The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan • Hacker News Board

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#191

Post by tomp » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:00 AM UTC

raphlinus wrote: post #119

erostrate wrote: post #111

An interesting aspect of the evolution of the lab leak theory is the unhealthy relation of mainstream media to scientific research. When the Andersen paper came out conflating the lab leak theory with the crazy bioweapon theory and lumping both as conspiracy theories, all mainstream medias jumped on this and used it for several month to quash discussion of the lab leak theory. The most vocal were the "science corresp…

I second your recommendation of Alina Chan, as she has the scientific credentials, is careful with the science, and as you say is balanced in that she doesn't dismiss the natural origins hypothesis either. If people want to be informed about multiple perspectives of this debate, she is a must-follow. That said, let me temper that with some skepticism. First, having got a book deal[1] she is now in the position of dir…

I just read your link [2]. She definitely didn’t fabricate or misinterpret the quote, which says that lab leak + concealed IS a conspiracy theory.

Full quote (as per Dr Rasmussen), and italic parts support the above interpretation:

> Unfortunately, this did little to quell often contradictory and sometimes outright ridiculous conspiracy theories that spread faster than the virus itself: SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a laboratory accident or was intentionally engineered, and this was concealed to hide either spectacular incompetence or a complex international conspiracy involving Bill Gates, the Chinese Communist Party and 5G wireless network infrastructure with an end goal of ushering in a new world order.

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#192

Post by EMM_386 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:01 AM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #190

arisAlexis wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know 2? It is documented that the Chinese deleted sequences from a global database. Also how naive can we be thinking they have given WHO access to all the research? They didn't. So remove argument 2.

> It is documented that the Chinese deleted sequences from a global database. You're referring to something completely different, which has nothing to do with bat coronavirus research or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A group of researchers working on new sequencing techniques for patient samples (not bat coronaviruses) withdrew their raw data from a database. They then published the key data in a peer-reviewed jou…

What about the purging that took place early in the virus (not this most recent "database purge" ... which as you point out may not be the important one.

March 2020:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinese-scientists-destro...

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#193

Post by mythrwy » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:21 AM UTC

waldoh wrote: post #162

beaner wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned this twice. "Contributed to real death." What do you mean specifically? Don't just use it as a scare quote. It's not a good enough justification anyway.

Ashli Babbit, officer sicknick, and a few others all died due to a conspiracy theory spread on Facebook. Many others are threatened every day because of these conspiracy theories.

Untrue, but also off topic.

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#194

Post by lazyeye » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:23 AM UTC

petre wrote: post #180

tynpeddler wrote: post #63

This article has a number of issues that jump out to me from just a cursory read. The author admits that the NIH has a specific definition of "gain of function research" and then seems to go forward with the article using their own definition, without calling out that they're doing this. Why are they using their own definition instead of the NIH's? The Chinese research this author cites claims that there are large re…

I've made up my mind to discount the lab escape hypotesis as it's likely to generate more yellow journalism and controversy fueling the "news cycle", conspiracy theories and finger pointing. I guess we'll find the truth in another five or more years.

Wouldnt it be better to try to focus on what the truth might be regardless of ideological constraints?

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#195

Post by roca » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:44 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #144

bradleyjg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is far cheaper than a global pandemic It’s hard to overstate the case here. Even a tiny chance for a proposed research project to causing something like covid 19 has a gigantic risk adjusted cost and should only have been undertaken if the expected results were likewise enormously beneficial. Something seems off with the cost benefit analysis in these laboratories.

The whole point of research like this is to better understand a naturally occurring risk of disease. Without the work to understand in detail how similar coronaviruses infect humans cells, there is no way Moderna and BioNTech could have turned around their mRNA vaccine candidates as fast as they did. When looking at cost-benefit analysis you have to understand that the probability of a naturally occurring human infec…

> Without the work to understand in detail how similar coronaviruses infect humans cells, there is no way Moderna and BioNTech could have turned around their mRNA vaccine candidates as fast as they did.

Can you provide a reference for this?

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#196

Post by DiogenesKynikos » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:05 PM UTC

EMM_386 wrote: post #192

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is documented that the Chinese deleted sequences from a global database. You're referring to something completely different, which has nothing to do with bat coronavirus research or the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A group of researchers working on new sequencing techniques for patient samples (not bat coronaviruses) withdrew their raw data from a database. They then published the key data in a peer-reviewed jou…

What about the purging that took place early in the virus (not this most recent "database purge" ... which as you point out may not be the important one. March 2020: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinese-scientists-destro...

You mean the order to either transfer patient samples to more secure labs or destroy them?

That's standard biosecurity when a new, dangerous pathogen is discovered. Regulatory agencies in other countries would have done the same thing.

A bunch of patient samples were sent out to diagnostic labs before anyone knew they contained a novel coronavirus. You can imagine regulators freaking out when they discover those samples contain a new, possibly dangerous virus.

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#197

Post by DiogenesKynikos » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:12 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #189

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was no "manipulation of patient data." The authors withdrew their raw data from a database, and then published the summary data (what most people will actually want to know) in a paper. The summary data matches the raw data (later recovered from the cloud). > Could you link to this please? It's in Table 1 of their June 2020 paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/smll.202002... > If the patient…

There certainly was deliberate deletion of raw patient sequence data from the NCBI database. See the paper by Jesse D. Bloom that the NYT article references[1]. I would classify this as "manipulation". The author is also puzzled why this was done if the data matches the published summary in the Wang et al. 2020b paper, but hasn't received any replies from the authors. This is also interesting: > Particularly in light…

"Manipulation" means faking data, deliberately altering it, etc. What happened in this case is that the authors removed the raw data from a database and then published an accurate summary of the data in a peer-reviewed paper.

> Since the CCP controls all aspects of Chinese research

Not everything in China is automatically connected to everything else. People working on a new medical diagnostic tool at one university are not automatically related to people doing bat coronavirus research at another institute.

> Or do we really believe there's nothing suspicious about a country of 1.4bn people having 5,508 reported deaths from COVID-19[2]?

I'm sure there are lots of people here on HN who live in China, and who can explain the extremely strict and effective measures China took in early 2020 to eliminate SARS-CoV-2 from within their borders. China had a first wave that was largely confined to one city, and has had no large outbreak since. It's had small, local outbreaks that have been quickly contained. There's really no mystery about this at all.

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#198

Post by bradleyjg » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:22 PM UTC

roca wrote: post #195

snowwrestler wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of research like this is to better understand a naturally occurring risk of disease. Without the work to understand in detail how similar coronaviruses infect humans cells, there is no way Moderna and BioNTech could have turned around their mRNA vaccine candidates as fast as they did. When looking at cost-benefit analysis you have to understand that the probability of a naturally occurring human infec…

> Without the work to understand in detail how similar coronaviruses infect humans cells, there is no way Moderna and BioNTech could have turned around their mRNA vaccine candidates as fast as they did. Can you provide a reference for this?

I’d also like some evidence for this. If moderna or biontech researcher were specifically using knowledge from gain of function research that would shift my view on the cost/benefit analysis.

So far all I’ve seen is a bunch of handwaving about “advancing the science.”

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#199

Post by tim333 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:31 PM UTC

jpeloquin wrote: post #149

The quest to come up with a narrative for why Covid happened reminds me of the reporting when Katrina hit New Orleans. The city's vulnerability was known beforehand [0] but the inevitable disaster was greeted with shock, confusion, and a search for peripheral explanations. In the case of the pandemic, our vulnerability to zoonotic viruses and other diseases was also well-known; e.g. [1] was published in 1995. But aga…

As an aside the Katrina stuff was odd - I was in Ireland watching cable (CNN I think) and for 48 hrs or so they'd been going on about New Orleans was likely to flood, on repeat, at least hourly, so I thought I'd get the popcorn and watch (I didn't think it'd be that bad). Then it flooded. Then Bush popped up saying no one could have predicted it would flood. Strange - guess he didn't have CNN.

The lab leak reporting is also odd. When it first happened my initial thought was natural, then when it came out it was next to a lab doing gain of function type experiments on coronaviruses and hundreds of miles from the bats I thought ah likely a lab screw up. This was around feb 2020 that the info came out.

But then the press has done a year of lab leaks are mad, possibly racist, conspiracy theories and then a couple of months of it's likely a lab leak, all based on basically the same facts. Also odd.

Re: The risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

#200

Post by tim333 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 12:35 PM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #164

imiric wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2) The sequence of COVID-19 does not yet resemble any of the sequences associated with the lab research that was being conducted. This doesn't discount the possibility of a lab leak if you take into account that some sequences appear to have been deleted[1]. We shouldn't make assumptions based on lack of evidence if that evidence was tampered with. And given China's history of deliberately concealing facts to save…

> some sequences appear to have been deleted That is a completely unrelated issue. The sequences you're talking about are sequences from patients (obtained in February 2020, I believe). They are not bat coronavirus sequences, which is what the poster above you is referring to. The Wuhan Institute of Virology publishes the sequences it discovers. RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, was published in 2016,…

This is totally related to the Chinese hiding all the data they can related to the origins which suggests there may be a reason for the hiding.

(some details - they even tried to hide the original sequence which our vaccines are based on. When a lab released it against orders they closed the lab. When Australia suggested an independent investigation they put 80bn of trade sanction on them. When a doctor at the start warned his colleagues privately to be careful as the vaccine was contagious they arrested him and made him sign a confession etc etc...)