Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#341

Post by pessimizer »

onethought wrote: post #332
adh636 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to better under the origins of a global pandemic is not an inconsequential endeavor.

That’s not what people are doing, they are trying to prove a lab leak theory, else all this effort would be in “how’d it get to that wet market” if you can’t answer that, then you do not have a logical chain to its true origin lab leak or not.

How have you justified deciding that the only important question for anyone to answer is why it was in the wet market? What's the case for that?

It wasn't exclusively in the wet market, it was in lots of places.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#342

Post by gataca »

sgift wrote: post #172
himinlomax wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with Wuhan lab is that the Chinese dictatorship blocks any independent inquiry into it. If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.

> If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt. No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally b…

Countries and governments are not individuals. The fact that a virus emerged in China and proceeded to kill millions of people globally and the Chinese government has completely obstructed any independent investigation is outrageous and criminal. You don't get to throw your arms up and say "No Entry" when millions of lives have been lost.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#343

Post by pessimizer »

Ithnolog wrote: post #194
sgift wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt. No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally b…

Governments aren't people. They don't have rights. Same for corporations.

Governments have neither rights nor duties, so saying they don't owe you anything is essentially the same thing. Governments do what they can get away with doing.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#344

Post by m00x »

makmanalp wrote: post #336
HardlyCurious wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right? The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. Gain of function research is real, scient…

> Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study Please don't "actually" something with an uncited statement without backing it up with any sort of detail. A news article? Anything, honestly. > that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right? Really? It's "Wuhan institute of virology". Not "coronaviruses". Right? I have no specific horse in this race but I feel lik…

From wikipedia:

> The institute has been an active premier research center for the study of coronaviruses.[6]

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[17][21]

The evidence is pretty damning, and points to way too much to be coincidental. It's not solid evidence, but that would be impossible to get since China blocked anyone from visiting or doing independent investigations.

My major and Msc are related to microbiology (which is highly related to virology), and I'd estimate it's a 95% chance of having originated from the lab.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#345

Post by sokoloff »

samspenc wrote: post #305
ricksunny wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chief among key new assertions the parent article makes, https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/16676623250907463... • WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator. • Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020 • WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant' • Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang…

> Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020 I mean, this is a pretty significant and concerning new finding right? Someone associated with the lab researching COVID early on just mysteriously disappearing in China?

This was news in the summer of 2021 and still seems a concerning (albeit not new) finding as he had reportedly filed a patent for a COVID-19 vaccine in Feb of 2020 prior to dying in May of 2020.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#346

Post by dekhn »

MathMonkeyMan wrote: post #329
nextos wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is also worth adding that there is good evidence of some lab leaks that caused pandemics in the past. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m... In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.

I saw an interview with a virologist, but I don't remember where (somewhere on YouTube). He said that there _is_ a moratorium on gain of function research, but that it's a joke because virology is pretty much about studying gain of function.

Even better: modern gene therapy is done with lentiviruses which were derived from HIV. This is commonly done; thousands of research labs around the world do this as a regular practice. We typically call them lentiviruses, rather than HIV-derived, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentiviral_vector_in_gene_ther...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#347

Post by [deleted] »

HardlyCurious wrote: post #304
pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right? The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. Gain of function research is real, scient…

[deleted]

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#348

Post by tim333 »

ajross wrote: post #175
pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

My position hasn't changed for years: if covid was really a lab creation we'd know, because someone would have told us. An email dump, a memo, a document, an interview. Something would have leaked out. The incentives are just too high and the access is too pervasive[1] to believe otherwise. Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone ma…

There has been stuff leaking out. The DEFUSE paper for example. As to why someone in the Wuhan lab wouldn't leak direct info, you are dealing with a military related lab in the country with the highest number of executions in the world. That could be a disincentive.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#349

Post by dekhn »

latency-guy2 wrote: post #318
toomim wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don't know what happened to JFK, 60 years later.

We also did not know that Cuba housed missles from Russia during the crisis. We also did not know to the extent that Cuba's leadership explicitly did have plans to strike the US alongside their Soviet allies. It took until 1992 for what appears to be the truth to be discovered, 3 decades with far more people involved in the process, and a much darker outcome than a man being assassinated.

The us had credible satellite evidence of soviets building housings for nuclear warheads in Cuba during and before the crisis. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/photos.htm (perhaps I misunderstand your argument; 1992 was when our knowledge was formally confirmed, IIUC)
Post reply on HN