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

691–700 of 1001 posts

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

#691

Post by texasbigdata »

austhrow743 wrote: post #543
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…

Article gave me the impression that the Obama ban wasn't real. It included an "unless its important" exception and everyone just kept on doing it anyway. >Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology.” He added, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wi…

Wink wink, you/they should go to jail upon blatantly disregarding something meant to protect us.

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

#692

Post by DebtDeflation »

bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

>"Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories."

This is important for another reason that may not be immediately obvious. The WIV (BSL-4) is ~8 miles from the Wuhan Market. There's a BSL-2 lab (the CCDC) that's literally just a few hundred yards from the market. If the lab leak theory is correct, it may have escaped from the latter rather than the former. Or a visiting worker may have inadvertently transmitted it from the former to the latter before it escaped from the latter.

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

#693

Post by nkrisc »

harryf wrote: post #6
bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

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…

In retrospect, and knowing what we know now, do you think his advice and direction has been inadequate?

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

#694

Post by texasbigdata »

toshk wrote: post #608
bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

The strong sentiment that it couldn't have come from the lab was suspicious from day one. It was not even allowed to be a consideration. Also, here on this forum, I was downvoted for saying it shouldn't be ruled out that the lab might be the source.

Maybe this is naive, but what the issue here? These people are alive, the documents exist, the physical locations are accessible. This isn’t archeology.

Couldn’t we ... just... check? Like maybe the UN or the group of 7 or something similar?

You shut down the globe for a year, seems like it’d be worth running down all the Rabit holes.

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

#695

Post by cm2187 »

zarzavat wrote: post #669
cm2187 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it is TVs and newspapers that were lecturing us that it was racist to call it the chinese flu and that are now happily using the xx-variant designation. It is the obvious bad faith that I find appalling.

Because there was no other name they could use. Blame the WHO for moving at the speed of molasses on this issue.

By the time it is deemed a variant, it has been sequenced number of times across the country and the health authorities always have a code or name to refer to this particular strain.

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

#696

Post by avereveard »

bildung wrote: post #638
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or all the effort to not call it China Virus/Wuhan flu because that's racist and we don't name viruses after places anymore. Virus variants named after places on the other hand are apparently perfectly fine. So we don't have the Chinese virus but we do have British, Brazilian and Indian variants.

Nobody in the world except the US right called it that, and it is indeed uncommon to name viruses after its place of origin.

Except for the Spanish flu, the Brazilian flu, almost every single mammarenavirus strain...

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

#697

Post by yarcob »

teachingassist wrote: post #663
yarcob wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most virologists think it's nonsense That's exactly the kind of unsubstantiated statements I see all the time (both from proponents of the lab leak theory and from opponents). I'd love to read the actual reasoning why virologists think that it's nonsense. I'm a bit sad that hacker is so full of political and over-simplified arguments for this topic, and the actual science is missing.

From my point of view, the lab-leak hypothesis is presented in a political way and not a scientific way, so it's hard to challenge scientifically. This is my genuine scientific take, having worked in a genome lab: If the virus was artificially engineered, then you might expect to see points of artificial cleavage in the genome (which I assume you don't, because that would have been identified by now and would be pres…

> From my point of view, the lab-leak hypothesis is presented in a political way and not a scientific way, so it's hard to challenge scientifically.

I think my problem is that I'm looking for a detailed analysis of a possible scenario, but the more I read it seems the lab leak theory is not a single theory, but rather a large number of possible scenarios without supporting evidence for any of them.

So asking for a detailed scientific analysis is kind of hard, because you'd have to look at dozens of possible scenarios, and evaluate each of them separately.

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

#698

Post by jonplackett »

bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

I read Biohazard by Ken Alibek years ago and the current situation reminds me of one of the anecdotes in it.

He was a Soviet scientist in charge of creating bio-weapons- the book starts with him planning world war 3.

In one of the anecdotes talks about a lab leak they had, caused by someone not replacing a filter and the the lab accidentally pumping out anthrax all day and killing a lot of people.

The government blamed it on local meat sellers at the market and executed them all. Blaming the local market seems to be part of the bio-weapon-denial playbook.

It's a great (but terrifying) book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0031RS5DI/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

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

#699

Post by SiempreViernes »

seventytwo wrote: post #442
TheBigSalad wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.

Well, we know for a fact that a >96% similar virus was found to infect the miners naturally in 2006… how hard is it to imagine a few more tweaks since then? We’ve already had many mutations of COVID occur in the past year. Is it crazy to think virus which infected the miners couldn’t have mutated into what we know as COVID?

No, there is no public evidence that the miners were infected by the virus. The common story is the WIV sent people there to check if it was a virus. From there it diverges to the WIV saying "turns out it was a fungus" and then an obscure masters thesis about the cases that just assumes it was a virus.

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

#700

Post by lifeformed »

gimmeThaBeet wrote: post #685
lifeformed wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I can definitely say that's what I understood outlets to mean, that it could have come from the lab in both contexts. I guess I don't quite follow with how people would think that it being a weapon that spread intentionally or unintentionally is the base case.

Certain right wing China hawks were pushing the bioweapon theory to stoke fears, and since the loudest and most outrageous talking points are what spreads on the internet, that became the default idea for a lot of people when they heard "lab origins".
Post reply on HN