Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

vanityfair.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 1001 posts

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#531

Post by carlivar »

generalizations wrote: post #477
justicezyx wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does no one else remember the videos out of China with people laying dead in the streets, falling over as they walked, convulsing behind the steering wheels of cars? Could you provide a link? I never saw such video on YouTube.

I can confirm the videos existed. Saw them when they were posted, back in Jan 2020. They were never on youtube, though, that I'm aware of.

I saw these too, mostly on Twitter. I shorted Boeing based on them and made some nice money. My friends didn't believe me that this was looking real bad.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#533

Post by teorema »

Jarwain wrote: post #392
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation Or explicitly creating chimeric coronaviruses, which has been the state of the are for some time. Here's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/265520…

I've read a few articles, skimmed a few papers and sent them to friends. The counterargument is that there still aren't enough similarities. The mutations on covid 19 are Really Different compared to the known and studied viruses. If it was a lab leak of an engineered chimera, you'd be able to see that A proteins came from virus X and B proteins came from virus Y and Z, but that hasn't been shown to be the case. From…

Of course that says little about SARS-CoV-2 relative to all the other viruses we don't know about, either sitting in a Chinese government lab, or in a bat cave somewhere.

I guess I don't find the argument "we can't figure out how to reconstruct SARS-COV-2 from known viruses" very convincing on either side.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#534

Post by ngc248 »

justicezyx wrote: post #394
frickenhamster wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China supported this in a psyop. Remember when they tried repeatedly to push the origin of the virus to Italy? I'm ethnically Chinese, so I'm in contact with a lot of mainlanders. The brainwashing is very effective. Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator, they'll take it deeply personally when you say anything that threatens the whole China # 1 narrative. All they had…

> Even if most mainlanders know that their state media is bogus, and that Xi is a dictator I am an ethnic Chinese, I don't see this impression at all. Disclaimer: this is quite normal, China is huge with 1.4b people, there are a lot of social bubbles. And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.

Well its turtles all the way isnt it, "And the readers should read this comment and the parent of proving that. Not that this comment or the parent is true.".

The same standard would apply to your comment.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#535

Post by teorema »

henearkr wrote: post #417
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not in Nicolas Wade's article, which I now see has been unfairly maligned along with David Baltimore who's been selectively quoted to leave out the technical detail of what made the latter say the SARS-CoV-2 is a smoking gun, see the 4) A Question of Codons: https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th... If correct, that's getting strongly into bioengineering evidence. You are of course more lik…

The author is contradicting himself: said that virus engineering is done by splicing of existing other coronavirii, and then also said that the two codons CGG is very unusual for coronavirii. Splicing is also naturally done everywhere and all the time, just by natural genetic events, so if there was splicing to create the two CGG codons, it can be natural. So still nothing to point out to bioengineering in my opinion…

I think the issue is the splicing flankers and recombinant mutation occurring naturally in that particular place.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#536

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

xenophonf wrote: post #269
arrosenberg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know. As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the…

For a measly $120k grant, I doubt Fauci was involved in the award whatsoever.

He has now been called in to testify in front of congress on it ... twice. However insignificant the dollar amount, knowing the details of it is his job.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#537

Post by mountainboy »

People have been discussing a possible lab leak for well over a year. For the most part commenters here on hackernews have been close-minded, arrogant, dismissive and probably wrong. disgusting.

I don't actually care much about the lab leak hypothesis. So I don't have a dog in that particular fight. I think contagion itself is a myth. See the work of Dr. Tom Cowan if you are interested. I just don't like the arrogant attitude I see on display here all the time, on so many topics. People wielding beliefs, opinions, and "scientific consensus" as if they were facts, and there is nothing left to discover about biology or wider sciences.

Guess what people, human understanding of the natural world is moved forward by those who DO NOT AGREE with scientific consensus of the day. The heretics are the interesting ones to follow, not the rest of you lot.

I'm quite frankly glad to see a bunch of you eating crow right now. You should.

Good day

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#538

Post by scrubs »

arrosenberg wrote: post #37
harryf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gets worse - gain of function research was banned under Obama until the ban was lifted in 2017 under Trump - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3... I can’t find sources for this right now but apparently Dr Anthony Fauci played a key role in getting the ban lifted. He’s also the head of the NIAID ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci ) which (apparently) is the ultimate source for…

You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.

Plain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#539

Post by Jarwain »

teorema wrote: post #533
Jarwain wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read a few articles, skimmed a few papers and sent them to friends. The counterargument is that there still aren't enough similarities. The mutations on covid 19 are Really Different compared to the known and studied viruses. If it was a lab leak of an engineered chimera, you'd be able to see that A proteins came from virus X and B proteins came from virus Y and Z, but that hasn't been shown to be the case. From…

Of course that says little about SARS-CoV-2 relative to all the other viruses we don't know about, either sitting in a Chinese government lab, or in a bat cave somewhere. I guess I don't find the argument "we can't figure out how to reconstruct SARS-COV-2 from known viruses" very convincing on either side.

That's fair. I wouldn't say that it's "we can't figure it out" but rather that "doing so takes a lot of mutations and thus resources that may be difficult to do under the table"

Sitting in a cave somewhere implies not being studied, right? Which is more the "natural mutation" thing.

Sitting in some government lab is a different story and depends on belief in scientific institutions to do science and publish peer reviewed papers and all that jazz.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#540

Post by JProthero »

tootie wrote: post #118
yumraj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

Other pertinent data point, how many epidemics have been positively traced to a lab leak since virology has been widely studied? The Wuhan lab was founded in the 1950s. You can say the likelihood that a virus would one day escape from one of these labs is pretty high. The likelihood that a given virus would be from a lab is very low. All of which brings us back to where we were at the start. It's plausible and possib…

A 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (an important virus affecting cattle) was traced to effluent released from a laboratory in the UK [1].

A small number of SARS infections in 2003-2004 are also believed to have been due to laboratory accidents [2].

This article [3] gives an introduction to the subject from the perspective of a journalist who has reported on laboratory safety in the US.

This article [4] published in Nature in January 2012 by members of the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviews the risk of a release of an engineered form of H5N1 influenza. It includes some alarming remarks such as:

'We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude' and;

'A pandemic, or the deliberate release of a transmissible highly pathogenic influenza A/H5N1 virus, would be an unimaginable catastrophe for which the world is currently inadequately prepared'

The authors take the possibility of release of a dangerous pathogen from a laboratory seriously, though the article is prospective rather than retrospective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

[3] https://eu.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covi...

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/482153a

Post reply on HN