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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please list the other "totally reasonable and likely ways"? I'm interested.

"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that? The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.

> "Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that?

What you described is still the lab leak theory.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#382
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…

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#383
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.

You've jumped from "do research" to "making frankenviruses" - which beyond being a sensationalist term with no formal definition, isn't necessarily the sum totality of viral research. Just the bit that the popular press likes writing lurid articles about.

Fair enough, but I'd file gain of function research in that category, it's common, and seeing a possible outcome of it, it's something we need to rethink very carefully.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#384
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2 Do you have a source for this? Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?

This is the study I alluded to: >Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic >Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed i…

> You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus,

There is no basis for this claim. Genomic evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a chimera of any two previously-known viruses. No possible genomic evidence could exclude a chimera of two previously-unknown viruses, and the WIV was the world's leading collector of such novel sarbecoviruses from nature. They proposed to make chimeras of them in DEFUSE. That proposal wasn't funded, but this article now reports explicit claims they did such work:

> They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.

You're basically rehashing Andersen's "Proximal Origins" here, and even he has moved on to more sophisticated (though still unconvincing) arguments like Pekar. As David Relman wrote almost three years ago:

> This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021133117

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#385
post #358

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…

> The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it. > No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of build…

Saddam intentionally let the WMD claims be made unchallenged because he wanted Iran to be reluctant to attack while Iraq was too weak to defend itself.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#386

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…

I read this in a non-paywalled source a while ago, but this is all that easily came up in my search now. Maybe you think the title is sufficient to back up my claim, maybe you don't, IDK.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-05/covid-lik...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#387
post #357
post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've got a PhD in infectious disease epidemiology who got his start in researching respiratory pathogens and whose work on coronaviruses has been cited 387 times. I'd both put my estimate at much lower than 95%, and I'd be substantially less confident in it, since my expertise kicks in about two weeks after an initial spillover event occurs.

It is fact that a group that funds research in Wuhan (Eco health alliance) submitted a grant request to DARPA to fund research to engineer a coronavirus which could infect human lungs by inserted a specific cleavage site. Covid has that mutation exactly where the grant proposal planned to insert it. And no viruses in teh wild have been found to have that feature. This grant proposal was submitted in 2018.

For covid to be natural it would have had to mutate in the same way as planned in the grant proposal within 2 years of the grant proposal, and then travel hundreds of miles not infecting anyone on the way until it got to the city where this research was planned to be done.

Think about it.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#388

This is the kind of writing you need to properly discuss the lab leak hypothesis. It's not perfect, there are no good links to sources which suggests a lot of it is made up. However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation. You can't do the lab leak panic 2 days into the pandemic. You can't even really do it half way through the pandemic. I'm glad such investigations are being c…

>However, this kind of writing should only happen after years or months of investigation.

In other words, censorship

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that? The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.

> "Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that? What you described is still the lab leak theory.

Oh you're right, i'm supposed to support "not lab leak".

Bats -> humans in the market.

Point remains the same. We're all speculating because I agree with the statement that trying to create foreign policy based on speculation creates so many problems - Iraq war for one (but, being fair, supposedly that was credible).

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#390
post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Lentiviral vectors are engineered to make them less harmful (and hopefully beneficial) to humans. They're also tested to ensure they're replication-incompetent, so that even if they did turn out to be harmful they couldn't spread from patient to patient.

https://www.criver.com/eureka/why-are-lentivirus-vector-safe...

The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.

There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.

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