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Lab Leak 2.0?

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#251

Post by fer »

kelnos wrote: post #227
fer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm no longer sure if that'd be good or bad. It's highly speculative, and does a lot of cherry picking, and an informed reader can read it for what it is, but it dumbs down some things so far as to make it fodder for the tinfoil hat crowd. And it's especially ugly when it justifies the cherry picking as "it's because these people don't make their living with GoF research". Substack is becoming YouTube f…

I'm not convinced that censoring ideas is healthy. Outright lies and attempts to generate panic and outrage might be an exception. But this isn't what's happening here: the article may be speculative and flawed, and may turn out to be incorrect, but it makes its case with actual real data, not with hand-waving and conspiracy theories. Even if none of the "popular" variants (or the original virus) came from a lab leak…

Censoring ideas isn't healthy, but platforms that snowball bits of information into dangerous wackery for ad revenue aren't exactly healthy either.

It's funny how some people are swift to be against gain-of-function research because of its dangers, but when it's social media the one playing with petri dishes of information for (and I think I'm going to coin a new term here) "gain-of-engagement research", then for the same people free speech is paramount and social media blocking content is literally 1984. Not saying that's you or GP, but it's a common overlap in my experience.

Everyone should be able to read whatever they want. I can't argue with that, because I defend that.

What I disagree with is with corporations (or any institution, really) abusing their position to spoon-feed content only to maximize some function regardless the externalities of the spread of such content. That's not free speech, that's giving a megaphone to the loudest and most digestible yet polarizing ideas.

So, sure, I think GP should be always allowed to share that on his FB with their peers. But maybe feeding that content to people who will potentially misunderstand it just because it generates engagement isn't the best thing to do. How can FB know that? No idea, but it shouldn't be our problem.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#252

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

the reason why the coronavirus was developed in a Chinese lab and financed by Fauci is because China is in an advantageous situation for GoF research having humans for experiments at disposal. they use Falun Gong and Uighurs for that purpose. it's the same logic that applies to black sites operated outside of the US.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#253

Post by ZeroGravitas »

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…

The other author of her book is Matt Ridley, the climate change skeptic.

But you know what they say, even a person who makes money by telling obvious lies about science is right twice a day, so we should probably evaluate this from first principals as if it wasn't coming from a professional serial liar.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#254

Post by toper-centage »

rleigh wrote: post #249
croes wrote: post #81

Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists. Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator. I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.

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…

But we never have the full picture. 2020 was a year where several countries closed their borders and restricted domestic travel. Many countries were not sequencing the virus. It's not that far fetched that we'd see a descendent of an ancient variant if it had been in hiding in some remote isolated village in a poor country.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#255

Post by rob_c »

challenger-derp wrote: post #238
rob_c wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious people on serious topics, journals, peer reviewed publications, non anonymous blogs, large email threads... Almost anything other than a) social media and b) anonymous platforms

Hate to be the bearer of bad news but you're outdated on this point. Researchers & politicians of repute use Twitter to voice their opinion and share stuff with the public.

I didn't say these platforms are never used. In this context I don't regard the public as an entity where you have a meaningful engagement on a topic. An individual yes, but the public as a whole is broadcast to. Hate to break it to you, trump likely never read your tweets...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#256

Post by croes »

rleigh wrote: post #249
croes wrote: post #81

Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists. Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator. I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.

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…

You are confusing our lack of knowldege of the intermediate steps with the lack of interim steps.

They might simply have been lost in the crowd or not even noticed, depending on where they were posted. How carefully have we studied the variants in animals?

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#257

Post by rob_c »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #174
rob_c wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious people on serious topics, journals, peer reviewed publications, non anonymous blogs, large email threads... Almost anything other than a) social media and b) anonymous platforms

Twitter is not anonymous and the authors have their real names attached. Their credentials are easy to verify It's not peer reviewed but that shouldn't discount the opinions of people who work in the field

Yes, but you don't find identified and certified accounts discussing technical details exclusively and exhaustively there...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#258

Post by Jyaif »

marktucker wrote: post #213
monocasa wrote: post #9

All of the GoF research procedures I've read stress natural evolution, but still rely on random mutations at the end of the day, which would still leave you with a natural looking count of silent mutations in the general case. As a GoF researcher you don't want to cull 'silent' mutations because those are a major source of building blocks for useful mutations.

This may be the standard approach, but the question is how else it could have happened other than some GoF procedure. Any idea what the odds are of this ratio happening by chance?

> how else it could have happened other than some GoF procedure

There are at least 2 other possibilities:

* The virus could have stayed alive in an immunocompromised person for months and accumulated mutations there.

* The virus could have jumped to animals (e.g. mouses), accumulate mutations, and jump back to humans.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#259

Post by sigotirandolas »

mbreese wrote: post #149
netizen-936824 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the blog post that we are commenting on, there is a strange ratio of silent to functional mutations. How can this be accounted for if it was a natural course of evolution?

Without looking more at the variants themselves and just going by the numbers in the post, it’s entirely plausible. It’s not likely, but plausible. Mainly because we are talking rare events. If the level of success is 33/3.5 (9.42), we’d expect that 4 (or less) silent variants would happen with a probability of ~ 0.042 (Poisson X Anytime you look at numbers like these, remember with a big denominator, even rare event…

If it was the case that the absolute number mattered, we would be able to sample different "Omicron-like" variants and observe various ratios such as 33N/10S, 33N/15S, etc. mutations. But according to the data presented, we don't: We only see a single (kind of) Omicron, the one with (about) 33N/4S mutations, presumably spilling over by a single event, so I don't see how your conclusion follows.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#260

Post by freemint »

TeeMassive wrote: post #151
tehjoker wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world has been blanketed in Coronavirus and as far as I know Africa has seen a mix of action that has been different from how Western countries have experienced it. The rates of infection are different, the rates of vaccination are different. Two VOCs have come out of South Africa, but who's to say that an earlier version from 2020 wasn't bumping around the continent and returned to South Africa? Everyone…

> The entire world has been blanketed in Coronavirus and as far as I know Africa has seen a mix of action that has been different from how Western countries have experienced it. The rates of infection are different, the rates of vaccination are different. Two VOCs have come out of South Africa, but who's to say that an earlier version from 2020 wasn't bumping around the continent and returned to South Africa? You're…

You seem to have caught some memes which don't make you see things rationally.

> The opposite require many hypothetical actors (mouses, immunosuppressed patients, back and forth between geographically distant places and all the combinations thereof) to account for it "hiding" since spring 2020

If you ever implied that closeness of outbreak of the Wuhan variant to the Wuhan lab the same should make you incredibly suspicious about this being a lab leak, since there is such lab nearby. So it would require an actor in another country to "breed" this variant and import it into South Africa/have agents spread it world wide and someone funding and green lighting what would a be case of international bio terrorism or even bio warfare.

As for accounting for those factors. Africa is an incredible diverse places with Nomads and hyper dense slums, with untreated large scale AIDS and healthcare systems as South Africa has and also a poorly understood and explored flora and fauna.

Does it seem that implausible that some combination of immuno compromised tribes/rural human and animals caught the old variant and didn't interact with the new variants from western civilization for less than two years? I don't think so.

As for the low number of silent mutations. I can not imagine how the lab leak theory would account for that, if it was designed why would there a low number of silent mutations and not an average number or none and if it was due to GoF why would a lab environment have less silent mutations then a "natural" one?

AFAIK we have almost no data on variants in some African capitals let alone people in rural/tribal areas or surveillance of animals. Maybe along its evolutionary it was a variant that has an advantage in sparsely populated areas so we didn't notice a large part of its history because it wasn't competitive in cities with other variants.

There are many possible explanations but the lack of lab is kinda blow for a lab leak theory and your political goal of less GoF-Research is only compatible with a lab leak and not any other form of lab caused (philanthropist/evil government developing and releasing this variant) explanation.

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