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Lab Leak 2.0?

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#61

Post by omginternets »

torstenvl wrote: post #59
omginternets wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I read into your comment more than was warranted. However, "follow the evidence" applies to science. You are describing an ethical question, which means you are doing philosophy.

"Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from?" is a scientific question. It certainly could have ethical implications, granted, but that does not make it not a question suitable for scientific inquiry.

You’re right, it seems I read into your comment too deeply, probably given the context of a GOF related article. Please accept my apology.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#62

Post by ufo »

ekianjo wrote: post #51
ufo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?

> A blog post full of wild speculation Asking valid questions, though. Is that better to bury one's head in the sand?

This is the perenial problem with all these poorly sourced "just asking questions" posts, in any topic (from covid misinformation to holocaust denial). By the time someone who actually knows their shit has a time to issue a proper response, the original wild speculation has already spread like fire on social media and landed in front of a bunch of eyeballs.

There are many things in the original article that raise red flags about how accurate it is (for example, barely even paying lip service to the non-lab-leak hypothesis, and using twitter as a primary source). Given that, I'm going to be less charitable about the questions it's asking.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#64

Post by sliken »

ufo wrote: post #38
ctoth wrote: post #34

Curious why this was flagged?

A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?

Seems like a cheap shot to me. Does twitter as a communication medium somehow invalidate what was being said?

One quoted thread was from "Tony VanDongen, an associate professor of pharmacology and cancer biology at Duke"

Seems like a reasonably valid opinion from someone with a clue. He's addressing specifically why Omicron is weird, and doesn't look like a normal evolution of COVID-19.

Another is from "Scott Ferguson, a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences and a postdoc at the Harvard Center for Systems Biology".

3rd and 4th are: "Phillip Buckhaults, Ph.D., is a molecular biologist and cancer geneticist at the University of South Carolina" and "Valentin Bruttel, who received his PhD in 2016 at the University of Würzburg (Germany) where he studied tumor immunology, autoimmune diseases, and development of biologicals"

A key diagram used is a Phylogenetic Tree from Science.

Looks like a collection of valuable scientific info, collected to support an opinion. Not saying it proves COVID came from a lab leak, but it's not just random speculation. Seems like a pretty valuable discussion to me.

Wouldn't you want to know if a disease impacting billions of people looked inconsistent with a naturally evolved virus? The scientist involved mention possible other explanations, poor models, etc. But do seem to lean towards a likely explanation of artificially tweaks to get omicron.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#65

Post by howaboutnope »

daxuak wrote: post #55
howaboutnope wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.

Then let me offer two informal "substantial" arguments. It's too long to question every point. The author argued in section "weirdness 1" that the phylogentic tree implies the omicron strain is directly related to an ancestor genome from Spring 2020. I have the following concerns: the tree is based on https://nextstrain.org/ , a database initially introduced in 2018 [1]. This is a great data source. However, for COVI…

> correct me if I'm wrong

I don't even remotely have the expertise for that, if applicable others would have to do that. But thanks a lot for elaborating!

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#66

Post by ufo »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #58
ufo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?

It also cites Science, The Taiwan Times, and Forbes (shrug). But more importantly, it's well reasoned. It's not "wild speculation". It's learned speculation based on history, opinions of experts, and independent sources, synthesized with deduction. I understand the reflex to push back on claims of conspiracy. I find the mainstream meme conspiracy theories (flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc) to be somewhere betw…

It links to a column on the Science website, and only to take a picture from it. The blog post doesn't discuss the scientific article that picture originally comes from or even he column that they link to. It uses the picture to say "omicron is weird" and jumps straight to speculation from twitter.

As for the news article from the Taiwan Times, it has nothing to do with omicron which is the main topic at hand.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#67

Post by [deleted] »

ufo wrote: post #46
ayjchan wrote: post #37

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a…

Another thing that the blog post appears to be unaware of is that the absence of samples showing the step-by-step evolution towards omicron doesn't mean that this didn't happen. A lot of places in the world don't have the resources to do covid testing and genomic surveillance.

[deleted]

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#68

Post by torstenvl »

omginternets wrote: post #61
torstenvl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Where did SARS-CoV-2 come from?" is a scientific question. It certainly could have ethical implications, granted, but that does not make it not a question suitable for scientific inquiry.

You’re right, it seems I read into your comment too deeply, probably given the context of a GOF related article. Please accept my apology.

No apology necessary, thank you for the pleasantness in hashing it out. :)

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#69

Post by ayjchan »

nnx wrote: post #42
ayjchan wrote: post #37

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a…

"Omicron could have evolved over an entire year in an immunocompromised individual before finally infecting others" Is it likely that this infected person would not have started any detectable cluster this whole time? How do you explain the ratio of functional vs silent mutations?

Evolution experiments in the lab mimic natural evolution. The ratio of functional vs silent mutations has also been used to characterize the evolution of viruses under natural selection.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#70

Post by [deleted] »

MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #14
beardedwizard wrote: post #11

So how are they keeping all the scientists involved in such a leak quiet? How many of these scientists are there?

A cover up isn't very hard to execute if the involved parties all have aligned incentives - in this case, not ruining their careers, possibly destroying their entire professional field, and publicly accepting culpability for millions of deaths and other damages.

[deleted]
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