The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory • Hacker News Board

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#121

Post by mandmandam » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:17 PM UTC

mikem170 wrote: post #101

rob_c wrote: post #94

It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection…

Didn't the article cover the scenarios you mentioned? The article said that the lab's normal job was to look for new bat viruses, and that it's pretty hard to get infected from a qtip swabbed over a bats anus stored in a stabilizing solution. The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out…

> The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin

Keep in mind that circumstantial evidence is also evidence: such as the earliest cases happening in a single-digit mile radius from one of the worlds few labs studying gain-of-function in coronaviruses, while bats are hibernating, a thousand miles from the nearest bat colony, and the extraordinary response and threats re calls for investigation from officials.

To me, that far outweighs the idea that some - NOT ALL - researchers have agreed that if there was editing done it was very smooth.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#122

Post by mandmandam » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:23 PM UTC

albinofrenchy wrote: post #104

rob_c wrote: post #94

It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection…

The article addresses this very point. I have 0 trust in the CCP to do or say anything not in it's own interest, but on the whole the "They found a novel virus in the wild, sampled it, and then it escaped their lab" seems a lot less likely than "Some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, and got sick".

> "Some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, and got sick".

More like, "some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, a thousand miles from the nearest bat population, while they were hibernating; and this all just happened to be within a few miles of a laboratory with sketchy safety history that literally studies coronaviruses, and didn't let independent examiners in for a year, even then limiting their time and access severely."

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#123

Post by canoebuilder » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

albinofrenchy wrote: post #104

rob_c wrote: post #94

It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection…

The article addresses this very point. I have 0 trust in the CCP to do or say anything not in it's own interest, but on the whole the "They found a novel virus in the wild, sampled it, and then it escaped their lab" seems a lot less likely than "Some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, and got sick".

There is a wide literature on this at this point. Please don’t make conclusive statements that also indicate you don’t have the faintest bit of background in what you are talking about.

At this point, this is not a complete black box, “novel virus.” There is a scientific understanding of the virus. There are known related viruses in the wild, just not anywhere near Wuhan. There are multi-pathway paper trails linking this class of viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the people working there.

I don’t mean to be too harsh on you, the media environment around all this has been so bizarre, how various waves of suppression have ebbed and flowed. But if you’ve known where to look, are an independent thinker, not one who just repeats what the large media bullhorns are trumpeting, and can connect dots for yourself, there’s been discussion, discourse, evidence gathering of the very likely source of this virus since the beginning.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#124

Post by canoebuilder » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

mikem170 wrote: post #101

rob_c wrote: post #94

It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection…

Didn't the article cover the scenarios you mentioned? The article said that the lab's normal job was to look for new bat viruses, and that it's pretty hard to get infected from a qtip swabbed over a bats anus stored in a stabilizing solution. The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out…

>The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin,

Highly tendentious claim...

>and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out.

Is that the case? Are you well-versed in this field? It is my understanding that previous epidemics of this sort in Asia in recent decades a host animal was identified in a matter of months. Are you privy to some valuable knowledge that is not widely dispersed in the literature? Because what you’re saying would seem to contradict it.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#125

Post by Synaesthesia » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #82

Synaesthesia wrote: post #30

As far as I'm concerned it's largely irrelevant, because the real question is how the governments all handled the Covid crisis, once it was out in the open.

I struggle to understand this thinking. If (and I don’t know) this was a leak of a gain-of-function modified virus, it’s a scientific experiment that killed 10 million people. We need to know so we don’t do it again. I’m not concerned about whether the car driver was drunk, I’m more concerned about how the paramedics responded to the crash.

Well I don't think we will ever uncover the truth about the origin of the outbreak, I'm interested in the fact that China (seemingly) and East Asia managed to contain the virus, in Europe their was initially a huge outbreak, then some level of containment, and in the US and Americas there was a huge outbreak with no respite. That's three different responses to the same thing.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#126

Post by mikem170 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

canoebuilder wrote: post #124

mikem170 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the article cover the scenarios you mentioned? The article said that the lab's normal job was to look for new bat viruses, and that it's pretty hard to get infected from a qtip swabbed over a bats anus stored in a stabilizing solution. The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out…

> The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, Highly tendentious claim... > and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out. Is that the case? Are you well-versed in this field? It is my understanding that previous epidemics of this sort in Asia in recent decades a host animal was identified in a matter of months. Are you privy to s…

So you think that it's less than 51% probable that this virus jumped from nature (from animals) into people, like every other virus we know about?

There's a lot of good sources saying otherwise, not just this article.

EDIT: My primary sources in this matter have been this reddit post from a virologist [0] (available as a 30+ page pdf), and the strongest (but not the only) genetic evidence he references points to covid originating 600 miles south of wuhan [1], which was also discussed in this writeup by another virologist [2] who also got into detail on the genetic evidence that we do have. Here's another article on how common it is for humans to be infected by bat viruses [3], here's the infectious disease expert from Biden's treansition team saying covid likely jumped from animals to humans [4]. The original article detailed how it took 15 years to find the origin of SARS, and China was secretive with that, too.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-05-...

[2] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

[3] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/23/21226484/wuhan-lab-coronavirus...

[4] https://text.npr.org/1000780650

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#127

Post by kian » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #108

joejerryronnie wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but does it happen right next to a world renowned Ebola virus research center?

I would be willing to bet that if Ebola were a frequent issue in a country that had the ability to construct a world-class virus research center, there would be a research center very close to the locations where Ebola had a natural reservoir. No matter how hard you yell it, correlation is not causation (and even when there is causation, the direction of the causation isn't always obvious).

Wuhan Virology Institute is not located near a natural reservoir.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#128

Post by aliasEli » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

vcavallo wrote: post #65

aliasEli wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is simply the result of natural selection, there are tons of viruses that are less infectious, but they simply die out.

It had this quality seemingly out of the gate, not after a period of selection. that’s part of the problem.

The mechanism that duplicate the virus genome is fairly imprecise, which means that they produce an astronomical number of mutants. The only mutants that we will really notice are the ones that survive. There is nothing sinister about the fact that the very first COVID virus was already adapted to humans because otherwise it would never have been to infect humans.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#129

Post by lamontcg » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

rob_c wrote: post #94

It doesn't have to have been engineered to have escaped. Why this convolution keeps happening is beyond me, we "know" this isn't a bio-superweapon. Taking this as read, either: Researchers at the lab failed to spot something like this in the wild, in an area where they were looking for this. So, failed to raise the alarm appropriately with acceptable transparency. or, Researcher work at the lab led to the collection…

The article covered this.

When collecting samples from the wild they aren't collecting viable virus, they're collecting samples which have mRNA in them. Those samples just won't infect anyone at all.

While collecting the samples they're of course exposed to the environment and could have gotten sick, but they have dramatically less exposure to the environment that the workers who collect bat guano for fertilizer in China, or the people who clean the cages in the wet markets. It would be highly unlikely that one of them was naturally patient zero when there's a million times more human exposure going on in China. And hopefully they were wearing respirators in the caves and mines since they know the risks.

When it comes to the live virus the problem is that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't look like any other known virus. The difference between it and RaTG13 is still 4% which is like the difference between us and gorillas. It is a few decades of viral evolution and serial passage through many millions of hosts away. So for a lab that was all about finding new sequences and publishing them they would have had to keep this new viral backbone perfectly secret, they would have had to keep this new ACE2-infecting spike protein perfectly secret. Then there would have had to be some novel lab accident since SARS-CoV-2 requires aerosolized particles to be breathed in, you don't get it off surface transmission so the petri dish binding studies don't produce an environment where a lab accident is very possible.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#130

Post by lamontcg » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

aerosmile wrote: post #95

The minute the PRC government destroyed the evidence, they lost the presumption of innocence. Let's also remember - we're dealing with very smart people who very well knew the price they were paying by not cooperating with the international community, and yet that path seemed more attractive than just "coming clean." I wonder what the judicial system would have to say if a murder was committed in my house, and there…

A totalitarian state acted like a totalitarian state by not addressing rumors and suppressing them, because it can.

You can't judge them like a Western Democracy with a free press and think that they'd just "come clean".