Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 494 posts

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#331

Post by jml7c5 »

willupowers wrote: post #137
lamontcg wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 1,000 nucleotide differences between the closest known progenitor and SARS-CoV-2. That is an evolutionary distance of 30-40 years in a coronavirus. You can't replicate that many years of evolution by serial passage in a lab. Serial passage isn't a magic wand. And the rest of it is that you're arguing in favor of a science fiction explanation for the capabilities of the WIV lab.

30-40 years difference from SARS-CoV. However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development. These unpublished sequences may have been much closer to SARS-CoV-2. I think you should read the leaks.

>However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development.

Could you give the page # for this?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#332

Post by zhdc1 »

cfn wrote: post #302
zhdc1 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact. I'm…

I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.

> I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records.

This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these animals can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. See https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-....

The issue is that (as far as I'm aware) there's no immediate evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from any of these animals, only that there was an (again, as far as I'm aware) unknown intermediary species. However, because the animals at the wet market were disposed of, there's no way to definitively link SARS-CoV-2 to them.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#333

Post by wk_end »

ImaCake wrote: post #298
inciampati wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

>The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution ... point to it being a natural zoonotic spillover event. Wuhan had a virus institute because it is a place where novel viruses are found, not the other way around.

This is not true as far as I’m aware. Novel bat coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are usually found deep in bat caves in the south of China, ~2000km away from Wuhan. The WIV was established in the 50s, long before serious coronavirus research was a thing.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#334

Post by phreeza »

mcherm wrote: post #323
phreeza wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which other coincidence is there apart from the proximity of the lab to the initial detection site?

Well, there is the similarity between features of the virus and research being proposed in a grant application written half a world away just a couple of years before the virus spread to humans. That's a coincidence of note.

Yea agreed this seems like an additional data point, that looks suspicious, but it is very new (at least to me) and I will wait to see what experts make of this.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#335

Post by littlestymaar »

cfn wrote: post #302
zhdc1 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact. I'm…

I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.

For SARS ans MERS the evidence were “we found a variant of the virus before its mutation allowing it to jump to humans in civet/Camel”.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#336

Post by uap »

googlemaps wrote: post #206
lamontcg wrote: post #83

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 4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites 5. Furi…

There is a nearly identical RBD in the wild. But... without the furin cleavage site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649716 And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other

What if EcoHealth (originally Wildlife Preservation Trust International) was infiltrated by eco-terrorists who did the reasearch anyway then released a depopulation virus to punish humans and 'restore balance' to the ecosystem, in a sicko 'Army of the 12 Monkeys'-style act of terrorism? But either they weren't that successful (only 5 million deaths is not depopulation) or their goal was lockdowns and reduced air travel to give the environment a breather.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#337

Post by lps41 »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #329
twobitshifter wrote: post #86

Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins, but this did not get mentioned in any reports. Instead he warns other not to discuss it. He does not include notes that research was done on modifying bat viruses to make them infectious to human cells. These behaviors look like a guilty person, do they not? The wuhan and eco-health researchers had already started work on the furin cleavage sites and why…

He proudly proclaims his research in this video, he is not hiding anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w

He absolutely did try to hide things. He tried to hide his relationship to the original Lancet article denouncing the lab leak theory, because he knew it was a staggering conflict of interest:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#338

Post by prox »

zhdc1 wrote: post #332
cfn wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.

> I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these ani…

Could a recombination be possible? So lab virus meets wild virus in zoonotic environment and sars-cov-2 appears?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#339

Post by tikiman163 »

Guys, two points here. One, this proposal was rejected. This did not happen! Two, their proposal was for genetic manipulation of an existing virus, which research on the existing corona virus shows was not the case.

This has nothing to do with the corona virus strains we are currently dealing with, and more importantly, there has never been any credible research proving that Covid was made in a lab. The only paper that got any traction suggested it was non-manipulation based gain of function research, but that was disproved only a few weeks after the paper's release as well. I know we all want to know where it came from, but the odds against us ever having actual evidence of it being from a lab are virtually zero. And no, rejected research proposals do not constitute proof of anything.

Post reply on HN