Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out • Hacker News Board

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

#641

Post by drran » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 11:01 AM UTC

stjohnswarts wrote: post #619

drran wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first covid-like epidemic was in November 2019 in South part of the Russian Federation, where Vector lab is located: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMh11FtfaP0 Turn on subtitles, then select automatic translation -> English in options.

This seems rather unlikely based on how quickly covid spreads in countries that don't take many precautions or slow to quarantine (like the USA and Russia) . Only countries that lock down fast and decisively like China, Korea, and Taiwan kept it under semblence of control initially.

Yep, covid spread quickly over Russian Federation, but it was unnoticed until first test systems arrived. Quote:

"The first practical use of the test system for the detection of antibodies to COVID-19, developed by the Novosibirsk State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology" Vector ", was held among the employees of the FSBI" National Medical and Surgical Center. N.I. Pirogov" Ministry of Health of Russia. Testing was carried out in 204 employees of the center, who had no symptoms of acute respiratory viral infections in the previous two months. According to the results of testing, antibodies to coronavirus were detected in 30 employees of the Center working in the" red "zone and at the entrance to it", - the message says.

https://news.rambler.ru/community/44036116-immunitet-k-koron...

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

#642

Post by soonnow » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

nyokodo wrote: post #484

Robotbeat wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assign non-negligible probability to each of them. I don't know. 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). These viruses are a threat to all humanity. I just want us to fight them better and help everyone. I think it's super important that we both simultaneously hol…

> But I hate the stupid racism and hate around it. What is most astonishingly stupid about this particular racism is that while the CCP doesn’t come off looking great in significant ways, Taiwan comes away looking spectacular! Japan, Korea and Vietnam also have a lot to be commended for major aspects of their responses! Asians in the United States have on average done an excellent job of staying safe and therefore ke…

Singapore and Thailand also have done quite well so far.

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

#643

Post by soonnow » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC

tripletao wrote: post #452

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-…

Deigin has said explicitly elsewhere that if SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, he believes it arose from manipulation of a novel, unpublished virus collected by the WIV from nature. This makes any arguments based on distance from existing, published viruses irrelevant. RaTG13 was such a virus (collected 2013, published post-pandemic), but it's very unlikely to be the ancestor for the reasons that you note. No one…

That was a great writeup that I enjoyed reading a lot. It dumbed it down just enough that I didn't feel completely lost while still being deep enough. Now the only problem is that the people that spew Asian hate and call it Kung Flu are likely not the people who read 34 page virology for dummies documents.

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

#644

Post by ricksunny » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

jeduehr wrote: post #264

ChemSpider wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alina Chan seems at least equally qualified and disagrees: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1374108473571557377

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…

Coronavirus work at the WIV was treated as BSL2/3. Not BSL4. Very different biosecurity protocol in play.

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

#645

Post by trevelyan » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 4:06 PM UTC

jeduehr wrote: post #558

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…

>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. Why would this support either hypothesis? The cleavage site clearly has nothing to do with RATG-13 a…

> Why would this support either hypothesis?

So why did you bring it up? The observation doesn't support zoonotic hypothesis at all, although it could support lab leak if we assume GOF was done on a natural or modified virus with a higher IFR rate, such as the ones known to be present in Tongguan where WIV sampled RaTG13.

Similarly -- it isn't clear why you are talking about the cleavage site. You appear to think it argues against some sort of hypothesis. But you haven't stated what you think the most credible lab-leak scenario is and why. It isn't even clear that COV came from RaTG13.

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

#646

Post by markhahn » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #7

newacct583 wrote: post #2

Almost no theories can be "ruled out" in this space. Viruses evolve in crazy and essentially unobservable ways. Nonetheless, we know there was a close relative documented in bats on the same continent within a comparable timeframe. The clearly obvious hypothesis is that animal transmission was the vector, for the simple reason that this is the way every single other pandemic, human or otherwise, has happened. There i…

Occam's Razor doesn't really apply to this one, because each side has different priors on which theory is actually the "simplest." Given that, as far as I know, we don't have a single human case documented before those in Wuhan - something which a) should have been likely and b) China would be highly incentivized to root out since it would disprove the lab hypothesis, it implies patient zero was probably in Wuhan. If…

there's no reason to think that case0 originated in Wuhan, so the lab coincidence is pretty weak. Wuhan is a big city with lots of travelers.

It would be nice to have a well-documented index case, but also quite unreasonable given what we know about asymptomatic spreading.

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

#647

Post by ricksunny » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 4:26 PM UTC

jeduehr wrote: post #309

ChemSpider wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That SARS-COV-2 was cooked up in a lab This is a straw man argument. No one is seriously claiming that this is a "cooked up" (artificially created) virus. It could be a natural virus that escaped the lab.

Hi, I actually wrote a direct response to this idea in my original post. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0... (Footnote 1) Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that. As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of…

(reposting sans downmodded comment)

Here is fresh evidence (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 sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute:

https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/137939900576396083...

The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study particularly) claim that they knew what viruses WIV researchers were working on.

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

#648

Post by trevelyan » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

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…

> I personally have no idea if it was shut down for a week in September, that's a very specific thing. Do you know exactly when a company in your line of work started doing work from home?

I'm quite familiar with my own industry and could easily fact-check claims of this specificity or follow-up with people who would know. If I could not do this, I would not be making appeals to authority in public.

> Sure I could ask around and probably figure that out. But I also don't want to, because I'm not interested in fueling your conspiracy theory when I have no idea what relevance that would have to the likelihood of a lab leak.

Conspiracy theory? This is a claim by the US Government. And you're clearly interested in "debunking" it given the amount you have written on the topic and your holding proactive AMAs. So - yeah - this leaves anyone reading your comments wondering (1) why you are rebutting strawmen arguments, (2) why you don't appear familiar with the facts [i.e. pushed the wet market hypothesis long after we knew it wasn't the origin], and (3) why you still aren't addressing basic, specific and addressable claims from sources with assumed credibility who take a different position.

> Science doesn't work the way you want it to work

The sad thing is that it does. You figure out what the most viable hypotheses are and then evaluate the evidence. Update your priors based on what you find and repeat the process. That's how you end up being able to make statements about Occam's Razor. Quite different from building strawmen, knocking them down and calling anyone who asks questions you a conspiracy theorist.

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

#649

Post by trevelyan » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

jeduehr wrote: post #568

jeduehr wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

I don't see the point. We know that zoonotic transmission and natural origin is possible. The question is about how likely it is to be the origin of COV. No-one who has been to Wuhan would expect zoonotic transfer. And certainly not of aersolized bat coronaviruses.

afaict the strongest evidence against lab-origin is the claim that COV was circulating in Italy in early autumn 2019, although I've read lately that the tests claiming this are now apparently suspect. go figure.

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

#650

Post by Robotbeat » Sun, Apr 11, 2021, 5:12 PM UTC

darkerside wrote: post #631

Robotbeat wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is not a near-island like the US, tho. It’s a micro state with massive travel to/from the rest of Italy (which was hit early).

Taiwan had high mask usage early on. That would’ve helped a lot in the US.

Testing was very successful, actually, in places like Singapore. Didn’t help that there was official discouragement of wearing masks followed by culture-war mask avoidance in the US.