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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

#631

Post by darkerside »

Robotbeat wrote: post #571
darkerside wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Being small kind of a bigger deal than being an island. Air travel doesn’t care much if you’re an island or not. The US is practically an island in many senses except for Mexico and Canada, but the virus didn’t come over land, it came over air in multiple places, especially from folks going on Alpine ski trips. If we had shut down air travel early on globally (not just China...) and pursued a vigorous in-country test…

Unlikely imo. False reliance on testing has created more issues than it helped. Look at Taiwan (another small island nation). They don't bother testing. If you are sick, it's assumed you have COVID and you quarantine for two weeks. Much smarter and safer imo.

I disagree, and think small island nations do have much better chances. Otherwise we'd probably have great success stories in places like Andorra, Armenia, and Vatican City. I'm sure island countries to be more self reliant, with fewer major transport hubs that can be locked down.

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

#632

Post by darkerside »

lostlogin wrote: post #601
darkerside wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See my other comment. Neither have Andorra, Armenia, or Vatican City.

I think from what we've seen, you need to be a small island nation AND have a strong policy response to have a chance at averting this crisis.

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

#633

Post by AndrewBissell »

tinus_hn wrote: post #514
AndrewBissell wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course; if we wait around for documentary proof of covert operations to emerge it almost invariably arrives long after the point where anything can be done with the information. There are oddities in the whole timeline which stand out to me. The social media videos of people keeling over in streets and buildings in Wuhan from the virus, which doesn't appear to be a genuine phenomenon of its pathology and therefore…

Well, dreaming about how the world would be able to organize such a conspiracy does sound like conspiracy theory to me. But that is not my point, what I wanted to say is that, even if it turns out the coronavirus was leaked from a lab, practically it is impossible to prove that this was intentional.

If the release was intentional then there was almost certainly a great deal of contingency planning in place, distribution of a prediscovered cure, etc. The release itself is easy enough to conceal, the planning to take maximum advantage of it, not so much.

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

#634

Post by zdkl »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #556
zdkl wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the point is there is almost no way the party would sanction an external investigation, regardless of the actual situation.

I find this very surprising, but I suppose it could be true. Can you put some meat on the bones somehow? An anecdote or something?

Without going into subjective current event interpretation, the phenomenon is well illustrated in HBO's Chernobyl with the plant engineers and manager, or the show trial. Their discounting of material facts in favour of "the expected answer" by higher-ups is an endemic (and probably rational) strategy in response to ruthless (central plan+party politics)'d organisations.

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

#635

Post by vagrantJin »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #554
fighterpilot wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-Chinese racism is stupid and toxic, yes, but you're missing the point. People here generally aren't blaming China because that's where COVID-19 originated. That would be stupid. No, they're blaming the CCP for covering it up in the early days, which allowed it to spread and become the global pandemic which it became. Big difference. It's not China's fault that COVID originated there (lab leak or otherwise). It i…

We should also blame the CCP for screwing up containment. Chinese culture is still deeply corrupt in ways that prevent honest and open discussion of safety issues. Honest and open discussion of safety issues should be table stakes for facilities like that in Wuhan. The rest of the world should be pressuring China to not operate these sorts of high-risk enterprises.

Heh?

Who is we? Who is pressuring the US to do anything?

DPRC is a sovereign state and can do as they damn well please just like the US.

Get off your high horse.

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

#636

Post by EMM_386 »

COGlory wrote: post #357
EMM_386 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that I am uncomfortable with the "hand-waviness" of the OP's response. If you are a virologist, I would really like your opinion on the science of the following document: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bies.2020002... Like you, I don't enjoy when facts I post are de-railed without actually addressing any of them. It happens a lot, but I try my best to not let them be the last word. T…

I'm unfortunately going to give an equally hand-wavy response. There's nothing in there that strikes me as factually incorrect (I could be wrong though because I am not an expert on these viruses). I did a brief genome analysis myself - only ~5% of the arginines are encoded by the CGG codon. It's also true that those two introduce the furin site, and it's hypothesized that the furin site is critical to the viruses ab…

Thanks for that, I'm very glad I asked. Your hypothesis around the restriction site is rather eye opening. The scientists involved in this study have faced intense online campaigns against them.

https://twitter.com/Rossana38510044/status/13806444823669841...

> the scientists among us should be trying to properly falsify it to the best of our ability.

This is precisely why I am bothered this has been placed into "conspiracy theory" land, due to a lot of political reasons and a whole lot of online pressure with those "hand-wavy" arguments. The same type of arguments you originally did not accept. I get them constantly when I post facts, and the are meant specifically to try to steer the discussion away from anything I was pointing out, to get that last word in.

Did SARS-CoV-2, with its affinity for human ACE2, leak from a lab in Wuhan that was doing known gain of function experiments dealing with CoV and human ACE2?

Or did it somehow show up in a market right next to the lab, with "hand-wavy" explanations as to how that happened?

The science seems to strongly point to one of those. Since access to the lab has been completely shut down, and historical information on the web has been systematically being removed, finding a smoking gun is difficult. But I feel an extremely strong case can be made with circumstantial evidence.

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

#637

Post by tjs8rj »

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…

For your second point: it’s not racist, but not because the US was funding it, but because it’s possible to criticize a regime and failures of a country without criticizing the ethnicity of people. The only reason racism ever gets conflated here is because people are implicitly aware of the fact that China is an ethnostate for all intents and purposes.

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

#638

Post by labawi »

redis_mlc wrote: post #472
anonymousisme wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a white American in Beijing during the 9/11 attacks, I experienced lots of not-so-surprising behavior from my Chinese hosts. Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. Tensions were still high from the "Hainan Island Incident" only a few months earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident

> Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. I don't see how their opinion matters, since they're misinformed and orchestrated by the CCP. The Hainan incident was caused by a Chinese fighter pilot running into a US surveillance plane. The former is agile, the latter is not, so that's the fault of the fighter. Also, a plane in distress doesn't need permission to land. For the CCP to make a big deal out of…

FWIW, when we heard of the incident, I think the prevailing sentiment was that America deserved it, and we are unrelated to China (in Europe).

America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror for what seems as both good and bad reasons. After all the one-sided "interventions", I find it hard to disagree that America (not the Americans affected) deserved something in return.

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

#639

Post by redis_mlc »

labawi wrote: post #638
redis_mlc wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many Chinese felt that America deserved what they got. I don't see how their opinion matters, since they're misinformed and orchestrated by the CCP. The Hainan incident was caused by a Chinese fighter pilot running into a US surveillance plane. The former is agile, the latter is not, so that's the fault of the fighter. Also, a plane in distress doesn't need permission to land. For the CCP to make a big deal out of…

FWIW, when we heard of the incident, I think the prevailing sentiment was that America deserved it, and we are unrelated to China (in Europe). America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror for what seems as both good and bad reasons. After all the one-sided "interventions", I find it hard to disagree that America (not the Americans affected) deserved something in return.

> America has made a lot of enemies and inflicted a lot of damage and terror

That's simply false, as shown by reactions when the US doesn't get involved as "global policeman." A country that chooses the communist ideology chooses to be an enemy of the US, not the other way around.

There's this opinion by snowflakes that they can comment on what they don't understand, but that's just childish.

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

#640

Post by ricksunny »

dang wrote: post #600
ricksunny wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old. And here is fresh evidence that labs in Wuhan have worked on unpublished coronaviruses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources. This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequenc…

> By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old. In this context, that does not read like a genuine welcome but rather as a sinister insinuation. That is seriously against the site guidelines. Please read and stick to them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . We want HN to be a place that's open to newcomers, not a smug and insular backwater. Internet users (including HN…

Thanks, and I upvoted this mod comment. In my defense, I'll voice that the offending line contributes to the conversation, as it asserts the interlocutor has an axe to grind by setting up an account for just this article and commenting extensively on it. Of course however I'm sure many HN users ordinarily and appropriately register on the basis of one such stirring subject or another. Anyway I would edit out the offending line if I had the ability to.
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