81–90 of 220 posts
https://news.yahoo.com/who-wuhan-lab-worker-covid-patient-ze...
China forbade publishing the virus's genome. It was published by a Chinese scientist contrary to the rules and his lab was shutdown the next day for 'rectification'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best writeup I've seen is actually this twitter thread from the WNYC science reporter, Nsikan Akpan (himself a phd in biology). The gist being that while lab leak is still possible, it's very unlikely and it's also likely we'll never find a smoking gun for any hypothesis. https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724
Again, this writeup is more about the bioengineering hypothesis while embarak states another theory. in it‘s current state the term lab leak has almost become meaningless
I also feel like if he's serious about it, he would produce something other than a tweet thread, at least a real blog post with links to papers he refers to. Otherwise it's hard for me to take them any more seriously than anyone else who handwaves about papers.
It would be nice to see something like that with good faith opportunities for people to respond and counterrespond but I'm skeptical about it happening.
There's also a sense that I have from reading stuff like that and others that we should treat the peer-reviewed academic paper trail as somehow the state of things, rather than looking at the evidence on its own terms. I don't mean anything conspiratorial about that, just that it's almost like they expect there to be some peer-reviewed paper out there from China that shows how they would have engineered it if they had, as if that's realistic at all.
That's not even getting into what you mention, which is the possibility nothing was engineered and there was a leak.
Everyone with common sense must assume that a lab which does experiments on Corona viruses is the most likely source and not the food market nearby. It's really that simple...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Imagine it was a leak. Dozens or hundreds of people -- researchers with PhDs and international cred and travel ability -- would have had to be knowledgeable about the research and in on the coverup. I don't see why this would be the case. It could be a lab leak with nobody at the being aware or having evidence. Why must people be in on a secret coverup? Many activities that make evaluating the lab leak hypothesis di…
> "Why must people be in on a secret coverup?" I hadn't considered this before, but you're right that most of the people dismissing the 'lab leak' theory seem to believe that their intellectual opponents are proposing that a 'premeditated conspiracy' took place. In any case, if I were a PRoC official, I would try to reduce the chance of any (direct or circumstantial) evidence of a lab leak came to light. That said, e…
Everyone with common sense must assume that a lab which does experiments on Corona viruses is the most likely source and not the food market nearby. It's really that simple...
Yes, the jumping of viruses from animals to humans due to keeping them in close proximity is so unlikely that it's happened hundreds of times before (e.g. SARS, MERS, Spanish flu, bubonic plague).
https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is important to consider the context within which these suggestions were initially put forth. We had a president that claimed to have Coronavirus under control, that it was no worse than the flu and who openly and frequently cast doubt upon the only expert in the room. Perhaps had his behavior been a bit more tempered, he would have been taken more seriously.
That makes the media look worse, not better. Their true inclination is to think one thing but they self censored so they wouldn't be seen as agreeing with the bad orange man?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I posted an article on HN at the time from a Chinese-born Harvard Public Health PHd who was writing in winter of 2020 he thought it could have come from the lab. It actually wasn't downvoted too much - plenty of people here found it plausible - but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me. I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in b…
>I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in biology) but still felt extremely gaslit. Similarly, on New Year's Eve 2015 I saw mention of the Cologne mass attacks on women by refugees as they were occurring on, yes, 4chan/pol/, and checked /r/worldnews and /r/europe to find out more. I didn't see anything, and assumed that it was another /pol/ "it's happening " dank mayma…
Was it confirmed these men were legitimate refugees?
> I only later realized that German media and those subreddits' mods had all worked to suppress news of the attacks until they could no longer be ignored.
Why would they do that?
I'm not skilled enough in the biomedical background to evaluate the various genetics-based articles written for or against natural-origin and lab-origin hypotheses. As a layman, however, I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.
To be honest the only way we will ever know is if the chinese would share the genomes of the viruses they stored in their lab, but who would trust them to do that? The express drive-by the WHO did in china served absolutely no purpose. I am ready to bet that all samples have been destroyed and the staff briefed (warned). I would even suspect the samples have not even been analysed by the Chinese themselves as it is b…
Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from)
Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, no zoonotic reservoir identified for this virus.
Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant.
The Chinese Communist Party (not China, not the Chinese people, but the CCP) has expended far more energy suppressing research and scientific access than any form of investigation into the origins of the virus.
The CCP deliberately suppressed and arrested doctors publicly talking about the virus early on.
Edit:
Forgot to add that there is a direct paper trail (publicly available on data.gov) of grant documents which specify that the funding will be used in WIV for research of bat coronaviruses with (and I quote from the paper) "humanized mice". Humanized mice, in this context, are mice genetically engineered to have human ACE2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. In what was the most infuriating moment of public testimony I have ever seen, Dr. Fauci argues that infecting humanized mice with animal viruses (resulting in animal viruses that can more easily infect humans) is NOT gain of function research. He was playing an obvious semantic game, where his definition of GOF is the far narrower concept of making an existing human infecting virus more infectious..... Seriously, I was a big fan of the guy until that single bit of testimony. Now i know he's a lying bureaucrat more than he is a scientist.
https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
Everyone with common sense must assume that a lab which does experiments on Corona viruses is the most likely source and not the food market nearby. It's really that simple...
Both SARS and MERS were recent coronavirus outbreaks that have had their origins rigorously pinpointed. Did this happen because governments cooperated and journalists provided important information? Not even close. Governments interfered with research into SARS and MERS origins for political reasons and journalists never really contributed anything of significance. The hard work was done by scientists doing sampling and sequencing of viruses and their results are extremely robust.
The next most recent pandemic is HIV/AIDS. When AIDS first hit everyone absolutely knew for certain that it was caused and spread by rampant gay sex in coastal cities. Then when research pointed to the Caribbean everyone knew that decadent travelers were to blame. It was only after a great deal of scientific work, again focused on sampling and sequencing, that we came to know HIV came from interactions with wild animals in Africa and didn't explode until much, much later. The one thing that can be said for certain about all of the early popular hypotheses is that they were all both completely wrong and thoroughly unhelpful.
The biggest problem with the lab leak theory is that it ignores all of the important information we have learned from past outbreaks and origins investigations and instead asserts that things are different this time and everything is about making narratives that have a coherent feel like a novel or dramatic film. An alternative conclusion that is far more simple is that finding the origins of SARS-CoV2 is going to be similar to the experiences we had with HIV and SARS and MERS. The rest is politics and click bait journalism.
I'm not skilled enough in the biomedical background to evaluate the various genetics-based articles written for or against natural-origin and lab-origin hypotheses. As a layman, however, I find the degree to which the Chinese government has stomped all over foreign-led investigations into the origin of SARS-Cov-2 to be highly, highly suspicious.
The best writeup I've seen is actually this twitter thread from the WNYC science reporter, Nsikan Akpan (himself a phd in biology). The gist being that while lab leak is still possible, it's very unlikely and it's also likely we'll never find a smoking gun for any hypothesis. https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1396240581651742724
The SARS1 virus escaped from a lab many years after the original outbreak (via accidentally being put in a fridge reserved for inactive virus and being examined under electron microscope, infecting employee), and it wasn't engineered at all. It was 100% natural origin.
I have ZERO doubt in my mind that natural viruses have leaked from US labs in the past, and were covered up. Can't prove it of course. Superpowers don't admit to these kinds of things.
Belief that this wasn't leaked from a lab requires a dismissal of a huge chain of improbable coincidences, and it's much easier to believe when you are part of a community of scientists who will undoubtedly have funding up-ended when people figure out they were at fault. Not unlike what happened to the field of nuclear energy after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The international virology community knows this.