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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

#561

Post by jeduehr »

ChemSpider wrote: post #285
jeduehr wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alina Chan, also not a virologist. She's a geneticst or biochemist. She just uses some viruses in her research sometimes, like basically all biochemists. Calling her qualified in virus biosafety is like saying someone with a PhD in Visual Arts is qualified as an expert in ballpoint pens because they've used them to draw. Sure they know some things about using ballpoint pens and which ones they prefer, but would you t…

> I have also responded to her criticisms substance elsewhere, Link?

Honestly, can't find it. It was in some random facebook group about this stuff, I joined a couple dozen as the pandemic went on, so hard to find which one and my activity log search isn't turning up anything.

Sorry. :(

I don't have the time or bandwidth to re-write it at the moment. But a lot of her arguments are similar to Dr. Degerin's and also Dr. Ebright over at Rutgers. They are a small minority, like the OP says.

I tend to rely on expert consensus when it makes mechanistic sense like this one does.

Nothing, no evidence we have, makes either possibility impossible. The lab leak just requires a lot more cloak and dagger and new assumptions. Occam's razer tells me to favor the hypothesis with the least new assumptions. Hence zoonotic release is more likely in my opinion. That's truly the crux of it, the rest of it is arguing over the number of angels on the head of a pin.

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

#562

Post by jeduehr »

mushishi wrote: post #525
natch wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you cannot take any virus known in nature That is such a straw man. I seriously doubt anyone, much less a signatory to the recent open letter (many with experience and knowledge far beyond yours) would have claimed they can take ANY virus and transform it to ANY OTHER virus. Your green handle just lost any respect I might have extended to it.

I feel their intention was to say that there is no known virus in nature that could be transformed to specifically SARS-CoV-2?

yeah, not in the time frame available or with the tools available. It would either have to be some hidden virus that they all lied about, or somehow an unknown contaminant in their samples that then also disappeared when they looked.

All new assumptions that make this theory less likely.

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

#563

Post by jeduehr »

beachy wrote: post #498
greggman3 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps it's due to conditioning on stack overflow, where posting links on their own always swiftly invokes rebukes from the moderators (because linkrot).

But these are permalinks? This is like linking to a github. It doesn't just "disappear." Unless Reddit goes under, which is just as likely as StackOverflow or HN going under.

At this point, with their market cap and increased moderation, probably less likely than the two I listed.

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

#564

Post by jeduehr »

jeduehr wrote: post #495
someperson wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core argument of your Reddit post addressing gain-of-function research is that GoF research causes the sugars on the surface of the virus to be lost. But that doesn't address the recombination event / recombinant virus, which is what the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis seem to be arguing (spike protein from one virus combined with backbone from another virus)

That's... Not at all the core argument. The core argument is actually one of occam's razor. Is such a recombinant /technically/ possible? Yes. How many new assumptions does it require? A lot. Lots of people who help cover it up, lots of people who get sick and say nothing, lots of samples destroyed. And then also the epidemiological and genetic evidence doesn't support it. How many new assumptions do you need for the…

Also, I just want to reiterate here, we virologists have literally been saying this is going to happen from nature FOR YEARS.

People like Michael Osterholm and Peter Daszak and Vincent Muenster and Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli have been saying this was going to happen /for years/. It was a matter of "when" not "if" to us virologists. We absolutely saw the writing on the wall and saw specifically SARS-1 and MERS and knew that meant there were likely other coronaviruses that could emerge.

But funding was always so low, because the viruses weren't currently infecting anybody! So the sampling efforts were always very minimal and underfunded!

And now, because of the lab leak theory, that has actually gotten worse, not better!

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/gb8yye/nihs_axing...

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

#565

Post by xadhominemx »

effie wrote: post #334
xadhominemx wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as?

Reparations.

Whether the virus jumped to humans because someone handled the wrong bat or because some junior lab tech didn’t wash their hands shouldn’t really matter as far as reparations go

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

#566

Post by pclmulqdq »

tripletao wrote: post #443
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal feelings are that all 3 are possible, but approximately 0.0001% of people will actually consider the likelihood of each one, but rather, most will choose whichever one is most convenient and comfortable to believe in. Of course as an Asian person, whatever people believe in will have a direct impact on me. I remember after 9/11, the amount of awful things that were said and done to the Sikh population in…

If SARS-CoV-2 emerged due to the WIV's research activities, then it was potentially with the knowledge and funding of the American government, via the EcoHealth Alliance. Racism is always stupid, but in this case it's particularly so. This absolutely shouldn't be China vs. USA, and it's deeply unfortunate that the Trump administration's early, characteristically unsupported rhetoric made it so. The WIV's safety was p…

By the way, one of the big proponents of gain-of-function research was Anthony Fauci. It makes sense that he came out and tried to control the narrative around the virus given that he may have been responsible for its creation.

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

#567

Post by paledot »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #552
chiefalchemist wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone. It would be more accurate to say: these viruses are a threat to the current socioeconomic and sociopolitical status quo. Take air travel for instance. It was key to spreading this and other pandemic viruses. Yet no one is questioning air travel. Note: I'm not suggesting it should be shut down, only that the idea of in…

Nitpick, but important: saying "wealth redistribution (from the bottom to the top)" implies there's a fixed amount of wealth, like a pie, and the "top" are getting a bigger and bigger slice. A lot of people actually think like this, and it's incorrect. It's more correct to think of e.g. Carlos or Elon as leading efforts to bake lots and lots more pie, and then keeping a lot of the pie for themselves. The dominant the…

Not true. The people in the middle expand the pie, the people at the top (the 1% of the 1%) eat it. And the people at the bottom are indeed having a harder and harder time.

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

#568

Post by jeduehr »

jeduehr wrote: post #545
trevelyan wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knows that mutations that increase transmissability generally hurt morbidity. Is there some reason you think this supports zoonotic hypothesis? It is public knowledge RaTG13 was collected from a mine shaft where a similar virus killed 50% of infected workers and where WIV was doing significant sampling work. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815... Your comments on mutation rates confi…

>Your comments on mutation rates confirm that RaTG13 is not closely related to COV (we knew that) and imply we should expect to find a closer relative. Yet we haven't. And the paper you share argues (again) against your conclusions by pointing out that neither Yunnan nor Wuhan are expected hotspots for missing zoonoses to emerge It's really funny you mention that because when I presented this paper in my departmental…

And you also don't have to take my word for it re: China's problem with zoonotic transmission. Here are scientific review articles that demonstrate that consensus:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26654122/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30806904/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27726088/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27426214/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30832341/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19906932/

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

#569

Post by rossdavidh »

nbardy wrote: post #307
rossdavidh wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Lots of issues that are just way too high-emotion right now for rational and objective discussion. One other reason it's way too hot to discuss right now: it would suggest that scientists were at least partly to blame for the pandemic. Even if you're not Chinese, you might not want to be discussing that idea if you were a scientist yourself.

Because people are having emotional discussion doesn’t mean we should stop trying to have rational ones. In fact it’s the opposite we need to have the hard conversations as early as possible.

Not if it causes people to (emotionally) dig themselves into positions which they later are unwilling to relent on because people hate admitting they're wrong, and hate it more the more adamantly they had stated their position before. We're in a very polarized environment, with very little trust between groups, and having an early emotional hard conversation could actually be another obstacle in the way of having a productive one later.

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

#570

Post by jeduehr »

jeduehr wrote: post #564
jeduehr wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... Not at all the core argument. The core argument is actually one of occam's razor. Is such a recombinant /technically/ possible? Yes. How many new assumptions does it require? A lot. Lots of people who help cover it up, lots of people who get sick and say nothing, lots of samples destroyed. And then also the epidemiological and genetic evidence doesn't support it. How many new assumptions do you need for the…

Also, I just want to reiterate here, we virologists have literally been saying this is going to happen from nature FOR YEARS. People like Michael Osterholm and Peter Daszak and Vincent Muenster and Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli have been saying this was going to happen /for years/. It was a matter of "when" not "if" to us virologists. We absolutely saw the writing on the wall and saw specifically SARS-1 and MERS and kn…

And you also don't have to take my word for it that virologists were concerned! See all these scientific review articles demonstrating that fact:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11779380/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29270793/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26654122/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30806904/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16940861/ (this one says wet markets, which probably are an issue, but not as big as initially thought, and probably not the origin of CoV-2)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26922715/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27726088/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26689940/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27426214/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30832341/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19906932/

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