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Lab Leak 2.0?

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#131

Post by BearOso »

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…

That assumes the origin is Africa, but it could have just risen to prevalence there. We know the original COVID-19 was spreading around the world when at the time we thought it was mostly China. It needs only a 12-hour plane ride to get to the other side of the planet.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#132

Post by alex_young »

If the author actually had some kind of evidence that there was a lab leak source of Omicron, don’t you think it would be mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the blog? Instead we have a long list of connect-the-dots tweets, out of context quotes, and unsubstantiated speculation going on for 2/3s of the post before we even get to the Omicron stuff.

The meat of the speculation is a scary looking graph plotting genetic delta from the origin. Here’s a more objective plot from the Wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant#/...

Notice anything? Looks like Gamma and others have similar genetic distances without other mutations.

Sensational blogging is pretty sensational. That’s about it.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#133

Post by nyolfen »

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…

> 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.

there's a great deal of compelling evidence for alpha leaking from a lab; e.g. the director of the WIV publishing papers about introducing furin cleavage sites, which have otherwise never been detected in coronaviruses, into bat coronaviruses in the years leading up to the pandemic. if anybody has not read the nicholas wade essay in the bulletin of atomic scientists from last year that was mentioned briefly in the linked piece, i strong recommend it: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#134

Post by dqpb »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #126
dqpb wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you also comment on her claim that Delta was a lab leak?

She , and yes, she does need to go back over that sentence and clarify it, because it does read that way.

Thank you, fixed it.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#135

Post by TeeMassive »

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.

Yeah but since spring 2020? This variant slept without getting replaced by other more contagious variants? That doesn't seem likely.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#136

Post by cyounkins »

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…

Welcome to HN. Can you comment on the silent/functional mutation ratio weirdness?

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#138

Post by downrightmike »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #109

> "[A virus wouldn’t be expected to develop a bunch of resistances to the current human antibodies if it evolved in] An animal, because animals in natural circumstances don’t have human antibodies" Animal antibodies would work just fine to put selective pressure on the virus.

That's why viruses coming out of bats are so scary. Bat immune systems are strange and complex, but they allow the virus room to exist and mutate.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#139

Post by thurn »

This is interesting, but even a brief discussion of selection bias would help it be more convincing. If you pick the most wildly successful mutation out of the thousands of available choices of course it is going to be an outlier in numerous ways. Isn't it perhaps even likely that the most widespread variant would have a low number of silent mutations and strong immune-evasion capabilities?

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#140

Post by klipt »

testplzignore wrote: post #104
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…

I think there is confusion on what the author meant by "leaked". The Delta variant was already spreading, yes. The author is saying - and the first link above essentially states this - that a lab worker was infected with Delta while in a lab. (Though it's not stated whether that worker was quarantined immediately, or if they could have possibly spread it to others.) So what's the point? 1,000,001 people have Delta in…

I'm guessing it's impossible to get the lab leak rate down to 0.

And assuming there are currently thousands of labs studying covid, even with a low leak rate there could be some leaks. But of an already existing virus, so not so bad.

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