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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?

#491

Post by gonehome »

dang wrote: post #482
gonehome wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me about it is not only did it take a long time for the “truth to win”, but mainstream media orgs actively suppressed it because of tribal stupidity. It was used as an example of “fake news”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-... > “ Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republ…

Ok, I checked. The users who downvoted the comment are well-established users with no obvious concentration on the topics you're posting about, and I didn't see any of the signs of suspicious behavior that we normally look for. Actually I recognize some of the usernames as good HN contributors, who are interested in and participating on a variety of topics. You might recognize some of them too. I also downvoted the c…

Thanks - appreciate the thoughtful response and you checking for me. I'll be better about this.

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

#492

Post by nyolfen »

matzab wrote: post #145
Pepe1vo wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the OP, it appears that scientists knew exactly where to insert a furin cleavage site: >“Since 1992 the virology community has known that the one sure way to make a virus deadlier is to give it a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction in the laboratory,” writes Steven Quay, a biotech entrepreneur interested in the origins of SARS2.

That's such a mischaracterisation, I don't even know where to start. That Quay-guy obviously searched for "furin" on pubmed, found some papers (that don't even say that - and most definitely not for any coronaviruses) and thought it fit his thesis. If only viruses and infections were that simple!

he left out the most damning part:

> “At least 11 gain-of-function experiments, adding a furin site to make a virus more infective, are published in the open literature, including [by] Dr. Zhengli Shi, head of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

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

#493

Post by searine »

flavius29663 wrote: post #383
xjlin0 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recombination virus is commonly made everywhere, including US or China. Researchers made it mostly for getting genes for later use, antibody/antigen analysis in this case. Using virus/BAC is a very common lab technique and is very different from "intentionally making virus as a weapon to kill human". You can reconfirm with any of your wet-lab biotech majored friends. Please run an sequence analysis between rWIV1-SHC0…

you are right, except sars-cov-2 happened to appear 500 meters away from said lab...

Maybe the reason the lab exists there is because wild coronaviruses appear in that region.

Which ever way you frame it, it is correlation, not causation. Poor evidence at best.

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

#494

Post by guesst »

throwaway4good wrote: post #346
throwaway4good wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There is an investegative group from the WHO interviewing the Wuhan lab people and looking at various form of documentation. The lab leak proponents claim that they are all lying and all the documents are fraudulent. The lab leak proponents have the burden of proof and IMHO kinda should shut up until they can carry that burden.

Oh - I forgot - the investigation is comprimised ... Insanity!

I agree that compromised isn't a smart word to use about this, but even if you think all these questions have been settled, I'm surprised you don't agree that it is bad optics to have the investigator to be the funder of the research being investigated, and even worse when he says things like: well, we asked them and they said no, so that's that. The conflict of interest couldn't be more obvious.

It's the media's job to investigate conflicts of interest, so the fact that they didn't looked into that, and that they took Daszak's original so-called debunking at face value, is bad optics on another level. It has left a credibility vacuum, so it's unsurprising that articles like the current one are coming in from the margins.

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

#495

Post by mrkramer »

_asummers wrote: post #258
mrkramer wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you conspiracy theory can mean pretty much anything for example during WW2 people couldn't grasp that Nazi regime had extermination camps until Allies entered East Europe and Germany and filmed the horrors of those camps. Some people could've called extermination camps conspiracy theory and regard it as propaganda against Hitler and Nazi Germany.

When entering the camps, they made sure to document well, because they knew no one could possibly believe the extent of the atrocities without seeing themselves.

That's what I meant so that some people can not call the holocaust a conspiracy theory.

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

#496

Post by dang »

briandear wrote: post #475
Bayesian_bro wrote: post #300

The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01A…

> I think everyone had the best of intentions Then why did China silence Taiwan at the WHO? Why did doctors get arrested? Why did China lie about human-to-human transmission? Why are schools still closed in many parts of the US? Why was a travel ban for Chinese travelers called xenophobic while the UK travel ban wasn’t? Best of intentions, my ass. This was political adrenaline from almost the start.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. This is a noticeable step in the wrong direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#497

Post by [deleted] »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #436
newacct583 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's literally not. I don't have the book, your other link is a podcast. And (this is the really important part) literally no one else, not even Breitbart or conservative link farms who would slurp this up like candy, is reporting that Rogin said it. So I choose to believe that you're just wrong about what he said. Again, Fauci covertly directing funds to an area of research that the medical community has recognized…

Thank you for this fascinating insight into a stranger’s decision making process. I am not being ironic

[deleted]

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

#498

Post by arisAlexis »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #198
roenxi wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose. Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.

If we're going to play at paranoia and assume the virus was engineered, it doesn't necessarily follow that the release was an accidental leak. It would be trivially easy for a hostile power to covertly release a pathogen in another country. It would also be trivially easy to engineer simultaneous release in multiple locations. It would be less easy but not impossible to take an existing pathogen during a pandemic, en…

We are not playing paranoia. And you have a valid point that in this scenario it's not crystal clear that it was accidental.

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

#499

Post by arisAlexis »

As a layman I found the odds of this happening near the only bsl4 lab dealing with coronaviruses so improbable I didn't even need to wait for great articles like these to make up my mind. The politics of it are extremely complicated. What do we do if indeed this happened? Can we drive ourselves to bigger catastrophes in form of war?
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