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

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

#551

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

bglazer wrote: post #323

tmp404 wrote: post #155

While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations. The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details: - First, most common…

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins. The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state…

[deleted]

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

#552

Post by Jarwain » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:02 AM UTC

puzzlingcaptcha wrote: post #549

Jarwain wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many "shocking" articles, but here's something I don't get: The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist 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 mutation…

>The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. Keep in mind there is an estimated 1.5 million viruses that have not been identified yet. There might very well be a virus in nature which is the 'missing link'.

I agree! The argument is mainly one against it being a lab leak, but instead something that evolved in the wild and spread.

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

#553

Post by WillPostForFood » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

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.

EcoHealth secured a NIAID grant of roughly $3.7 million, which it allocated in part to various entities engaged in collecting bat samples, building models, and performing gain-of-function experiments to see which animal viruses were able to jump to humans.

It was a $3.7million dollar grant to EcoHealth Alliance, which I wouldn't doubt he was involved with. $600,000 was sent from EcoHealth to Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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

#554

Post by ddeck » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:04 AM UTC

40four wrote: post #492

ridaj wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice. Consi…

Guys, a bit of a tangent if I may? This is not normally my lane, but I really wish we could get over this term ‘wet market’. From a western point of view if you really think about it, it’s derogatory, and likely based in racial paranoia. We’ve all heard this term time and time again in the media. But after looking into it more, it’s not really accurate. Just call it a market. Or a farmers market as we call them in Am…

You wouldn't call your local farmers market a 'wet' market because it isn't.

Wet market is the standard English term for a market that sells live animals, typically seafood. They are full of tanks and water filled buckets and polystyrene boxes etc., thus the "wet" adjective. There are 2 less than a mile from my home and I've never heard anyone use a different name for them.

You'll find this term used by the HK (i.e. China) government, so I fail to understand how you came to the conclusion that it's based on racial paranoia:

"As at October 2019, the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department ("FEHD") managed a total of 74 public markets, of which 35 were standalone wet markets and 39 contained both a wet market and cooked food centre." [1]

In Cantonese, it's "濕貨街市", which is literally wet goods market/area.

[1] https://www.legco.gov.hk/research-publications/english/essen...

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

#555

Post by kelnos » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:07 AM UTC

jcrawfordor wrote: post #205

harryf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav... Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.

Would Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at…

Pretty sure if I ran an organization that funds a bunch of labs that do virus research, and a global pandemic started in the neighborhood of a lab doing virus research, and people started floating the theory that the virus leaked from that lab, one of the first things I'd do is call my grant-funding team and ask them if we funded that lab. If Fauci didn't do that, he's a strange dude.

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

#556

Post by ddalex » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:14 AM UTC

frickenhamster wrote: post #306

mc32 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other astonishing things is the sudden about face by the media. I'm glad they allowed themselves the liberty of looking at alternative origins. But... they were SO adamant and complicit in any discussion about alternative theories being shut down under the guise of conspiracy, Trumpism, anti-China, etc. (These are the same people who have no qualms about attributing anything to Russia even if evidence is thin, so…

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…

> blame Italy

I would like to remind everybody that this happened in Milano just before the outbreak

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o_uXF9B4KI

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

#557

Post by tayo42 » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:17 AM UTC

lifeformed wrote: post #317

kaesar14 wrote: post #54

It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of crackpot theory. The serious questions raised in this article have been around since last April but it’s only now it’s even allowed to talk about them on digital forums. Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.

The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline. It being engineered as a bioweapon is in the realm of a crackpot theory, but it being just a poorly contained natural research project was fairly reasonable. Some prominent people mixed the two up on purpose and eventually the whole thing - both ideas…

> The way I remember it was that people conflated the lab leak theory with it being engineered in a lab. Those are very different things but easy to mix up in a headline.

This is kind of how I remember things too I think, I feel like I'm being gaslit by the internet lately reading how certain some people are.

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

#558

Post by ravel-bar-foo » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:18 AM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #183

deugo wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is exactly fuckoff zero evidence that funding wound up supporting gain of function research for anything. From the Fauci e-mails: People Fauci directly worked with seemed surprised and shocked to learn otherwise, and could not even instantly say if their funding had made it abroad. There are papers resulting from GoF research of concern at the WIV. There are grant proposals, which specify the exact modificati…

- There was GOF research done on US soil at UNC Chapel Hill which collaborated with WIV. They took a SARS-CoV-1 backbone and splied in a surface protein from another coronavirus and ran it through mice to produce a mouse coronavirus. - There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research > but you'll see through studying the records that it was the cover for military funding. You're offering a blatant conspiracy theo…

> There's no papers out of WIV indicating GOF research

This is something I'm confused about. There are a bunch of papers from the WIV and the North Carolina lab which describe "reverse genetics", spike protein modification, and other obvious gain of function research which acknowledge funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance. (The most recently famous of these is Menachery et al, Nature 2015.) But it looks like the actual GoF was done at the Baric lab in North Carolina. The closest I could find was serial passaging experiments done at Wuhan to isolate viruses and test vaccines. One could argue that testing virus infectivity by serial passage is dangerous enough...

> The funding to WIV had nothing to do with GoF and there's no evidence of anything else.

The funding to EcoHealth Alliance specified GoF under such terms as "reverse genetics", "virus infection experiments ... humanized mice."

EHA may have put restrictions on how this money was used, but with the revelation in this article that WIV has lied about doing military research... I'm not so confident we can say no GoF was done there.

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

#559

Post by Javantea_ » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:20 AM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #521

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a totally fair reaction to all "trump theories".

No, it is not. Judge ideas on their own merits please. These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office. A broken clock is still right twice a day.

Here I have a little bit of experience. When a person has shown themselves to be a pathological liar, you can't judge their ideas on their own merits because the cost of judging far outweighs the cost of producing garbage ideas. That is why attention is so valuable, there are plenty of people out there who do not make it their trade to espouse nonsense.

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

#560

Post by bigfudge » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 7:22 AM UTC

ravel-bar-foo wrote: post #536

xenophonf wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On its face, That’s an absurd statement. NIH offers Very small grants for fellowships ... should he know about those too?