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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

#601

Post by lostlogin »

darkerside wrote: post #537
spondyl wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. COVID-19 attacked every country. With the exception of, like, New Zealand (but it affected them as well... had to shut down their borders, etc). As someone who lives in New Zealand, we were still "attacked" by covid all the same. The only difference arguably is the coordinated response from our government compared to others. Some of that is presumably culture too (we…

Being a small island country certainly played a role, no? Not to take anything away from your impressively functional government.

I don’t think the ‘island’ part is the important bit, but the ‘small’ might be. Hawaii and the the UK are examples of islands that haven’t done that well.

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

#602

Post by xadhominemx »

effie wrote: post #575
xadhominemx wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

True. But what if the virus was enhanced in a lab and then escaped? The enhancers and the guards would be liable.

Yes if the virus was weaponized and then escaped that would matter, but that’s a different topic

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

#603

Post by jeduehr »

tripletao wrote: post #588
jeduehr wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, difference is I actually admit these things are possible and have happened before. But this event doesn't look anything like those other lab release events. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

Certainly this is unlike e.g. the 1977 flu pandemic, whose genetic sequence provided strong evidence that it was an accidental release of something derived from a stored 1950 sample. Even so, at the time the WHO said "laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395…

Hi you'll see elsewhere that I was very open about the fact that I, too, think an open and honest investigation from third parties is necessary. Seriously just search this page for "independent" or "investigation." I have said that several times on this post, and in the OP I linked as well. I am 100% in support of that and always have been. I just don't think the outcome will be conclusive, but I hope it will maybe prevent some of the damage this theory is causing.

I don't have time to address the rest of your comment I'm sorry, I have already sunk so much time into this post that I should have spent studying. This is the exam I have in 3 weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USMLE_Step_1 Pay particular attention to the section marked "effect on matching residency." I never should have responded or brought myself into this post in the first place.

Sorry, but I need to exit now. I hope you find the certainty you're looking for, either way. I hope you find the solace in "holding virologists to account" that you are looking for, although I'm not sure it will happen the way you are suggesting.

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

#604

Post by jeduehr »

COGlory wrote: post #468
jeduehr wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Hi I made this exact calculation (as have others). You can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... Here's an excerpt of the important bit: >>>>>>>>>>>> SARS-CoV-2 is mu…

>We can't just focus on random mutation, we have to think about fixation. Because virus populations don't just evolve in one concerted direction. They evolve /outwards/ in a cloud. It's not simply A to B, it's A to B then back to A then over to C then to D, then back to B, then over to A again, then finally settled on C. A random walk. Fixation relies on selection, which is entirely different in a laboratory environm…

Hi, I want to apologize. I was the one who did not see that you from the very beginning said you did not put much stock into the lab theory, and I basically ignored that. I didn't see it. I also did not read closely enough some other things as well. I was attacking some strawmen, some of which I have seen in the real world and others I have not.

I'm sorry, that colored a lot of my responses to you because I made unfair assumptions about what you were saying. I sent you a longer form email to your protonmail about it.

Anyway, good luck with your work.

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

#605

Post by lostlogin »

nyokodo wrote: post #589
jashmatthews wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NZ has extremely high international air traffic. With 11M international passengers per year Auckland airport is comparable with the big US airports like SFO with 13.8M international. Even kiwis often don’t realize just how busy Auckland airport is!

> NZ has extremely high international air traffic. Maybe per capita but not per se. The US had 241 million international air passengers in 2019[1]. The UK had >160 million[2]. The US has two land borders with significant traffic and the UK had 21.5 million Chunnel passengers in 2019[3]. The volume of passenger shipping is also vastly higher in both countries. NZ also has almost no illegal border crossings. NZ has a m…

Keep in mind that NZ is less than a tenth the population of the UK and less than a 60th of USAs. And those figures are for the country, not a city. The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers.

It is true that in absolute terms NZ has small trade and travel relative to the UK and US, but those factors are far from being the only reasons that NZ has suffered less death and destruction. It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.

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

#606

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

tripletao wrote: post #597
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The RdRp of RaTG13 was published years before the pandemic. The full genome wasn't published, but enough of it was published to identify the virus. SARS-CoV-2, by contrast, is not among any of the sequences published by the WIV over the years.

That's correct. The RdRp was published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016, and that's how the link to the Mojiang mine became known. The first publication on SARS-CoV-2 didn't mention that, instead referring to the virus by its new name RaTG13, but others made the connection: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0322/v2 Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have…

RaTG13 was simply uninteresting before the pandemic. It only became worth writing a full paper on after SARS-CoV-2 was discovered. When they wrote a paper about it, they also gave it a more memorable name.

> The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.

They upload sequences to Genbank (just like they did with RaTG13, years before the pandemic), they have international collaborators, and they give talks at conferences. Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.

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

#607

Post by tripletao »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #606
tripletao wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's correct. The RdRp was published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016, and that's how the link to the Mojiang mine became known. The first publication on SARS-CoV-2 didn't mention that, instead referring to the virus by its new name RaTG13, but others made the connection: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0322/v2 Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have…

RaTG13 was simply uninteresting before the pandemic. It only became worth writing a full paper on after SARS-CoV-2 was discovered. When they wrote a paper about it, they also gave it a more memorable name. > The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection. They upload sequences to Genbank (just like they did with RaTG13, years befor…

> Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.

If that's true, then why has the WIV removed public access from their database? It serves only to remove a valuable scientific resource, and to cast suspicion on China; so why would they do such a thing? Do you genuinely believe that even with the international importance of the topic, no one in China can figure out how to keep a simple database-backed website up?

And again, Deigin et al. report assembly of the genome of a novel coronavirus from contamination in other published reads sequenced in the same facility:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

As far as I can tell, this virus wasn't previously known outside the WIV. Am I mistaken? I emphasize again that their novel virus is relevant not because it's an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 (it's not), but because if the WIV had one unpublished virus, it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous that they might have had others.

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

#608

Post by chrischen »

fighterpilot wrote: post #544
chrischen wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing with covid was it caught everyone by surprise. It’s not like the US even caught on first. It devastated Italy before we even flinched, so that alone is evidence that, at least for the US response, we would have gone to shit no matter who warned us.

The counterfactual is hard to reason about. SARS-1 was contained because international travel was restricted immediately after the first few cases. Once you seed multiple countries with it, competence matters for little.

Sars 1 made it to the US and many countries. Short story was it was contained because it was much more deadly, and transmission was tied to symptoms so it was more easily detected.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-did-the-world-shut-...

One of the first things done by the Trump administration was close borders with China, but it was not enough.

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

#609

Post by mensetmanusman »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #572
mensetmanusman wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite support data is that you can literally shine a laser at the retro reflector they put on the moon to measure distance.

No one's saying we didn't send artefacts to the moon ... {Actually, done prior probably say the moon doesn't even exist, but I think this makes the point - there's a plausible reason for a reflector being there that doesn't require a manned moon-landing. Just saying that for the sake of argument. Though I did see a program as a teenager that presented some convincing 'evidence' that NASA/USA Government were lying to…

In those cases I usually change tactics and steelman believing the moon doesn’t exist (it’s just projected to the sky) ;)

Then you can see if they have the reasoning skills to convince themselves the moon isn’t a projection.

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

#610

Post by nyokodo »

lostlogin wrote: post #605
nyokodo wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NZ has extremely high international air traffic. Maybe per capita but not per se. The US had 241 million international air passengers in 2019[1]. The UK had >160 million[2]. The US has two land borders with significant traffic and the UK had 21.5 million Chunnel passengers in 2019[3]. The volume of passenger shipping is also vastly higher in both countries. NZ also has almost no illegal border crossings. NZ has a m…

Keep in mind that NZ is less than a tenth the population of the UK and less than a 60th of USAs. And those figures are for the country, not a city. The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers. It is true that in absolute terms NZ has small trade and travel relative to the UK and US, but those factors are far from being the only reasons that NZ has suffered less death and destruction. It’s more that the UK an…

> Keep in mind that NZ is less than a tenth the population of the UK and less than a 60th of USAs.

Yes, hence my "per capita" comment. The risk of infection getting into a country is more of a function of how much total traffic it gets rather than the per-capita traffic.

> And those figures are for the country, not a city.

Auckland Airport represents the vast majority of all international traffic into New Zealand, and not just flights.

> The point made that Auckland has a lot of travellers.

Not by absolute number which is what matters most for how easy it is for a virus to find its way in and get established domestically.

> It’s more that the UK and US have done poorly.

This is an important point and I do not belittle it at all. My point isn't to defend the USA and the UK but to point out that the difficulty of NZ's response was enormously easier both absolutely and relatively given the nature of NZ's geography and the fact that the local epidemic had barely started by the lockdowns. NZ has a lot to be proud of in its response, but no reason to be smug.

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