This mile-long gibberish has no more logic to it than the argument that the eye is so complex it could not have evolved, therefore God created life.
Lab Leak 2.0?
91–100 of 319 posts
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
This post had 40 points within 20 minutes, which is the reading time of the article at 200 WPM plus a minute or two for figures. How many of those upvotes were from people who didn't read or who skimmed the article?
I often upvote articles I find interesting enough I want to see a discussion of them on HN. To me it doesn't mean every word of an article is perfect and above criticism, it just means it's IMO interesting and of substance enough to warrant discussion. In this case I took my time fully reading it before posting it, but not being a biotech person I posted this here also because I was interested in criticism of flaws I…
Same here. I skimmed parts of the beginning, then upvoted because I found it interesting. I don't feel we should be squashing everything that might challenge our existing beliefs just because. Then HN would just be like every other awful social media site out there. If people have substantive problems with the article, they should articulate them as comments instead of blindly flagging something and hoping nobody ever has the opportunity to think about it.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#93In some ways this reminds me of the ill-fated flight MH370. It's not that there's compelling evidence that the pilot took deliberate action to divert the plane and assumedly land it in the Indian Ocean in a place where it would be hard to find because of the distance from land and depth of the ocean. It's that it's the only theory that fits the facts.
Likewise, it's not that there's compelling evidence of a lab leak (now or in 2019/2020). It's that we're sort of left with it by process of elimination. For example: if Covid-19 came from an animal population (eg via Wuhan wet markets) then why hasn't that population been found? The sources of SARS and MERS were, I believe, found relatively quickly.
Just like we shouldn't just accept the prevailing theory of MH370's disappearance as fact and we should continue to look for the plane and hopefully factually establish what actually happened, we shouldn't take the "lab leak" hypothesis as fact. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
As for the articles claims about Omicron origins... I really don't know. I'm certainly no virologist so can't speak to the mutations. That's an odd-looking graph though.
I'm also wary of drawing conclusions from anything to do with statistics, just because it's so easy to make a mistake. My favourite example is the long-running idiocy about "natural immunity" being better than a vaccine. This is based on comparing two populations: vaccinated and unvaccinated. Except... those populations aren't equivalent. The vaccinated group includes people who would've died without the vaccine (and thus are more likely to have comorbidities). Those people are dead in the unvaccinated population.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And even if they did do genomic analysis - it's entirely plausible the results are sitting in a hospital database somewhere instead of uploaded to the international gene surveillance repository.
Plausible, yes. If the data exists, it should be made public. The article still mostly just makes a hypothesis and makes the argument that this is something that should be seriously investigated, not that the author has determined without a doubt that this is a lab leak.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#95This 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…
Can you also comment on her claim that Delta was a lab leak?
[deleted]
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#96This 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…
Can you also comment on her claim that Delta was a lab leak?
He doesn't claim the origin of Delta was a lab leak. He claims Delta leaked from a lab in Taiwan.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Journals are very unlikely to publish this kind of things, because of massive conflicts of interests. Look at the Lancet.
What conflicts of interest? Big companies? The nations they are based in? None of that stopped, for example, the story about Volkswagen's Diesel fraud, or Boeing's troubles with the 757-MAX from finding a lot reputable publishers willing to print the story.
737, not 757
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#98I'm open minded, but my bullshit detectors started going off around the point where it was casually implied that we all know and it is widely accepted that delta was leaked from a lab. I tried googling it but could find nothing. Then I looked at the two sources the author links: > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 Neither of these have nearly enough evidence…
I feel like you're unfairly biased. The author doesn't say what you think they do. All they're saying is that there was a lab leak of delta in 2021 as an example of lab leaks being possible. They do not argue that this was the source of delta, nor that this was the source of any other strain. Just that it happened.
Sorry, the hysteria on HN is ridiculous. At least read the damn thing and try to be objective about it.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#99This 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…
Can you also comment on her claim that Delta was a lab leak?
You misread that - there is no claim that delta was initially released by a lab, rather a the known fact that a lab studying delta had an accident. Read the links the author provided.
Re: Lab Leak 2.0?
#100This 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…
Can you also comment on her claim that Delta was a lab leak?
The claim wasn’t that Delta originated from a lab leak but rather that Delta happened to leak from a lab (after the point that it existed in the wild). Additionally, the phylogenetic points from the article would suggest that Delta is of natural origin