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Lab Leak 2.0?

bprice.substack.com

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#111

Post by zerobits »

d23 wrote: post #79

I'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…

The author did not claim that Delta's origin was a lab leak. Just that there was one isolated case of it. And so it stands to reason, other lab leaks may also be occurring.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#112

Post by daxuak »

KarlKemp wrote: post #75
ekianjo wrote: post #50

Earlier 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.

Conflicts on trying to appear politically neutral for PR pieces while 1) they are not (because research funding sources, public relationships etc), 2) it is not possible, so better off avoiding certain topics all together.

I still have faith in preprint servers though. Or self-publishing in the scientific writing form, instead of unorganized blog rant.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#113

Post by saalweachter »

cletus wrote: post #93

In 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…

>> The sources of SARS and MERS were, I believe, found relatively quickly.

> But it took nearly 15 years and extensive animal sampling to find a closely related virus in bats.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01541-z

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#114

Post by [deleted] »

d23 wrote: post #79

I'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…

[deleted]

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#115

Post by john_moscow »

What kinda raised suspicions about Omicron for me is that it propagates considerably faster in the bronchial tissue, while being much slower in the lungs [0].

Given the current state of biotech, it is not possible to just edit the viral RNA achieving the desired clinical result, but is entirely feasible to keep applying minor edits and measuring the propagation rate in different tissues in vitro, effectively optimizing it to be more transmissible and less lethal. The snapshot of the phylogenetic tree, showing how Omicron "branched out" mid-2020 highly supports this assumption.

It is also quite obvious that an endeavor like this would be against all written rules and norms and would face backlash of epic proportion even if it wouldn't backfire, so it's safe to assume we won't hear an official confirmation of this theory from any of the governments.

[0] https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/omicron-propagate...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#116

Post by netizen-936824 »

GolfPopper wrote: post #26
netizen-936824 wrote: post #13

As someone who wasn't totally sure about the lab leak hypothesis before, this is rather convincing. Especially for the path that omicron took. I'm also surprised gain of function research has not been banned, the risk is far too high

I found it completely unconvincing, particularly when it came to discussing the "lab leak". From the article, where the author speculates about why the omicron variant is so genetically different from other variants of the virus:> "One parsimonious hypothesis is that some engineering has been done to it, in order to make its evolution look so unnatural. I have not heard another parsimonious hypothesis." A New Scienti…

The article you linked was extremely short on details and mechanisms

In the paper that the article links about mutations in an HIV patient (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.03.21258228v...)

There is a figure 1 and the left side (A) which shows a maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. If you examine this tree, you can see that the highlighted piece is based off a recent (to the HIV patient's case) variant.

On the other hand, the linked article (https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20) has a tweet by Jonatan Pallesen showing a tree for Omicron. This tree shows that Omicron is based off of a variant from a surpringly long time ago. This alone is bizarre.

That combined with the lack of silent mutations is extremely suspicious. I'm not saying this is concrete evidence or anything, but its very strange and doesn't appear to line up with a natural course of evolution

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#117

Post by daxuak »

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…

Adding one more clarification in case someone reads this text wall:

The "requests" I made was rather harsh, e.g. it might be impossible to check nextstrains's sequencing sources, if this is a real manuscript revision. I honestly probably won't question as harsh if it's a writting for a different topic.

However, given that the author is trying to illustrate a not-very-likely scenario, which being, not only that there's a major lab leak, but also someone has engineered a not yet fully understood non-trivial virus genome to alter its function as desired (note that COVID doesn't have a well established animal model. It would be hard to test a engineered virus even if it exists. In this case, would you assume that it's continuous lab "leak" and only the omicron strain was a success? And if yes, how could all other strains went undetected at all in the past 2 years?), I think scrutiny is justified and should be expected. It is against several odds and you really need some strong evidences to rule out other possibilities.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#118

Post by verdverm »

ufo wrote: post #66
MaxfordAndSons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If we don't know the answer, are all hypotheses "speculation"

What is the differentiator?

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#119

Post by rob_c »

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.

And the reason not all of these spread fast is obviously that one mutation (or combination) impacts the spread rate more than the 30+other mutations in isolation... Although after enough conversations I've found this too needs spelling out in plain English...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#120

Post by daxuak »

hermitdev wrote: post #49
PennRobotics wrote: post #40

Earlier 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 read the article, then up voted. On refresh it was buried. I had to find it via my upvoted submissions. In my opinion, the immediate flagging is a symptom of the hostility of even discussing the origins, lab leak or not.

I read, had a bunch things to argue about, and came back to find it flagged. IMO it's a terrible blog post and I regret reading it. But man, the flagging was... fast.
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