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

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

#171

Post by runawaybottle » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:12 PM UTC

erostrate wrote: post #164

eloff wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the cover up and hostility towards the lab leak hypothesis may actually be the strongest evidence for it. Which is to say, not much. But we have no evidence for the natural origin story, and it's a somewhat strange coincidence that the initial outbreak was near a lab studying these very same kinds of viruses. Granted you might put such a lab in places where there are lots of bat viruses to be found, but that's s…

Combine that with the sick lab researchers, with the work performed at BSL-2 instead of BSL-4, with the main researcher being a world leading expert on gain of function research, with a WIV database of genomes surprisingly taken offline, with inconsistent sequencing dates reported by WIV researchers, with huge conflicts of interest from several of the main researchers supporting the natural origin theory (Daszak), et…

Combine that with reports that WIV worked with live bats, not just samples:

https://news.yahoo.com/news/evidence-mounts-wuhan-lab-studie...

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

#172

Post by native_samples » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

joejerryronnie wrote: post #99

Taniwha wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the Ebola and Marburg viruses both seem to live in bats in Africa and periodically transfer to humans - given it's happening in one place means it's not surprising it happens elsewhere

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

Ebola has in the past escaped from labs.

https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/marburg/index.html

(Marburg virus is a variant of Ebola)

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

#173

Post by simonh » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

aliasEli wrote: post #57

simonh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the first point, they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment), and that even if they did have Covid instead of flu they might have got it outside the lab. There were people in Wuhan with Covid back then, but there were a lot more people with flu. The odds that any given three people with f…

> The reasons for this seems to be that bats are just too small and the virus load too thin to pose a threat to humans. So bat to human is very unlikely, but bat to cat is more plausible, and then cat (etc) to human also more plausible. Some bat species, e.g. flying foxes are not really small and can weigh about 1 kg. Also bats are very strange that they can tolerate high virus loads without getting ill. There is a r…

According to the article these specific bats involved in the research are very small.

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

#174

Post by mikem170 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

jkingsbery wrote: post #106

> WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited... Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" s…

> it seems to me that the early cases would not have been so concentrated in Wuhan

There's genetic evidence that the origin was 600 miles south of Wuhan [0]:

> His research determined that A was the founding variant because it was the version most similar to the type of SARS-Cov-2 (the scientific name for the virus) discovered in bats. Many experts suspect that the virus migrated to humans from bats, probably via some other animal. But he also discovered that the A strain wasn't the predominant type in Wuhan.

> Of 23 samples that came from Wuhan, only three were type A, the rest were type B, a version two mutations from A. But in other parts of China, Forster says, initially A was the predominant strain. For instance, of nine genome samples in Guangdong, some 600 miles south of Wuhan, five were A types.

And this [1]:

> Upon further investigation, the first case detected from December 1st was found to have no connection to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. Also, that patient was never linked to any future cases of COVID19. A third of the first 41 cases had no connection to the market, including 3 of the first 4 cases reported. Given this data, we have a new hypothesis: The first human cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection must have happened before December 2019 and likely did not originate at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

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

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

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

#175

Post by spfzero » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #129

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 C…

The difference between us and gorillas is best understood as the number of genes, not the % of nucleotides. Virus genomes are much, much smaller.

Since viruses can multiply so quickly, when grown in large numbers of lab mice they can mutate relatively quickly into something with a "desirable" trait.

In fact if as you say the virus has passed through millions of wild hosts on its way to being perfectly adapted to infecting human lungs, why has no one found even one of those millions of hosts?

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

#176

Post by native_samples » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:27 PM UTC

bellyfullofbac wrote: post #62

Huh, the second sentence of the article made me doubt how good it is... > Last spring, the media accurately reported the scientific consensus that Covid (also known as SARS CoV-2) is a natural virus [...] To be pedantic: No, lady, Covid is the disease, and the virus is SARS-CoV-2. Like AIDS and HIV (disease and virus respectively). It's a little thing, but accuracy in journalism is still important (or is it just me?)…

The article has far more severe accuracy problems than that. The author appears is a typical journalist with a left wing axe to grind, so nothing in the article should be taken at face value. Look at this sentence:

"Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas entertained a particularly fringe version of this last variation, speculating that China might even have attacked Wuhan with a biological weapon"

She actually provides a link here, which goes to a Twitter thread [1] where Cotton starts out by saying the exact opposite:

"@paulina_milla and her “experts” wrongly jump straight to the claim that the coronavirus is an engineered bioweapon. That’s not what I’ve said. There’s at least four hypotheses about the origin of the virus: 1. Natural (still the most likely, but almost certainly not from the Wuhan food market). 2. Good science, bad safety (eg, they were researching things like diagnostic testing and vaccines, but an accidental breach occurred). 3. Bad science, bad safety (this is the engineered-bioweapon hypothesis, with an accidental breach). 4. Deliberate release (very unlikely, but shouldn’t rule out till the evidence is in). Again, none of these are “theories” and certainly not “conspiracy theories.” They are hypotheses that ought to be studied in light of the evidence, if the Chinese Communist Party would provide it."

In other words, merely enumerating every hypothesis that had been proposed by anyone got turned into "Republican thinks China might have attacked its own city". That is a blatant mis-representation of his position and shows the journalist is willing to manipulate her reader. Moreover this was in February 2020, long before the recent evidence of a lab leak became available, and thus Cotton's openness to the lab leak theory looks rather prescient in hindsight.

[1] https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202139232292866

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

#177

Post by hex4def6 » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:33 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…

Here's a question: How many times did classic SARS escape from a lab?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346413716_A_review_...

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

#178

Post by runawaybottle » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:36 PM UTC

jkingsbery wrote: post #106

> WIV officials told the investigators that serum samples for all staff and students in the bat coronavirus group subsequently tested negative for Covid antibodies. We have only their word to go on because the lab hasn’t been independently audited... Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" s…

Why has the lab not been independently audited? If I was going to make a case against someone making an error, saying "well, that group said they didn't make an error" seems like a bad argument.

Well, remember back in February 2019 when China said Covid was basically over and capped their infection count at about 60k? While every other country reported the truth in the millions, they just said ‘no, it stopped at 60k (as of today less than 100k still)’.

They are liars, that’s why there’s no independent investigation. China believes it deserves automatic respect and the rest of the world should take it’s word for it. They do not accept that many countries work hard to earn a modest reputation of integrity.

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

#179

Post by rossdavidh » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:51 PM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #139

rossdavidh wrote: post #100

The real motive behind most of these kind of articles: "...loose talk about a lab leak elevates tensions between China and the United States, undermining the collaborative research we need to understand this pandemic and prevent the next one." Translation: "please shut up about this, it doesn't matter now and we need to get China calmed down, and this talk is making them defensive and therefore uncooperative." The re…

The real motive behind most of the lab leak articles: "Please shut up about zoonotic origins, we don't want to have to worry about factory farming of animals, and for fucks sake could you imagine a world where we had to admit the goddamn VEGANS were right? That certainly can't ever happen. They're already insufferable assholes, could you imagine?" (p.s. be very, very angry at China so you don't think about the US pol…

Hmmm...maybe there are articles that slant that way, but I haven't run across them. Can you cite an example?

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

#180

Post by garmaine » Tue, Jul 06, 2021, 7:52 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #58

jfktkrkfk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You underestimate the power of AI and social credit like tools. Now add human-free justice systems and block lists to the mix.

Ridiculous. Software isn't magic. Hell, it's barely even impressive. Persecuting 100 million people outside your borders requires one thing: power. If China invades every nation and dissolves every other government then they can commit genocide on every other people. Until then, it's just one poster's deranged fantasy. Good luck with any of that post-Manhattan Project.

It’s the Roko’s basilisk, China superpower edition.