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

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

#241

Post by Natsu » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:27 PM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #77

Natsu wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem for the wet market theory is that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at that wet market: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2 "Here we document 47,381 individuals from 38 species, including 31 protected species sold between May 2017 and November 2019 in Wuhan’s markets. We note that no pangolins (or bats) were traded, supporting reformed opinion that pangolins were not likely the spillover…

> One problem for the wet market theory is that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at that wet market That's not a problem for the theory. SARS did not come directly from bats (or pangolins). It went through civets first, which were sold at markets. That's why SARS first showed up in Foshan, 1000 km away from where the bats that harbor the ancestral virus to SARS live. The Nature paper you linked shows that live an…

Can you give more data on that? Last I knew, the animal reservoir wasn't identified, has that changed recently? We have a wild animal population infected with Covid-19?

I would revise my assessments if we have a clear animal reservoir, but I need to see more data on that first.

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

#242

Post by michaelmrose » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

beerandt wrote: post #240

michaelmrose wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no clause matching your assertion in the rather short law passed 25 years ago and no case law asserting your erroneous interpretation. I'd ask you to provide such but we both know there is none. Neither editorial selection nor removal has anything to do with 230 immunity. The law is working as written and intended. It isn't merely a grey area. The law was deliberately intended to support editorial selection…

>obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable The intent is clear from this list. It even implicitly allows violence as long as it's not excessive. It does not include anything about truth, or difference of opinion, or statements that aren't "backed by the science". It also requires a "good faith" interpretation, which would be irrelevant if hosts were allowed to act o…

Otherwise objectionable is so broad a fig leaf it could shade a continent. Just because they called out excessive violence does not mean a platform need tolerate any violence.

Good faith is only relevant to immunity from suits by people whose content was moderated not in terms of liability for other parties communications which is inviolate in all cases.

A finding of bad faith would then pertain exclusively to the particular act or acts of moderation and would not effect the platforms immunity for either other acts of moderation or for other parties speech. There is no act by which a companies 230 protection may be in general dissolved.

Furthermore absent 230 protection for act or acts of moderation those moderated would have little just cause to bring anything but fraudulent frivolous lawsuits because you in truth have little right to be heard on someone else's website. That is to say finding bad faith would only open the door to lawsuits it wouldn't be a cause in and of itself.

Say I banned you from my site because I don't like blond people but lied and said it was for breaking site rules.

I might be acting in bad faith but as you have no particular right to access or post content on my site so the judge would find my bad faith may cost me protection under 230 but nothing else.

This is probably why there wasn't a notable finding of bad faith that helped the blocked party between 1996 and 2019.

In 2019 we finally had Malwarebytes v Enigma wherein Enigma sued Malwarebytes labeling it's software as a possibility unwanted program and advising it's users not to install it. The 9th circuit found it was in bad faith discouraging competition.

If your issue is Facebook and Twitter silencing some viewpoints this is hardly encouraging as there are few parallels.

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

#243

Post by DiogenesKynikos » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #241

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One problem for the wet market theory is that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at that wet market That's not a problem for the theory. SARS did not come directly from bats (or pangolins). It went through civets first, which were sold at markets. That's why SARS first showed up in Foshan, 1000 km away from where the bats that harbor the ancestral virus to SARS live. The Nature paper you linked shows that live an…

Can you give more data on that? Last I knew, the animal reservoir wasn't identified, has that changed recently? We have a wild animal population infected with Covid-19? I would revise my assessments if we have a clear animal reservoir, but I need to see more data on that first.

The intermediate host hasn't yet been identified, but the site of the first known outbreak was a market where wild animals were sold, exactly like with SARS. On the other hand, there's no evidence that links the outbreak to the lab in any way.

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

#244

Post by justshowpost » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 12:10 AM UTC

aplummer wrote: post #17

runawaybottle wrote: post #4

People will hate this source, but this is the most info I’ve seen revealed about the actual conditions in the Wuhan lab(s): https://www.the-sun.com/news/3174242/wuhan-labs-leak-covid-c...

That's because the source regularly deliberately misinforms. So it's impossible to know if literally any of the claims here are completely made up. For example: _In December 2019, The Sun's political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, wrote an article for the paper titled "Hijacked Labour", alleging that "Jeremy Corbyn is at the centre of an extraordinary network of hard-left extremists pieced together by former British intell…

[flagged]

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

#245

Post by dragonwriter » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

beerandt wrote: post #234

dragonwriter wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The justification of 230's existence is that the host shouldn't be liable, because it's not their speech. > That's no longer true if they're picking and choosing what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. No, its not. That's approximately the traditional justification for distributors having more limited liability than publishers. Section 230 was expressly adopted to allow platforms to act like publis…

>specifically to pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned. BS. It covered liability for third party speech. It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them. Private censorship of controversial speech is the complete opposite of it's purpose. >"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of…

> It allowed controversial things to be said without the host being liable for hosting them.

That was already allowed, provided they didn't, to use the phrasing being used in this thread, “pick and choose what gets heard, what gets buried, and what gets banned.” Doing that even on a limited basis made them, under pre-230 law, a publisher, subject to liability for all content on the platform.

Section 230 was adopted specifically to allow platforms to moderate user-generated content according the platform owners’ view of objectionable content without incurring publisher liability, because the pre-230 situation was viewed as encouraging a situation i which platforms who didn't feel they could completely moderate were forced to not moderate at all, making online communities persistently polluted with objectionable content.

The Communications Decency Act, of which 230 was the only substantive part to survive, was not about promoting unmoderated internet fora, but the opposite.

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

#246

Post by Natsu » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:43 AM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #243

Natsu wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give more data on that? Last I knew, the animal reservoir wasn't identified, has that changed recently? We have a wild animal population infected with Covid-19? I would revise my assessments if we have a clear animal reservoir, but I need to see more data on that first.

The intermediate host hasn't yet been identified, but the site of the first known outbreak was a market where wild animals were sold, exactly like with SARS. On the other hand, there's no evidence that links the outbreak to the lab in any way.

That goes back to seeming odd to me. We know all the animals there thanks to a comprehensive survey and prior outbreaks didn't take even half this long to find.

And several lab workers did get sick early on. We'll likely never find solid proof one way or another at this rate, though, unless an animal reservoir is found.

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

#247

Post by kjaftaedi » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 5:56 AM 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…

The vulnerability in this analogy is scientists working with viruses in BSL-2 conditions.

I would argue this was not a widely known fact.

It's difficult to prepare for the next disaster if you're not willing to explore the previous one.

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

#248

Post by DiogenesKynikos » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 8:55 AM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #246

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The intermediate host hasn't yet been identified, but the site of the first known outbreak was a market where wild animals were sold, exactly like with SARS. On the other hand, there's no evidence that links the outbreak to the lab in any way.

That goes back to seeming odd to me. We know all the animals there thanks to a comprehensive survey and prior outbreaks didn't take even half this long to find. And several lab workers did get sick early on. We'll likely never find solid proof one way or another at this rate, though, unless an animal reservoir is found.

> We know all the animals there thanks to a comprehensive survey

The people surveying which animals were there were not from the government, and were not studying coronaviruses. They're conservationists, and it's coincidental that they did this survey just before the outbreak.

> And several lab workers did get sick early on.

So the US government claims, without providing any evidence.

> prior outbreaks didn't take even half this long to find.

That very much depends on which outbreak we're talking about. The intermediate species for SARS was found within about a year, but how Ebola spills over is still elusive, decades after its discovery.

Unlike with SARS, this time around, the Chinese government closed the market down quickly, and also quickly shut down the wildlife farms and culled their stock. That might possibly make finding the intermediate host more difficult.

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

#249

Post by arisAlexis » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 10:48 AM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #236

arisAlexis wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you seem to trust the Chinese administration to their word. I bet during Chernobyl we should have trusted the USSR for information too. And since this famous Chinese investigator said "oh no it wasn't romantic our lab" we should stop digging for the origin of the most catastrophic event since WW2

The Chinese can't go back in time and change things they said before the pandemic. The viruses that the Wuhan Institute of Virology works with are fairly well known, because the WIV has published numerous papers on them. We know, for example, that the WIV has three live coronaviruses that it works with. None of them is close to SARS-CoV-2. We also know about a whole range of other viruses they've discovered (by seque…

Did they give full access to all documents and facilities to WHO? NO. Why do you continue an argument that has 0 basis?

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

#250

Post by kjaftaedi » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 12:45 PM UTC

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #237

salawat wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incorrect. The RBD was a 90+ percent match to a pangolin coronavirus, the backbone was 90% + match to a sample collected from bats in Guangdong if I recall correctly, and you had GoF techniques in play that enabled seamless porting of nucleotide sequences that left no traces of gene edits. We've gone over it in previous articles... Capabilities. Not motivations. Never ever lose sight of that. You will never know what…

A 10% difference is massive for a 30k-base virus. In the public mind, "gain of function" has gained the aura of some sort of black magic, but creating SARS-CoV-2 from any combination of known viruses is beyond the capability of any lab. The amount of effort you'd have to put into it would be astronomical, and all for no apparent scientific reason. This line of speculation really is completely separated from reality.

I recommend taking the time to read the article, they cover this pretty well.

It seems that even of this were manufactured, it is not likely intentional.

>The Chinese research did not have the specific goal of making the viruses more deadly, and rather than SARS itself, it used SARS’s close cousins, whose real-world risk to humans was unknown—in fact, determining the risk was the point of the research. Just as when you trade in part of a poker hand for fresh cards, there was no way of knowing whether the final chimeras would be stronger or weaker.