Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#421

Post by rualca » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

SilasX wrote: post #412

rualca wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You cut off the critical part of the parent's comment: "(or well, with such a low chance it may as well be)". No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation. > If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific the…

>No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim. It's not a "weasel word", "Scientific theories placing a low enough probability to match lay usage of 'impossible', and clarifying that you mean as much" isn't a weasel word; it's being precise, and scientific theories do classify things that way. >Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowing…

> It's not a "weasel word", "Scientific theories placing a low enough probability (...)

If that was the case then go ahead and just show the theory.

Just provide a single evidence that supports said claim. Any at all.

Don't just handwave after claiming something is impossible, otherwise you're just intentionally spreading lies and misinformation.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#422

Post by passivate » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:40 PM UTC

inciampati wrote: post #285

passivate wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

>A spillover from nature would look like SARS1.

Why do you say so? Co-evolving organisms/species and their cross-interaction in a large changing global environment is not a deterministic process, or rather is not a process that we can predict with any great degree of accuracy. What things would "look like" is extrapolation, not evidence.

In any case, my main objection to your argument is that you're drawing inferences from an imperfect dataset and them employing backwards reasoning "Well nothing else explains it except theory A". Sorry, but that doesn't satisfy me. I still want to see actual evidence of actual work being done in an actual lab that corroborates the hypothesis. It is pretty much impossible to keep such large multi-year scientific development projects secret in this day and age. There are dozens of people involved, past employees, lab assistants, etc, etc. I work in biotech (I'm not claiming to be any expert on anything) and maybe that's why I'm finding it difficult.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#423

Post by passivate » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 4:47 PM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #301

passivate wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, because all those things weren’t scrubbed in the first 4 hours after this became globally known. All the evidence we have is by necessity circumstantial.

Any example where this has happened in the past on a global r&d science project? We're talking about scientists and lay people assisting them, not trained spies. Past employees, disgruntled employees, warehouse personnel, vendors/suppliers , bat handlers, emails, paper, nothing?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#424

Post by mannanj » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #96

BellLabradors wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your characterisation of the evidence, except I think "Points to" is not synonymous with "smoking gun" so I don't think the criticism of the title is valid. In terms of how important this evidence is, it isn't just "a novel aspect of a viral genome", it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin. And it is an aspect that scientists involved in this research explicitly pr…

"And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect." They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to…

Hey JPKab, just wanted to post that I empathize with you and I’ve experienced the same criticism. You aren’t alone, and even if it may feel the entire country hates and condemns you for questioning that not everyone is that way.

I’ve found some hope among opponents with disagreeing beliefs, and I think remaining optimistic (reasonably) is an important piece of retaining the power to drive forward change in this area. Let’s remain supportive and hopeful in ultimately the same goal as our opponents: caring for and providing safety, love and compassion for all humans.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#425

Post by mannanj » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #309

I have no clue what actually happened but this sequence looks weird to me: * Event occurs * Access to investigate is limited * A deep independent investigation is blocked *Internet is flooded with msging that unless there are hard facts uncovered by independent investigation some of the origin theories are def conspiracy theories

Unless there are hard facts and proven evidence claiming you are not a quack and a conspiracy theorist, you sir, are a conspiracy theorist. /sarcasm (I am mocking the contradictory perspective people take on anyone even thinking differently about things)

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#426

Post by mannanj » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #224

If you are an expert in virology I’d love to know the answer to this question: If given the right resources, would it be feasible to synthesize a pandemic-inducing virus in a lab setting? If so, a general question: why haven’t the villains of the world done so already?

What if they already have? What if COVID-19 was that virus?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#427

Post by mannanj » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

jgalt212 wrote: post #357

Why is lab leak vs zoonotic a front in the culture war rather than a question for which we should see the truth in a dispassionate manner?

My opinion is the same reason other topics of discussion in society become culture wars. Why do they really?

- Gay vs straight: religious and political beliefs - Abortion: same reasons IMO - Left vs right: politics that self propagate and stay in power with division

What what some other examples that we can try to isolate the causes for and extrapolate to here.

My opinion on the reasons for this theory being a culture war is the government and its predominate scientists have pushed a “hero” or “patriot” perspective onto one class of its citizens that if you’re not devoting your energy towards increased vaccine engagement or government policies towards containment of this virus you are doing something wrong. Everyone else is a villain or bad guy or extremist conspiracy theorist.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#428

Post by beerandt » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:20 PM UTC

devwastaken wrote: post #410

Aeolun wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation. There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (or well, with such a low chance it may as well be) have occured naturally. What am I supposed to believe here? Even the people on my side of the fence, even the people that research this stuff themselves all seem to have an agenda and when research turns up one thing, I can practically guarantee…

Not how probability works. What's the probability the entire universes atoms are arranged the way they are? The number is so finitely minute it's "impossible", because you're trying to make predictions on specific order out of chaos. The probability of any viruses currently existing would be equally infinitely tiny. Research is not equivalent. Just because two people make an argument does not make them equally valid.…

It's not the probability of any specific configuration, but the probability of a specific configuration over any other particular configuration.

All configurations could have an infinitesimal chance of occurring, but one configuration could still have a billion to one chance of occurring over another particular configuration.

Which is especially relevant if we have a relatively recent basepoint of comparison.

An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters might eventually reproduce Shakespeare, but 10000 monkeys doing it on their first try points to causation beyond "chance".

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#429

Post by angelzen » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:31 PM UTC

rndgermandude wrote: post #397

Aeolun wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation. There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (or well, with such a low chance it may as well be) have occured naturally. What am I supposed to believe here? Even the people on my side of the fence, even the people that research this stuff themselves all seem to have an agenda and when research turns up one thing, I can practically guarantee…

>There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (or well, with such a low chance it may as well be) have occured naturally. Now, I remember reading about it most likely not being a result of direct genetic manipulation, and it sounded sound to me. Do you have any sources for your assertion that there is evidence it cannot have occurred naturally? As far as I read such viruses have a natural tendency to sometimes jump speci…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649120

People have asserted in this thread that it would take 30-40 years for the closest known natural covid relative to aquire the necessary 1000 mutations and turn into covid. And yet here we are, almost 2 years since the pandemic started, with no identified natural reservoir for covid.

Where is the covid source?

-----

Consider https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf, a pro natural origins review of the literature. They tie themselves into knots to explain that the infamous furin cleavage site, while absent in the closest covid relative, could have naturally occurred, even if they admit they have zero actual evidence for that.

> Although the furin cleavage site is absent from the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., 2020), this is unsurprising because the lineage leading to this virus is poorly sampled and the closest bat viruses have divergent spike proteins due to recombination (Boni et al., 2020; Lytras et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2021). Furin cleavage sites are commonplace in other coronavirus spike proteins, including some feline alphacoronaviruses, MERS-CoV, most but not all strains of mouse hepatitis virus, as well as in endemic human betacoronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 (Gombold et al., 1993; de Haan et al., 2008; Kirchdoerfer et al., 2016). A near identical nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coronavirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2 and HKU9-1 contain short palindromic sequences immediately upstream of this sequence that are indicative of natural recombination break-points via template switching (Gallaher, 2020). Hence, simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain the evolution of an out-of-frame insertion of a furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 2).

On the flip side, Nicholas Wade claims that Peter Daszak grant application proposes exactly that:

> The..grant proposal..now puts beyond doubt that engineering cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses was a technique to be explored at..Wuhan

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/new-routes-to-making-covid-1... (medium paywall, sorry) via https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1441190122360225797.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#430

Post by spfzero » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

tikiman163 wrote: post #339

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 th…

> "This did not happen!" It did not happen, with DARPA money, upon this particular proposal. There are many other ways for that research, or similar, to have happened. This tells us there were researchers actively seeking to.