The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? • Hacker News Board

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#101

Post by roca » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:30 AM UTC

nl wrote: post #77

roca wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's true, then there's a straightforward experiment that would boost confidence in the natural-origin theory: culture the earliest available SARS-CoV-2 virus, and see what it's good at infecting other than humans. Surely someone has done this?

Yeah, it's pretty good with Pangolin. This is a good summary of the current consensus: It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian c…

This paper doesn't seem to have anything to do with the experiment I suggested.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#102

Post by throwaway4good » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:31 AM UTC

For an alternative perspective on this - the official WHO report covers the lab hypothesis:

https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...

Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus

And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees.

For more from one of the WHO people:

https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t...

I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#103

Post by swader999 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:31 AM UTC

FpUser wrote: post #30

mromanuk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don’t read articles written by racists. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2834627 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-...

And if the article tells the truth? Why would author's racial preferences matter? You might be surprised how much of modern tech was developed by racists and other bad apples. If you are from the US try reading how your rocket / space industry had been developed for example.

No kidding. Operation paperclip comes to mind.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#104

Post by misja111 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

guesst wrote: post #31

rramadass wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a very good point (and thanks for the links). However i would not let China off the hook until we have figured out exactly what happened. If nobody is held "accountable" (for a certain definition of this word) it is bound to happen again and the next time it most certainly will be "biological warfare". This needs to be treated as seriously and as comprehensively the way we treat Nuclear Weapons.

I really think it's just the other way around. The more people make this about China, the less likely we are to find out the truth. If it's used as a geopolitical chess piece, it will get bogged down forever in political mud, which is kind of where the question is right now anyways. People will decide what they think about it based on how they feel about China. That's crazy.

It's too late to keep politics out of this, politics were at the heart of this from the very start. Without politics the consequences of the outbreak would probably have been much less severe.

In the beginning of January 2020, president Trump was already informed by an advisor who had close contacts in Wuhan that the outbreak was much more severe than China made it look like. But he chose not to act on that, because the USA were in the middle of closing a trade deal with China. However later that month he changed his mind when the first infections in the USA happened, and later even more when a Chinese official came out with a theory that it might actually have been an USA sports team that visited Wuhan in late 2019 that was the source of the Corona outbreak (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...)

So this is not about 'people making this about China', it has been China from the start trying to cover this up and trying to make it about other countries. A more transparent Chinese policy would have given other countries the chance to react early and save thousands of lives.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#105

Post by guesst » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:32 AM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #79

guesst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

I remember an article from about a decade ago where a virologist was saying that China shouldn't be trusted with the highest danger (lvl 4?) labs (IIRC at the time when Westerners were about to or starting to help them build them) because Western labs themselves could barely (or not) be trusted with something as dangerous, and (s)he expected the Chinese to not be able and/or not be willing to fully respect the proced…

Right, but the Western sponsors of the work would have been aware of this. This whole thing was a major dispute among virologists, major enough to end up in a NYT editorial. That makes the lab escape scenario an international failure, not a national one.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#106

Post by johndags » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:35 AM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #93

misja111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There was an outbreak in a deserted mine in South China in the early 2000's, 6 cleaning workers got seriously ill with symptoms similar to current Corona. See e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815... The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals. In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the…

Also,this sars cov-2 virus will not infect bats. That really hurts the 'it came from the bats' theory.

That’s not how viruses work.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#107

Post by roca » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:38 AM UTC

throwaway4good wrote: post #100

throwaway4good wrote: post #96

Nice layout of the dominating conspiracy theory that is constantly being repeated on various alt-right media. Basically COVID-19 is the result of evil and illegal experiments setup by Anthony Fauci (US researcher and long time civil servant) at the Wuhan virology lab and covered up by WHO scientists. It is as idiotic as it sounds.

For an alternative perspective on this - the official WHO report covers the lab hypothesis: https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the... Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus And unlike the author here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees. For more from one of the WHO people: https:…

Unfortunately the doctor's report amounts to "we asked them if the virus escaped from their lab and they said no".

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#108

Post by harry8 » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

throwaway4good wrote: post #102

For an alternative perspective on this - the official WHO report covers the lab hypothesis: https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the... Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees. For more from one of the WHO people: http…

Heavy on "we looked at and we found x." Light on reasoning on why the conclusions are drawn and from what evidence.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#109

Post by refurb » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

There is value in just the truth being known, even if nothing comes of it.

The Truth and Reconciliation tribunals the UN puts on (e.g. South African apartheid) are a good example. Just achieving a common understanding of what happened has value all by itself.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#110

Post by bsder » Fri, May 07, 2021, 7:48 AM UTC

swader999 wrote: post #93

misja111 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There was an outbreak in a deserted mine in South China in the early 2000's, 6 cleaning workers got seriously ill with symptoms similar to current Corona. See e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.5815... The leader of the Wuhan team went there with a team to collect samples and animals. In the early days of Covid, those samples were re-examined and it turned out that the genome of the…

Also,this sars cov-2 virus will not infect bats. That really hurts the 'it came from the bats' theory.

Define "will not infect bats".

Bats have a very unusual immune system in that they can harbor viruses without the virus killing the bat or the bat killing the virus.

It's one of the things that makes them ferociously good incubators for a cross-species mammalian plague. The other things are that they fly (so can cover larger distances than most mammals) and have communal living (so can transmit to each other very readily).