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

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

#781

Post by istjohn »

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

The media also insisted masks were useless for the general public. The media demonstrated a real inability to critically evaluate the statements authority figures feed to them over the past year.

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

#782

Post by tim333 »

m0llusk wrote: post #8

This is silly. The lab leak hypothesis was never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things are different this time thinking. Finding viral origins is never a fight, it is hard work requiring detailed research. Both SARS and MERS are good comparisons and took around three years to fully understand. The lab leak theory is popular because of politics and ignoring the d…

>never off limits, it was ridiculed because it had little evidence and was based on political things

re limits - I got banned from the covid19 reddit for mentioning it and was unable to write about in on Wikipedia, this in Feb 2020, pre Trump

re evidence - there were no bats anywhere near Wuhan and Daszak's gain of function funding and interview were public before the breakout but unmentionable

How is the above that the nearest viruses to the breakout were in a lab politics?

And while people like me being unable to write on Wikipedia etc may seem silly bear in mind 10m people died from this thing and several of those million may not have done if the data was not censored.

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

#783

Post by raphlinus »

eutropia wrote: post #763
tootie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think lab workers getting sick is really a useful data point. People get sick all the time. Could have very easily been seasonal flu or whatever. It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring vir…

I quoted this bit in another comment, but Steven Quay (interviewed by the US gov as mentioned in tfa) The “engineered” comments refer to common amino acid sequences from lab practices, they leave a signature because ordinary biology is more random. The gene sequence for the amino acids in the furin site in CoV-2 uses a very rare set of two codons, three letter words so six letters in a row, that arerarely used indivi…

Perspective on the rarity of the CGG pair:

https://twitter.com/K_G_Andersen/status/1391507272887455746

Basically, it's somewhat rare but not wildly so. FCoV has an RR pair, the first is coded as CGG, and the second as CGA, a difference of one base pair.

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

#784

Post by Rapzid »

ALittleLight wrote: post #82

One thing I've noticed a lot in articles like this one is how they kind of "both sides" the issue. This article says "With disreputable wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other" - to make it seem like both the right wing cranks and the experts were wrong here. Right wing cranks way-overstepped by calling it a "bioweapon" without evidence and experts understepped by assuming it was natural witho…

Vanity Fair.. publishes a ton of articles that pander to various audiences. I'm not sure how else to put it but their stuff pops up all the time on r/politics (somewhere I spend too much time TBH). That community is easily pandered to.. I like to just keep that in mind when reading articles like these from sources like these.

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

#785

Post by fireflash38 »

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…

I've seen this so many times, yet 9 times out of ten, even in this thread, when people are claiming it originated in a lab, they also include claims that it was created in a lab.

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

#786

Post by eutropia »

lamontcg wrote: post #185

> Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. > Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the…

The “smoking gun” was the “human” (arginine as CGG) way the AA seq was coded for at the furin cleavage site: Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.

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

#787

Post by dbsmith83 »

bingbong70 wrote: post #591
AstralStorm wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a problem though. Without access to source material of any real journalist (not a reporter) you have no way of knowing whether whatever they're saying is true. Marketplace of ideas is just measuring the average of views at best and fringe views may on occasion be valid, or not. It is also gameable by promoting "truthy" or plausible explanations with no data behind them. In this case, it is irrelevant what th…

This "Marketplace of ideas" is run by English speakers, in our case, and completely ignores the idea that we or our allies may have been involved in a biological attack on China. Very convenient, in my opinion, since history says NATO countries are the most likely to deploy biological weapons.

Nonsense. What a foolish weapon it would be. Both for its lack of virulence and imprecise targeting. This is (a rather bad) conspiracy theory

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

#788

Post by igravious »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #347
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…

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…

What's the deal with you continuously referring to Zhengli-Li Shi as "Bat Woman" or "Bat Lady"? Is there some reason you can't or don't want to call her by her name?

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

#789

Post by eutropia »

NoblePublius wrote: post #703

Ok so…China infected the President of the United States with a bio weapon? And we are going to do what about it?

TFA doesn’t call Sars-Cov-2 a bioweapon. Sloppy lab practices on virus research is all it takes to have a lab leak.

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

#790

Post by ddxxdd »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #759
ddxxdd wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses? During a season when bats hibernate to areas thousands of miles away? If you look at the circumstances behind this pandemic's origins, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope math, the lab-leak hypothesis i…

> So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses? No, of course we are not "to believe" that. What we are to do is to consider it is a possibility. Or are we to believe that SARS-CoV-2 could only have emerged as a lab leak? Both the natural and the lab-…

>Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?

The natural emergence of a virus from an animal is much more likely than the existence of a secret, unknown research facility, but much less likely than a lab leak (particularly in the circumstances surrounding COVID19).

All these mistakes in reasoning that I keep seeing in these discussions is making me truly understand the definition of "gaslighting".

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