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

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

#241

Post by Kognito »

onethought wrote: post #231
didericis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lean towards the lab hypothesis due to China’s behavior early in the pandemic. I have a difficult time understanding why they would have been arresting doctors who were talking about the virus if it were natural. The transition from arresting doctors to locking down cities doesn’t make much sense otherwise. You could argue they had motivation to arrest doctors talking about a natural infection if they thought they…

Arresting Drs talking about a possible repeat of SARS is something China clearly wouldn’t want out unless it absolutely had to. The effects on markets, general panic etc are not nothing issues. Later discovering they really did have a problem and it was even worse than SARS going to a full lockdown at the main crossroads city right before Chinese New Year (the largest human migration event). The motivation feels very…

I don’t know why any mention of a lab escape automatically triggers people to start shouting “xenophobe”.

There’s nothing particularly new about lab escapes, they happen quite frequently. And given the presence of a bio-lab studying coronaviruses just a short distance from the site of the first reported cases, why would any rational person not consider that as a possibility?

I don’t think you even have to go down the “bio weapon” route here. It could be as simple as a worker infecting themselves with a natural sample unwittingly. Following your logic then, I think China would be incredibly unlikely to admit a lab escape of a natural sample now given the devastation it has caused. It’d be a huge loss of face and draw questions towards China’s competence.

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

#242

Post by astrange »

johncena33 wrote: post #222
astrange wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's a natural sample that escaped a lab, cleaning up the lab doesn't necessarily help anything because it's not the actual reservoir of the virus.

This sort of reasoning seems very ideologically and politically motivated. It's sad that we live in political climate where millions of people died and almost every single person's life in the planet has been affected and it's absolutely okay to make a statement that "no investigation is necessary".

I did not say that. But I am opposed to assuming the most cynical thing must be the truth.

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

#243

Post by Hitton »

ransElectronics wrote: post #113

The question isn't whether or not it escaped from a lab. The question is whether or not China released it from their lab deliberately.

Why would they do that? It would be trivial to release it somewhere else so it couldn't be linked back to them.

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

#244

Post by darkerside »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #124

I don't really think it matters a whole lot whether it jumped species or was created in a lab. I think the issue is that there are nearly 8 billion people on the planet and that fact has somehow fundamentally changed how disease spreads and mutates. We need to be figuring out how to deal with that. Wondering where it came from is mostly neither here nor there. We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments i…

> We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab.

No magic required, we can just stop. Or better yet and more realistic, update and enforce regulations on this type of research.

Personally, I don't care whether it was a lab or not. The fact we haven't disproven it means it's not all that unlikely, and I think we should reform research practices now. We don't need to prove it did happen if we already know it could happen.

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

#245

Post by nxpnsv »

Clewza313 wrote: post #116
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…

So I've been pretty skeptical of the lab theory to date, but: > We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was fou…

> This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc.

Possibly also worth to consider that there are very high incentives to publishing in China, as far as I understand authors can often get rewarded for publications

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

#246

Post by didericis »

onethought wrote: post #231
didericis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lean towards the lab hypothesis due to China’s behavior early in the pandemic. I have a difficult time understanding why they would have been arresting doctors who were talking about the virus if it were natural. The transition from arresting doctors to locking down cities doesn’t make much sense otherwise. You could argue they had motivation to arrest doctors talking about a natural infection if they thought they…

Arresting Drs talking about a possible repeat of SARS is something China clearly wouldn’t want out unless it absolutely had to. The effects on markets, general panic etc are not nothing issues. Later discovering they really did have a problem and it was even worse than SARS going to a full lockdown at the main crossroads city right before Chinese New Year (the largest human migration event). The motivation feels very…

If this did come from a lab, it was an accident. I think it’s unreasonable to consider the spread in China intentional, as there’s no reasonable motivation to do so.

The main difference from SARS is we know there is a virology lab in Wuhan researching coronaviruses right across from the wet market considered the epicenter.

I don’t know enough about the reaction to SARS to know how similar it was, but my understanding was they were similarly draconian internally, and were trying to keep it relatively quiet, but I am not aware of any arrests of doctors early on in SARS outbreaks.

The plausibility of Covid escaping from a lab does not make all viruses plausibly escaped from labs. The reason it’s more plausible for covid are the initial reactions and the proximity of the epicenter to a virology lab studying covid.

I fail to see how it’s xenophobic to consider the lab leak plausible. If anything a natural spread relies on the assumption that the wet market was engaged in unhygienic practices and that someone foreign may have eaten an infected bat.

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

#247

Post by fabbari »

tomp wrote: post #187
inciampati wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late…

This sounds a plausible explanation, but I see one problem: there’s a big fear that the vaccines don’t work on the more infectious strains (South African, Brazilian, Indian, ...). Vaccines target the spike protein. So surely if the spike protein doesn’t evolve (and isn’t responsible for the increased virality of these strains), then the vaccines should still work against it?

The vaccines do work on variants [0] with different degrees of efficacy. This actually demonstrates that the virus - after infecting millions of people over a year - hasn't significantly changed the spike protein.

Also: major changes in he spike protein could impact the ability of the virus to infect humans, so -- there is that.

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMc2104974

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

#248

Post by evrydayhustling »

zby wrote: post #146
ximeng wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... Here is a paper that states that the furin cleavage site appears naturally in a number of viruses. I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science…

The natural origin hypothesis is also pushed for ideological reasons - at this level of meta analysis we are at a stalemate. The article was good at revealing that there is not just ideology - but also material interests involved and that the two prestigious letters that were so categorical in dismissing the lab escape hypothesis were quite a bit tainted by conflicts of interests.

If we abstract away the specific actors/motivations, this reminds me a bit of the Oumuamua debate. "Man made" and "natural" are both very broad theories that admit many details and are thus hard to falsify. But I wonder to what degree we agree about:

(1) Which category (if either) has an advantage by Occam's razor? (2) Which category (if either) is more easily falsifiable? (Meaning easier to determine improbable, since it is hard to falsify them entirely)

For me, I see neither having an advantage on (1), but on (2) there are a finite number of relevant, well-known lab techniques that could be investigated.

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

#249

Post by prox »

ximeng wrote: post #169
prox wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is great at spelling a few things out, personally I feel enticed by it in some form. It is the job of other scientists to dispel any wrong or inaccurate information. Usually the more interesting questions are of the kind of what -isn’t- being said, of what information isn’t being related or investigated.

I agree it's enticing. I tend to agree with the scientist quoted that it's a conspiracy theory, but if it is then it's a really good one, and this article is well written. If I'm right the reason it's not being analysed or investigated is that from a scientific perspective it's just not an interesting question, rather than for a deeper ideological reason as suggested in this article. I drew the conclusion that this f…

Exactly, and concerning your last paragraph since nobody seems responsible (and who is able to write such a rebuttal) it isn’t done. This is a problem because sometimes it can harm the information sphere around this, which is already loaded in camps and so on. Especially when it comes to China which has a questionable track record on sharing information which doesn’t paint them in a good light.

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

#250

Post by XorNot »

darkerside wrote: post #223
pizza234 wrote: post #192

I'm very confused by the article. There has been an extensive analysis by a virologist on Reddit[¹], who claimed that, very simply, SARS-COV2 is a so-called "mosaic" virus, while man-made viruses are inevitably "chimera" ones. The article does not seem to make this distinction. The virologist also chimed on HN (besides, calling BS on people who were, out of ignorance, spreading false beliefs), but it seems he's not p…

It's a false dichotomy between natural and manmade. What about a virus that naturally occurred in a bat cave, was studied in a lab, and escaped from the lab later? What if that virus mutated unintentionally while in the lab? And what if its mutation was encouraged by researchers in the lab? Occam's Razor, to me, suggests that it's more likely the virus came from the nearby infectious disease lab than from the wet mar…

Why couldn't it have been transported into the city on trucks and vehicles coming from sampling sites? Or hitchhiked in bat guano on a worker's boot who visited the wet market?

You've generated 2 possible outcomes and gone "yes these are the only possibilities". But why? There was a whole train of transportation bringing things into the city for the lab.

Of course, if it was from that timeline, then the whole "lab escape" thing becomes a bit problematic doesn't it? Because, why would it need to be by activities of the lab specifically? It wouldn't - coz it could really just have rode in on anything. Which would of course mean that actually, it's probably way more likely that a virus which can infect humans, starting out in the wild, and being sample by a lab, probably infected a bunch of humans anyway because it didn't stop being in the wild when it was collected by researchers...

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