: post #305
rndmize wrote: post #99

I feel that for people paying attention to COVID news, this has always been the case; there's never been any kind of conclusive evidence on the origin of the virus (that I've read of). The article outlines three main possible origins - natural, accidental combination in lab, deliberate construction in lab. (There's a fourth option I've seen floating around - deliberate release of a constructed virus.) It seems that m…

You think we should wait one-two more years to figure out the biggest pandemic in 100 years?

I don't think it matters much how long we take, because it's not figuring out the pandemic - that we're already failing to do, even without an origin story - but instead figuring out the origin.

The origin, truth be told, is basically irrelevant, just like the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. We live in the world today, and while the story of how we got here might be somewhat academically or historically interesting, it's about a million items down the list of things that are actually important right now.

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

#317

Post by ckw »

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…

We conduct this sort of research, and in fact the NIH funded gain of function research taking place at WIV. So first we could reinstate the moratorium that was lifted in 2017, and we can stop funding it elsewhere. If the ultimate conclusion is that this research is too dangerous, we can create something analogous to the Biological Weapons Convention, to which China has acceded. I see no reason China wouldn't sign and abide by such a treaty.

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

#318

Post by pumaontheprowl »

Shouldn't be ruled out?

The idea that some scientist accidentally infected themself with this virus while trying to study it is far more believable than a person contracting it because they ate raw bat from a wet market. It can't be a coincidence that the epicenter of this pandemic is less than a mile away from a lab dedicated to studying coronaviruses.

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

#319

Post by s5300 »

lurquer wrote: post #282
neilparikh wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

News articles are not equating Chinese and Asian. It seems very obvious to me that those doing racist hate crimes aren't going to ask their victims if they're Chinese or not before attacking them, so you'd see an uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes in general, not just anti-Chinese hate crimes, and so it makes sense to talk about anti-Asian hate crimes as a whole.

> It seems very obvious to me that those doing racist hate crimes... Who are doing racist hate crimes? There is nothing obvious about it. The media narrative is that Trump’s use of the term “China Virus” or “Kung Flu” has led to attacks on ALL Asians. I’ve never seen any evidence of this. And what is disgusting is assuming any old lady anywhere — be she Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, etc— who get pushed or m…

I happen to live in red-neck Bubba land and have for near all my life, but thank you for your input on matters you seem to not be very much personally acquainted with...

I don't understand the nature of your straw mans.

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

#320

Post by drran »

jeduehr wrote: post #276
loveistheanswer wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the detailed response. As a layperson, these specifics are over my head. Assuming everything you say is true, that still would not rule out a lab leak of a virus collected from nature, would it? >You can't do it in the time we've been able to handle viruses like this or modify them in the ways we can. You'd have needed to start a few decades ago, have tools that we've only just invented, and a huge numb…

Yes, a lab leak of a virus collected from nature is the most plausible of these lab theories. But the epidemiological evidence points to covid-19 originating outside wuhan entirely, that's why I find that theory less likely, among other reasons. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpcfs2 Also if they had collected it in nature, it would have been in their freezers, or likely that people invo…

So, we have two patients with SARS-CoV-2 in France[0] and China[1] on November 17, and the whole epidemic in Russia[2]. Hmm.

[0]: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/coronavirus/corona...

[1]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMh11FtfaP0

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