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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

#431

Post by jb775 »

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…

Pretty crazy that people have been placing so much criticism on response-related aspects, but don't have any interest in the root cause. This entire mess could start over from scratch tomorrow with a completely different virus...but who cares, let's argue about the political response.

I think this is in large part a display of the power the media has to steer what a population thinks about. They clearly don't want the root cause investigated, or even thought about for that matter. We should go one step deeper and question why that is so, and who stands to benefit from that?

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

#432

Post by jeduehr »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #419
jeduehr wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, Yuri makes a few mistakes in this. 1) Chimeric viruses (copy and paste) are what scientists make in the lab. They take a piece of one virus and paste it into the genome of another, en masse. This is very different from what SARS-2 is, which is more accurately described as a "mosaic" (lots of little changes all over the genome). This is much much more difficult (if not very close to impossible in the case of SARS-…

Without explicitly supporting the theory it is a loosed weapon, I think your estimation of technology is off. Typically military technology will lead by about a decade, maybe more. So all of the rest could be explained, a little paranoically, as intentional action.

In virology and other related biological sciences, the opposite is usually the case. All the most cutting edge stuff either happens in university labs or in the private sector.

The military (in the US at least) has too much red tape and bureaucracy that gets in the way of that kind of fast-paced experimentation.

Source: I was about an inch away from working at the Defense Intelligence Agency after grad school, but this is why I turned them down. After talking to all the people on the hiring team, this was the consensus. They did it because they loved their country, despite those challenges. And this is what my friends at USAMRIID tell me (US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases). If they want to present anything or publish it, they have months of red tape to go through first. They can't collaborate as easily either.

Also you can read books like The Hot Zone (sensationalized, but shows they weren't doing anything that wasn't happening at the same time in academia) or Ken Alibek's BioHazard, both of which describe the past history of bioweapons research and how it wasn't 10 years ahead of anyone else (in the USSR or the US). It was about where everyone else was, but applying it maybe 2 or 3 years ahead of the game.

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

#433

Post by COGlory »

jeduehr wrote: post #413
COGlory wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You spend an awful lot of time attacking me and not very much time attacking my arguments. That's not very scientific of you. I said I had no way to know you were actually a virologist, which I didn't. It isn't really important to the discussion though, as I said. Can we talk about this like adults? Thanks. Unfortunately that is impossible for two reasons: 1) Because you have inextricably tied your argument to who y…

1200 mutations away from RATG-13 is how significant exactly? I will propose that it is not particularly significant. One virus I work with, I have 14 variants ranging from 300 to 500 base-pair differences. That is from passing in a laboratory only. I have one variant that has a 14000 BP deletion! ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7217056/#mmi144 ... TABLE S2) However, it is noteworthy for that reason. Th…

>You're comparing apples and oranges. 14 mutational sites across a virus with 17k ssDNA genome is not comparable to RATG-13 vs SARS-2, which have not just 1200 mutations different, they're spread out over HUNDREDS of SNPs.

If memory serves, that was a single generation. An rdrp produces one error per thousand bases, which comes out to 30 mutations per generation, so we're talking 40 generations away? That hardly seems significant.

>Not particularly. CGG exists in MERS 15 times. NL63, 29 times. It even exists twice in a row in Human coronavirus 229E. Throughout all of the known alphacoronaviruses (94 described) CGG exists 1575 times. In betacoronaviruses, it exists more times than my processor can count without hanging, and I believe it tops out at 9,999 events.

How many of those are in frame for an amino acid? How many of those are two in frame for arginine in a protein, next to each other?

>Why is it so unlikely that synonymous mutational drift over the course of 70 years of infections in millions of viral generations could create these arginine codons that are not the most optimized but still work in the mammals this virus infects? CGG works. It makes an arginine when this virus infects its host.

There are many reasons why it's unlikely. The first is pure statistics. But the statistics are almost certainly influenced by millions of years of biology.

>Why couldn't it be a recombination event between SARS-2 and one of the known coronaviruses with an extremely similar cleavage site?

It's absolutely possible and I would never dispute this. The possibility of it isn't a refutation of the possibility of other hypotheses, and I don't think it's in the scientific spirit to discount other viable hypotheses.

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

#434

Post by guram11 »

khuey wrote: post #373
BurningFrog wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it looks like a coverup, Occam says it is a coverup. The Chinese authorities are not stupid. They know how bad it looks to not allow investigation. Which means they think the result of a free investigation would look even worse.

I thought the lab leak hypothesis was pretty unlikely in early 2020 but having seen the how the Chinese state has acted since then it now seems entirely believable.

there were similar conspiracy way back in 2003 when SARS outbreak, except this time in 2019~, the social medias are way more viral than the virus and CCP apparently can't suppress these "contents/info/fakenews" even with the enormous help from WHO

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

#435

Post by jeduehr »

EMM_386 wrote: post #268
jeduehr wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Furin cleavage sites very similar if not largely identical to this one have also been found in nature I don't believe this is correct. There are no other examples of a CoV within the sub-genera Sarbecovirus of a species/strain that shows evidence of insertion of a polybasic furin cleavage site.

I just wanted to add that I probably was exaggerating when I said "we have no idea how that happened." re: VP40, bats, and ebola.

Best guess is: a retrovirus and an ebola-like virus infected a bat cell at the same time, the retrovirus accidentally picked up some of the bat genome, which then somehow recombined with the negative sense RNA genome of the ebola-like virus. We have no proof this happened like this, but it's the best guess.

Just as an example of the crazy things that we think probably happen in the world of viruses in nature.

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

#436

Post by jeduehr »

d0100 wrote: post #430
jeduehr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> The post also won a "best of r/science 2020" award! It was probably awarded by /u/mvea

Hi,

it's actually voted on by users.

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

#437

Post by jeduehr »

greggman3 wrote: post #410
jeduehr wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thank you for all that info and for taking the time to write it. Don't know why people can't be bother to just follow the link and instead expect you to repeat it all here.

Part of me thinks it's because that's an easier argument to make than actually addressing any of the substance.

Easier to just assume I won't respond and then they'll look more "right."

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

#438

Post by jeduehr »

natch wrote: post #329
jeduehr wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They were built and designed by very reputable people in the virology community. Anyone under the thumb of communist party minders is by definition not in a position to freely act as a very reputable person. They may very well have a reputation, but they are not free to fulfill it well.

Then why has Shi Zhengli continued to support the zoonotic crossover theory as the most likely when the communist party no longer does?

They left that behind a long time ago in favor of "The US did it."

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

#439

Post by jeduehr »

temp8964 wrote: post #363
jeduehr wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> covid-19 originating outside wuhan entirely, Is this the main stream opinion now? Can you provide a link? Or is this just your personal opinion?

Hi,

I actually provided several links filled with sources above.

here is the main one you're referencing again: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

Thanks

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

#440

Post by brigandish »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #177
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?

What exactly are the good guys supposed to do in a situation where bad guys enjoy the truth: support the noble lie, or hiss "you are not supposed to talk about this"?

Perhaps not divvy up the world, or people, as "good" and "bad" and instead focus on truth?

Or perhaps consider that if truth is good, then more truth is likely to be more good, and good people would (should) embrace truth and bad guys speaking more truth would be better than bad guys using less (as surely that is one way to measure who is bad).

Given these options (and I could go on) I'm not sure why a "noble" lie or suppression of speech are the only choices, or better choices.

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