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Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

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Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#41

Post by eurasiantiger »

8note wrote: post #35
asdkjjjthrow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is very wishful thinking, or deliberately choosing how to interpret "lab-made" to be "sliced and diced and recombined". "Lab-made" still encompasses the whole of GoF research. That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. If the virus was manufactured through some means then it was, by definition, l…

It sounds like you'd consider the state of Florida being a lab to produce covid variants? The wet market theory is also then a lab made one, since putting sick Bata and pangolins and whatever together can promote viruses jumping species. Flu is mostly a lab made virus by this definition too. Put people close to chickens, and you help people catch new flu variants

Remember when there was an Ebola outbreak from CDC facilities in Reston, VA?

There is currently one in Washington, too

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#42

Post by shostack »

coolso wrote: post #11
deaddodo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Given that the vast majority of mainstream article posts are from a place of opposite bias, I think it's a breath of fresh air to have a different bias at the forefront every once in a while.

This is a false equivalence. The opinion of someone who does not believe in science is not magically equal to those of people who do and are well versed in it when it comes to debating scientific matters.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#43

Post by mrtesthah »

hunterb123 wrote: post #33
caperfee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not aware of another confirmed sample found that is closer to SARS-CoV-2 Paraphrasing from this article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 > BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2; one section in BANAL-103 and BANAL-52 could have shared an ancestor with sections of SARS-CoV-2 less than a decade ago. > RaTG13 is 96.1% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and the two viruses probably shared a common ancestor 4…

> The results, which are not peer reviewed, have been posted on the preprint server Research Square It's a CCP propaganda piece. I find that "study" pretty fishy, the results would have been easy to verify if true. Same as the CDC study they tried to use against Israel's study for natural immunity.

Once you let ideology infiltrate your reasoning, you’re no longer doing science. Just because you don’t like the implications of a particular piece of research doesn’t mean you get to dismiss it.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#44

Post by nikolay »

Why wouldn't it be? We have all the technology. Why make a dirty bomb, when you can make something invisible and release it at a busy airport, and it gets everywhere in a month and only affects the unvaccinated. It could be very profitable. Why politicians rush to convince us that this is not lab-made?! If not the original SARS-CoV-2, then Omicron for sure was lab-made.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#45

Post by vintermann »

asdkjjjthrow wrote: post #21
alevskaya wrote: post #16

Sigh. As I've said in other posts, if any experiment of this sort were the source of sars-cov-2, it would be -blindingly- obvious. The synthetic metagenomic experiments looking into spike, etc. leave completely obvious traces, number one being the use of known, characterized viral vectors. Using some random isolates as experimental vectors is not only methodologically pointless and counterproductive, it's vastly more…

I think this is very wishful thinking, or deliberately choosing how to interpret "lab-made" to be "sliced and diced and recombined". "Lab-made" still encompasses the whole of GoF research. That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. If the virus was manufactured through some means then it was, by definition, l…

> That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc.

And as I understand it, that's the "serial passage" possibility they discuss in the recently publicized papers.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#46

Post by dirtyid »

asdkjjjthrow wrote: post #40
8note wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you'd consider the state of Florida being a lab to produce covid variants? The wet market theory is also then a lab made one, since putting sick Bata and pangolins and whatever together can promote viruses jumping species. Flu is mostly a lab made virus by this definition too. Put people close to chickens, and you help people catch new flu variants

This is a really dishonest form of argument and I don't think you actually read my post for context. There's a very large difference between the relatively small gaps in genomes between related virus species and the grand canyon sized gap between COVID and it's nearest neighbor. The difference between omicron and delta is very small, delta and alpha also very small. These would be "expected" differences much like inf…

> Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible.

No logical narrative for PRC is this:

Covid19 never originated in PRC in the first place - Wuhan was merely the first identified cluster, being a large transit hub in the world's most populous country that just happens to have some labs which contributed to PRC's flu monitoring system picking up the novel disease in the first place. The most likely origin is some cave down south, likely (hopefully for PRC) across the border in Laos/Vietnam/Cambodia. And PRC should be praised for identifying and reporting novel virus relatively promptly, even more so for unprecedented locking down and buying the world time, which most countries squandered. That geopolitical adversaries of PRC who failed to contain convid are looking for an escape goat, and there is zero reason for PRC to cooperate by entertaining their conspiracy theories, let alone open up sensitive PRC facilities to inspection because frankly sovereignty violations like that are not "common" for large countries - it's the kind of weapons inspection tier treatment enforced upon losers of wars. PRC already entertained WHO investigation. That's enough. Now go validate PRC conspiracy theory that it was a leak from Fort Detrick, which is just as valid, knowing full well there's about zero chance US would open Fort Detrick to international scrutiny (though it would certainly shut PRC up if US did). Ultimately PRC would never submit to that kind of sovereignty violation doubters deem necessary even if she's innocent due to history and basic geopolitics. It's not going to change enough minds to matter.

Of course I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but not by much. Official PRC position is to let science work it out, which will take time, which is to say spend decades years sampling all the bat caves in South Asia and best case find something to clear PRC or worst case implicate PRC through process of elimination. But by then so much time has passed that it would barely be consequential and in all likelihood there's going to be an entire universe of conspiracy theories to cloud any findings. Or the fact that PRC's superior covid response could vindicate it's claim that it was simply best prepared to identify novel virus that did not originate in PRC because in retrospect, the idea that west was best prepared to deal with pandemic is a meme. Or that time will bring clarity to all the covid geopolitics, and conclude lab-leak is just one of many propaganda campaigns in nascent Sino-US cold war. And frankly it'll probably work, because none of this is even wrong and history has tendency to be rewritten.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#47

Post by pindab0ter »

nikolay wrote: post #44

Why wouldn't it be? We have all the technology. Why make a dirty bomb, when you can make something invisible and release it at a busy airport, and it gets everywhere in a month and only affects the unvaccinated. It could be very profitable. Why politicians rush to convince us that this is not lab-made?! If not the original SARS-CoV-2, then Omicron for sure was lab-made.

If SARA-CoV-2 wasn’t lab-made, Omicron for sure wasn’t either. Why would you release a biological weapon that already does exactly as the currently ongoing pandemic?

Also, how are you going to get every non-target vaccinated before the virus shows up?

What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#48

Post by pindab0ter »

option wrote: post #7

Check out “Viral” by Chan and Ridley - I highly recommend this book. Edit: Yes, the initial pandemic virus most likely leaked from WIV lab in Wuhan. Whether it was engineered and whether it was intentional are different questions.

Now this is much more likely than it supposed to have been a bio weapon.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#49

Post by bmn__ »

hunterb123 wrote: post #14
zozbot234 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there are many strong indications that it did. Nope, there really aren't. We're now finding more and more naturally-evolved viruses in cave-dwelling bats that share plenty of features with SARS-CoV2, including the 'weird' features everyone was talking about at the beginning of the pandemic. All it really takes is to go and look for them. Occam's razor says this virus too is just one of many.

> All it really takes is to go and look for them They did, the closest sample is still Ra4991/RaTG13 which was found in a Wuhan mine and transported to the Wuhan virology lab before the outbreak. Not aware of another confirmed sample found that is closer to SARS-CoV-2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13

> Wuhan mine

correction: Yunnan mine

It is exceedingly important that you get all facts right. Much depends on this.

Re: Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate (2015)

#50

Post by tripletao »

alevskaya wrote: post #37
tripletao wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already know that the EcoHealth Alliance sought funding for DEFUSE, which involved making chimeras of "random isolates" (novel coronaviruses collected by the WIV from nature) and certain known backbones. They proposed to do that work in North Carolina, not Wuhan, and the proposal was rejected for safety concerns; but it gives general insight to the kind of work they wanted to do, and might have continued with othe…

Yeah, I used to engineer viruses and immune cells, etc. I've read that grant a few times. Again, a rejected _American_ grant for work to be done in Baric's lab in North Carolina. Most of the work outlined in it involved chimeric genomes that would be obvious. There's a few sentences about verifying properties of full-length quasispecies isolates, but the QS experiments aren't well outlined - a lot of chimeric experim…

> These stories remain ludicrous when compared with the unambiguous epidemiological evidence for zoonosis that we have in hand.

What would you consider the strongest evidence for zoonosis? All previous pandemics of novel[1] viruses have been of natural origin. But the technology to enable such an accident has only existed for a few decades, so that seems far from decisive. No one had died in a plane crash before the Wright brothers, but that doesn't mean the risk wasn't there.

We've found lots of viruses related to SARS-CoV-2 in bats; but no one questions that the virus is ancestral in bats, just whether it passed through some postdoc's hands on its way to humans. We've found new bat viruses in Laos, and perhaps SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally from that; but the WIV was also sampling in Laos, so perhaps it emerged that way too. I don't think natural zoonotic origin is impossible, but I certainly don't see unambiguous evidence for it.

> The damage it does is distracting us from the unregulated wild-meat and fur industries that were the overwhelmingly likely cauldron for evolving these strains (as in SARS-1!).

I'd certainly argue for restricting those industries, even if this pandemic turns out to be lab-origin, just as I'd argue for restricting certain virological research of concern even if this pandemic turns out to be natural-origin. Per above, neither risk seems small enough to me to ignore for the sake of the other.

1. I say "novel" to exclude the 1977 flu pandemic, which somehow nobody gets upset about even though ~700k people died.

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