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More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

nytimes.com

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Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#151

Post by munk-a »

astrobe_ wrote: post #128
adrianb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it. Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the…

To be fair the lab escape scenario looks a lot like a conspiracy theory. One should remember that around that time the "flat earth" theory was still going on (IIRC), and there are similar lab escape theories about AIDS.

There have always been conspiracy theories but I think it's more relevant to note how quickly this theory was co-opted by anti-asian racism and converted into a version where that lab escape was interpreted to be an intention action to cause a world wide pandemic.

I really sympathize with both sides here - I think it's quite possible a lab accident was involved with the virus escaping into the world... but the benefit we'd get from knowing that would mostly involve labs being a lot more careful with PPE and I think we've seen PPE usage tick way up and the dangerous involved with disease handling get a lot larger of a spotlight. And, I also think that beating up or harassing Asian-Americans is wrong and if we need to tell a big societal level lie to people to get them to stop then I'm okay with that.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#152

Post by fullshark »

kossTKR wrote: post #134
antattack wrote: post #48

It's not going to be possible to prove lab origin w/o Chinese cooperation. However, lab origin should not be totally dismissed, so we can have a discussion about safety of gain-of-function research now, rather than waiting for some verifiable event to happen in the future.

Why are people acting like China is doing anything in isolation? The Wuhan Lab was funded through the american Ecohealth alliance, and a dozen american scientists probably know just as much as the Chinese do. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432

I don't know who is acting like that, but that's the kind of thing that becomes very interesting if you believe COVID leaked from a lab and not appeared suddenly at a wet market.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#153

Post by [deleted] »

ChemSpider wrote: post #93
Dah00n wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be but we have hardly started looking yet. We haven't even found a source of SARS from 2002 yet.. > "... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11... Edit: Added source.

Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to WHO report) and found nothing. Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in…

[deleted]

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#154

Post by querez »

hayst4ck wrote: post #120

A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not true. People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing…

I'm sorry, but this feels like conspiracy-theory peddling and FUD. What the linked site calls "evidence", is are at best "hints" or "possible signs". No evidence anywhere. Instead, you have wildly weird texts like section 8.3 ("A Note on Biowarfare") that literally just reads "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program.". It's completely and utterly disconnected from the rest of the text. Why even bring it up? Just so you can throw the word "bioweapon" out there?

Plus, the site always seems to see "causation" whenever there is correlation, and never even stops to admit that there's the possibility they got the chain of causation backwards: if there was a lot of coronavirus-carrying bats in the region wouldn't it make sense to build a research institute there? And publish on all the findings? The site goes on to cite papers and job postings that are exactly the kinds of research (and job postings) you'd expect from a site that focuses on coronavirus related research. Yet the linked site makes it sound ominous, when it is utterly mundane.

So one has to ask who actually produced this site to begin with? To quote the page:

> "We are an anonymous group of researchers"

Very convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#155

Post by prox »

throwkeep wrote: post #131
hayst4ck wrote: post #120

A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not true. People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing…

> Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look The origin was politicized in the US and taboo to even question it, so few did. It was labeled a crazy conspiracy theory by the media and that shut the door on open inquiry until recently.

This is why there is a big difference between skepticism and conspiracy. A skeptic digs deeper to gather more data and facts, a conspiracy loosely joins a few data points and makes a poor conjecture.

Conspiracy is political ammunition, skepticism is healthy debate and gladly welcomes more data.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#156

Post by pishpash »

hayst4ck wrote: post #120

A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not true. People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing…

This is not evidence of anything in particular, without some Bayesian calibration:

- What other kinds of virus research besides coronavirus was done at the WIV? - What proportion of coronaviruses are anyway derived from bats? - What were the outcomes of the instances of poor PPE/safety measures with regard to containment?

Without this calibration, all you've written is innuendo.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#157

Post by fullshark »

mirekrusin wrote: post #18

What's the point? Regardless if it leaked from the lab or not we have to prepare for the future the same way.

I see a lot of these appeals for ignorance in these conversations. There's so many obvious reasons why we'd want to learn to truth, such as learning how to prevent it from happening again and to determine if gain of function research is too risky.

The only reason I see why we should want to remain ignorant is it will possibly embarrass China.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#158

Post by amayne »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #124
TacticalCoder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no virologist but of all the places on earth we are supposed to believe that, by cheer coincidence, the outbreak happened in that one city that happens to do research and have patents on lab-modified bat viruses and that it doesn't have anything to do with that lab. I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.

To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses for shipwrecks. That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out

"Wuhan is ~1000km away from SARS spillover zones. Its human population was even used as a negative (no SARS) control group."

Via @Ayjchan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1394327680456220672?s=20

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#159

Post by franciscop »

syshum wrote: post #123
kossTKR wrote: post #112

What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression among certain virologist: "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, please unfollow me. " https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1390720308265508871 Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanati…

>>I know the issue is politicized This is becoming more and more common, Pure Science is almost never practiced anymore. The Hard sciences like Immunology, virology, general medicine used to be some what insulated from politics however in the last few years all sciences are no longer data driven. You form a conclusion then find the facts that fit your narrative, and if your narrative is not the "correct" one you bett…

Is it? Since the beginning the science has been in conflict with politics (or the Church, or the Kings/Emperors before democracy). Notable political/social opposition to the sciences are well documented. Couple of examples: doctors washing their hands was a controversial issue [2] and how being able to eat "higher-class" food killed thousands of Japanese, who rejected eating other food even when it was known it was killing them [3].

[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2020/09/18/what...

[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...

[3] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#160

Post by [deleted] »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #124
TacticalCoder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no virologist but of all the places on earth we are supposed to believe that, by cheer coincidence, the outbreak happened in that one city that happens to do research and have patents on lab-modified bat viruses and that it doesn't have anything to do with that lab. I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.

To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses for shipwrecks. That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out

[deleted]
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