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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#801

Post by eloisius »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #734
eloisius wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, we’re not talking about America right now. Even so, the US has its faults, but is vastly more transparent than the CCP. I would be shocked if the US arrested scientists and journalists to conceal the origins of a viral outbreak.

> I would be shocked if the US arrested scientists and journalists to conceal the origins of a viral outbreak. The US are actively prosecuting a journalist on phony charges because he helped expose their war crimes, among other things. The UK is of course actively complicit, which contributed in making his life a living hell. Given that precedent, I wouldn't be shocked at all.

And you'll read an endless trove of comments posted on this site, including from myself, in support of Assange and his work, and condemnation of what the US is doing to him.

We shouldn't even be on this tangent, because the parent comment was nothing but "what about America!" and now we're veering into even more tangential territory with "well what about America with regards to some other topic!?" This isn't a Chuck Norris movie with a good guy and a bad guy.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#802

Post by cade »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #725
undecisive wrote: post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all utter horse manure. > We have very strong prior knowledge that diseases arise naturally Correct. We also have very strong prior knowledge that existing diseases can be manipulated and produced by means of unnatural selection. We also have strong prior knowledge that this particular lab have done a fair amount of that. With coronaviruses. With bats. 5 minutes with wikipedia would tell you that. It's a bit…

>> This is all utter horse manure. That's great to know. Thank you for your kind and dignified contribution.

One of the more amusing versions of, "I may be mistaken on some points and need to reconsider" that I've read in a while...

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#803

Post by nradov »

jacquesm wrote: post #756
nradov wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily agree with the lab leak hypothesis but your arguments have some flaws. Hypothetically a lab worker could have been infected by careless handling of a lab animal rather than a swab. As I'm sure you're aware, viruses can be passaged through transgenic animals as part of gain-of-function research. There is no reliable evidence that the bat or pangolin species suspected to be the source of zoonotic tr…

All it would take is a bat taking a dump on a pigsty and then the unlucky pig that now happens to be infected being taken to the market. Which is the most likely backstory of several other bat-to-intermediary-to-human viral jumps. And if you're unlucky the intermediary species doesn't just carry the virus but serves as an amplifier. Hendra for instance.

Fecal-oral transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is suspected to be possible, but I don't think it has ever been definitively established.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#804

Post by lamontcg »

tripletao wrote: post #781
lamontcg wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the discovery of WIV1 in bats it was found that it efficiently infected human airway epithelial cells, and since the palm civets were never linked to any outbreaks it is possible that the virus had directly hopped to humans from bats and that the palm civets were unnecessary as an intermediate species. It was also later found that it infects racoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats. There was never any con…

I believe that: 1. The closest known animal viruses to human SARS-1 were found in civet cats in 2003, within about a year of the first discovery of the virus in humans. 2. No animal viruses closer to SARS-1 have since been discovered. Dr. Shi discovered various viruses in bats that we believe are ancestral to SARS-1, including WIV-1 in 2013. This is significant because we believe SARS-1 evolved primarily in bats, but…

Discovery of WIV1:

[Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/)

WIV1 grows in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures:

[SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048)

> Together, the data demonstrate that the WIV1-CoV spike can mediate infection of human airway cultures with no significant adaptation required.

And thanks for putting words in my mouth but no, I'm not confusing those with MERS.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#805

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #804
tripletao wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that: 1. The closest known animal viruses to human SARS-1 were found in civet cats in 2003, within about a year of the first discovery of the virus in humans. 2. No animal viruses closer to SARS-1 have since been discovered. Dr. Shi discovered various viruses in bats that we believe are ancestral to SARS-1, including WIV-1 in 2013. This is significant because we believe SARS-1 evolved primarily in bats, but…

Discovery of WIV1: [Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor]( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/ ) WIV1 grows in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures: [SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence]( https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 ) > Together, the data demonstrate that the WIV1-CoV spike can mediate infection of human airway cult…

I didn't mean to suggest that you were confusing anything with MERS. I just brought MERS up to show that not only had we found an animal infected with SARS-1 within about a year of its emergence in humans, but we'd also found such an animal for MERS, on a similar timescale. This means that SARS-CoV-2 is the 1/3 for which we haven't, not impossible just by chance but slightly more surprising than just 1/2.

And yeah, you'd mentioned WIV-1 above, and I'd assumed that's what you meant from the 2013 date. I noted this in point (2) of my grandparent comment. I just don't understand why you think that's more significant than finding the near-identical virus in civets. The SARS-1 civets might not have first transmitted SARS-1 to humans, but the WIV-1 bats definitely didn't--they're very different viruses, and while WIV-1 might indeed be able to infect humans it's definitely not what caused the actual outbreak. So why pick 2013 and not 2003?

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#806

Post by godmode2019 »

mandmandam wrote: post #788
godmode2019 wrote: post #370

An interesting tidbit. The image of Wuhan on the map in the article shows WIV down the road across the river from the wet market. Something that gets zero screen time is the Chinese CDC is literary across the road from the wet market. They have since moved / unlisted that address. This does not mean a lab leak, but its a weird thing to be left out of the conversion.

> the Chinese CDC is literary across the road from the wet market I would looove a source on that, please. Can't find anything with a quick search and haven't heard that before.

I can read Chinese and saw it on a Chinese map at the start of the pandemic, when I was looking at the huanan wet market.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Center_For_Disease_Con...

No. 288, Machang Road, Jianghan District, Wuhan

If you duckduckgo the address you can see a bunch of academic papers listing that as the address.

Its not controversial. Just no one has ever brought it up.

Only media that reported on it was this

https://nypost.com/2021/08/13/who-scientist-eyes-on-wuhan-la...

Again, this doesn't prove a lab leak. But its a weird fact to leave out of public discourse.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#807

Post by lamontcg »

tripletao wrote: post #805
lamontcg wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discovery of WIV1: [Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor]( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/ ) WIV1 grows in primary human airway epithelial cell cultures: [SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence]( https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 ) > Together, the data demonstrate that the WIV1-CoV spike can mediate infection of human airway cult…

I didn't mean to suggest that you were confusing anything with MERS. I just brought MERS up to show that not only had we found an animal infected with SARS-1 within about a year of its emergence in humans, but we'd also found such an animal for MERS, on a similar timescale. This means that SARS-CoV-2 is the 1/3 for which we haven't, not impossible just by chance but slightly more surprising than just 1/2. And yeah, y…

We have no proof that civets gave us SARS-1 and not the other way around.

Since it was also found in raccoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats which one of those was the actual intermediate animal? Civets were just the first identified. Either one of them gave it to us and we gave it to the other three, or possibly we got it from bats and gave it to all four. AFAIK there's no conclusive phylogenetic analysis establishing which species got it from whom.

MERS is much more obvious what happened.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#808

Post by jacquesm »

baja_blast wrote: post #775
jacquesm wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The similarities vastly outweigh the differences. The biggest difference between SARS-CoV and COVID-19 is that the latter takes a bit longer before you get ill but you are already contagious. Other than that it's mostly the same old story. Note that if not for SARS-CoV this would have been a lot more serious because that served as a dress rehearsal and put a lot of mechanisms in place as well as suggested screening f…

Another major difference between SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 is that SARS-CoV-1 took time to gain new adaptions to effectively spread between humans. These mutations that SARS-CoV-1 went through allowed researchers to find the intermediate animal host within months. With SARS-CoV-2 there was no known mutation phase where the virus rapidly gained mutations to more efficiently transmit between humans. SARS-COV2 came out th…

> SARS-COV2 came out the gate perfectly adapted

We actually do not know this for sure. There is a chance that the reservoir is one step removed and that another host in between amplified the virus to the point where it could make the jump.

Ebola also has this property, but it is just a bit too lethal to spread far (fortunately). An Ebola with a slightly longer asymptomatic incubation time (while already shedding) would be far worse then the current versions.

With Ebola each and every outbreak starts with an interspecies jump, usually bushmeat. The idea that these jumps are extremely rare is in principle incorrect, but it looks like that because pandemics are rare. But those are just the runaway successes (from the viral point of view).

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#809

Post by jacquesm »

tim333 wrote: post #777
jacquesm wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while in private believing it quite likely That's not what they said or believed. That's exactly why I have a problem with this whole exercise, it seems to me to be mostly a game of jump-to-conclusions.

Well "accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40." sounds like Mike Farzan thought it quite likely. And >Before I left the office for the ball, I aligned nCoV with the 96% bat CoV sequenced at WIV. Except for the RBD the S proteins are essentially identical at the amino acid level – well all but the perfect insertion of 12 nucleotides that adds the furin site. S2 is over its whole length essentially ide…

Meanwhile, we have hard proof that this does occur in nature.

So this part of the discussion is no longer relevant from an evidence of view, the 'even more implausible' part turned out to be true.

This - again - illustrates why I think this whole thread is a large pile of rubbish. If you are arguing with old information for an implausible viewpoint why are you arguing at all?

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#810

Post by jacquesm »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #793
jacquesm wrote: post #341

If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed. This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda. It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first p…

Hmmm I think someone else is also extrapolating one data point to an entire community as well based on less than probably 0.1% of the participants of HN...

There are 100's of comments here like that, and on balance it's a dumpster fire.
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