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Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

theintercept.com

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Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#281

Post by N00bN00b »

blablabla123 wrote: post #265
ramraj07 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do also note that damn near every lab today would not propose a new approach or project without already secretly having gone half the way in it with prior funds. No one proposes a potential novel idea without already being fully sure it will work.

Certainly not true in the area of particle accelerator experiments. Every single step there is done in public so to say. And it's not that it's a niche, literally thousands of scientists and engineers work on this stuff. (Also I know people that had to change thesis topics half-way through, although I cannot fully recall the reasoning for that.) It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research acros…

> It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe.

Not to me.

>Actually there are even documentaries from before the pandemic, not sure why this has to be double-emphasized.

Got any names/years so I watch them?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#283

Post by Tade0 »

gameman144 wrote: post #240
hammock wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I didn't realize this until reading the Wikipedia article on Daszak, but he was the one that organized the Feb 2020 letter in the Lancet condemning suggestions of a lab origin for Covid-19 as conspiracy theories. Tangent, but if it takes this long to learn a fact like that, consider a critical audit of your regular news sources.

Yeah, I'm always curious about this -- what would a good recommendation be to get a broad base of news while also relying on credible information? E.g. I want to know the different reasonable perspectives on issues/events without entertaining every kooky idea. In this case, I feel like I lumped what seems a plausible concern in with kooky ideas, and so missed the entire non-kooky narrative.

It helps to be up to date with what the kooks think. Majority of conspiracy theories start with a factually-correct, compelling premise and only then go overboard with speculation.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#284

Post by trhway »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #150

Fairytales about lab leaks won't absolve us of our abject failure to deal with this novel pathogen, nor will they help us prepare for the next.

>our abject failure to deal with this novel pathogen

the response during the initial critical phase could have been been different if it wasn't led by the people with obvious conflict of interests like Fauci and was looking more like coverup than an actual response.

The EcoHealth NIH grants for coronavirus/Wuhan included "Human Subjects", so who knows how much of the initial spread was the part of it.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#285

Post by inciampati »

passivate wrote: post #235
darawk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things…

I think employing probabilities and likelihoods which are subjective and will needlessly cause back and forth arguments over their use and validity. Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anyth…

The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution are a mountain of evidence. Why don't you trust them?

We don't see adaptation to the new host. This means that either the spillover happened a long time before it was detected (months, years), or the proximal host was a primate. Or, the virus could have been adapted to human cells and their surface proteins in relatively straightforward laboratory experiments. Then, if accidentally released, the phylogeny and virus adaptation process would look exactly like the one we are seeing with hundreds of thousands of viral genomes.

A spillover from nature would look like SARS1. There are rapid phenotypic adaptations in the beginning of the epidemic. The initial virus is infectious, but not anything like SARS2. In SARS2, it takes many months for real phenotypic change to appear. The rate of variation is clock-like because there are few easy phenotypic wins to be made.

This is hard evidence. What do you make of it? Maybe you have to understand genetics and evolution to "read" this material, but that doesn't negate it.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#286

Post by runsWphotons »

diatone wrote: post #226
teh_klev wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well what were their predictions vs actual outcome?

Speaking from experience, last year we had an outbreak in Melbourne, Australia. The local government's response was guided by modelling from epidemiologists (and others), and went on to match the peak and length of the outbreak to the model's estimations almost down to the day[0]. [0]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-29/coronavirus-melbourne...

They seem to be doing fairly well now, as well.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#287

Post by refurb »

hammock wrote: post #142
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been extremely wary of how some of the evidence of Covid-19 origins have come about, particular because so much of it has been presented as "Well, we've never seen this before, so it must have lab origins." That said, I think the context around this is extremely damning for Daszak. I didn't realize this until reading the Wikipedia article on Daszak, but he was the one that organized the Feb 2020 letter in the La…

>I didn't realize this until reading the Wikipedia article on Daszak, but he was the one that organized the Feb 2020 letter in the Lancet condemning suggestions of a lab origin for Covid-19 as conspiracy theories. Tangent, but if it takes this long to learn a fact like that, consider a critical audit of your regular news sources.

Indeed. “Thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory” was how the lab leak was described earlier this year by the media.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#288

Post by hirako2000 »

gfodor wrote: post #263
stablechaos wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because all of the major players, the Chinese Communist Party, the US government (DARPA & the NIH), and several universities and their IRB boards (UNC-Chapel Hill, WIV, and others), all had a hand in this, and the second they give legitimacy to this theory--that the hubris and recklessness of scientists and bureaucrats led to the deaths and suffering of millions--then they'll never be able to put the cat back in the…

Well, the good news is that either way we are still exposed to a lab leak of an airborne highly contagious coronavirus as much as we were before. Oh wait did I say good news?

Not either way. Investigations to find out whether this virus was in fact made in lab has tremendous utility. First it would seek reparation from all parties involved in creating this chaos. Second it will dissuade other lunatic research group or companies getting funny ideas in the future.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#289

Post by fnord77 »

lamontcg wrote: post #169
createdapril24 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specific claims here that are most compelling to me are: "The grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2." The counterargument is "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." The takeaway is that it is not likely this specific proposal was funded elsewhere, leading to SARS-CoV-2. "If they actually carri…

> "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." It isn't as simple as altering the proposal. You're speculating a very large and hidden process using sequences that were kept perfectly secret and have not been leaked, with virus backbones that would take considerable effort to create but which were never shared publicly (and kept perfectly secret before SARS-CoV-2 happened before t…

I guess all the stuff the NSA kept perfectly secret before the Snowden leaks were the hallmark of a conspiracy theory, too.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#290

Post by inciampati »

lamontcg wrote: post #175
createdapril24 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a question I've encountered a few times. How quickly, versus natural evolution, can serial passage evolve a virus? Using this figure, we could have some parameters around how much time such a project must have taken and its latest start date (assuming its evolved from known or closely-related-to-known viruses). Using this figure, and a theoretical timetable, we can also specify how close a cousin virus we wou…

Serial passage isn't magic, it is just what nature does. In the lab you'll get a handful of mutations not thousands. After serial passage through some large fraction of a billion humans, with large evolutionary pressures due to the recent species jump, the delta variant is still well over 99% homologous to the reference Wu-1 strain. A 96.1% different would require serial passage through billions of organisms, but the…

In the lab we can vastly exceed natural mutation rates, rendering this appeal to nature baseless.

The rate of evolution is a function of the mutation rate and the effective population size. There is no reason to believe that a lab setting, with highly parallel evolution on a very large, diverse population, will be as slow as passage through hosts in nature. The application of mutagens, and also the lack of selection by a host immune system can support much higher rates of change. And in coronaviruses, recombination is also very frequent, and this could easily give rise to multiple % levels of divergence in a single step. Finally, it's trivial to synthesize a genome of this size, and also to synthesize pools of related viruses based on common backgrounds.

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