Lab Leak 2.0?

Not something I know much about but assuming there was a lot of selective pressure because the virus was in a new environment, likely a mouse, and one virus gets a silent mutation and another a non-silent, the non silent might zip ahead and take over?

Thanks for joining me under this aluminum tent

> > What if instead of that well-trod path of war, they chose to boost the poll numbers by allowing a crisis to occur and saving the day?

By this I meant to imply that, as opposed to being faced with rebellion, the government could allow (if not cause) the pandemic to take hold and then show competence vis-a-vis building hospitals and distributing vaccines. By doing a better job at it than democracies, the CCP could buy some praise from the public, but I'm unable to speculate whether the average Chinese citizen feels their government was heroic or not.

Agreed CCP is unlikely to co-operate with USA, but maybe we had the same idea, that division in the US population was a Good Thing, ie, what was that quote, maybe it was Martin Luther King Jr, that as long as poor white and poor black people are kept fighting, they won't notice that they're both being taken advantage of by the rich? That still goes on, but it is Red vs Blue as well, and as long as we keep voting our more radical representatives in, and being angry with the 'other side', the less likely we are to unite and overthrow the corrupt show of two-party politics.

Please don't do this, our understanding of the world is not improved by censoring things we consider unplatable. It is not a "conspiracy" to consider various viewpoints. Everything speculated about in the article was backed up by real data. It may be true, or it may be false, but suppressing discussion is no way forward to determine the origins of the virus.

I'm an immunologist and molecular biologist, though I currently work on software-related things. I've worked in class 3 facilities in a medical school as a PhD and a postdoc. I've seen a fellow PhD student infect themselves with a tropical disease. I've seen my fair share of good and bad working practices. Scientists are not infallible, they are human. They make mistakes, they get sloppy, and they lose attention. The unfortunate reality is that lab leaks are commonplace. Most you never hear about because the consequences are minor.

Given the poor track record of labs worldwide to practice good biosafety, the real question here is whether we should have a complete worldwide ban on gain-of-function research. Is the risk really worth the benefit?

Over time, we'll gradually learn the real truth of the origins of all of the variants as we get more data, but attempting to suppress discussion of genuine avenues of investigation is about as anti-scientific as you can get. Please reconsider your attitude.

Perhaps the audience for that blog isn't the regular hn reader because I read it the same way as d23. I get that an origin leak can't come after delta was already spreading but most of us aren't drawing a timeline on the side while reading either.

Evolution occurs gradually, one base-pair at a time through replication error (or various other effects). Occasionally you get big changes through duplication, transposition or deletion of whole parts of a sequence. But the latter hasn't occurred here--we're looking only at the former. When we study evolution over time, we can look at the accumulation of silent and non-silent point mutations. And we can also pick up any larger insertions and deletions. From this data we can create a graph of the changes over time based upon relatedness (the phylogenetic tree). This is the data shown in the article.

When looking at a large sampling of data across an entire population, we would expect to see a gradual accumulation of point mutations over time. And very rarely, some larger insertion or deletion event. None of this is new. We had all the tools to do this for over two decades. I was using Perl for bioinformatics 15 years back.

So given the assumption that we would see a gradual accumulation of point mutations over time, if we see any big changes appear out of the blue, that's a flag to investigate more closely at what happened. That's not "creationism" of any sort. Given that the point mutations give a very clear fingerprint, we can immediately find the most closely-related genome, which is why it was found to match a sample collected in early 2020. That completely breaks our expectations of it missing a whole 12 months of natural accumulation of point mutations. We might not sample perfectly--we might occasionally see two or even three point changes because we failed to sample those intermediate states. But to have a jump spanning dozens of changes--that's just not matching our existing expectations, particularly when we tracked nearly every Delta change.

Now that might be real. But the probability of that being natural is very, very low. Almost nonexistent. But the chances that this was stuck in a freezer and pulled out, skipping over those 12 months of mutation-gathering while frozen in a tube, are unfortunately a much more likely possibility.