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

821–830 of 1001 posts

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#821

Post by HardlyCurious »

jasonlotito wrote: post #662
HardlyCurious wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Think about it. That's the hard-hitting evidence that was missing. And that's why this topic is so taboo and annoying. People turn coincidence into proof. Clearly, you have an agenda that encourages people to stop looking at facts and instead to make things up they don't have answers for. Think about it. (This means I'm right, right? This means if you don't agree with me, you aren't thinking, right?)

It's an appeal to Occam's razor. The most simple explanation of why a novel virus started infecting people in a city with a virology lab is that the written plan to make covid in that lab was executed.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#822

Post by George83728 »

revelio wrote: post #573
misja111 wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that the epidemic started in the middle of the US election campaign. At some point the Trump team started to support the lab leak theory. And then it became political; Biden supporters started framing them as conspiracy theorists, anybody who dared to support the leak theory was labeled as a Trump supporter etc. In China some people must have been amazed how the US was arranging such a thorough cover-…

Lab leak theory was suppressed worldwide, it wasn't just in the USA.

[Not] incidentally, around the world it's easy to find people who know more about American politics than their own local politics. I'm friends online with several Brazilians; they spend as much if not more time talking about Trump than Bolsonaro. Why is that?

I think this is for a few reasons; America is a [the?] global hegemon; so American domestic politics have some earnest global relevance. But more than that; reporting one country's news is more efficient than reporting N countries' news. Fewer stories means fewer writers to pay, less research and investigation to do, etc. Furthermore people have an appetite for news, but a finite appetite; sate people with news about America and you'll have them thinking less about local issues. Therefore, news organizations in other countries have both an economic and political incentive to report American news instead of local news. What's more, America encourages this because for America it is a form of soft power to live rent-free in the minds of everybody else.

Point is: when a narrative becomes taboo in American media, that's likely to rub off on the rest of the world. Particularly so in countries where a sizeable portion of the population consume at least some English-language media, participate on English-language forums, etc.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#823

Post by thatguy0900 »

pfisherman wrote: post #589
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you overstate how much the lab leak and the bioweapon stories were being conflated. I recall that most people were able to distinguish between them, and that the most prominent figures raising red flags about a potential leak weren't talking about bioweapons. In any case, the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could ha…

> the most alarming aspect of the lab leak hypothesis is that gain-of-function research is STILL being done, and that the same thing could happen AGAIN. This right here is an example of why we can’t have reasoned discussion around the topic. You can explain one of the many reasons why gain of function research is necessary: anticipating next year’s version of the flu, designing drugs and vaccines such that resistance…

I'm honestly under the impression that people are just too irresponsible to do some things. People are not machines who go into a bsl 4 lab and do proper safety precautions each and every day without slipping or becoming lax. If you have a lab making viruses, eventually, it will escape. If the viruses they are making are capable of shutting the whole world down for a year, then we really need to ask whether we should have them.its not a question of "is doing this useful?", because I'm sure it is. It is a question of is this worth doing even though we know it will inevitably go bad? You can talk about all the precautions and regulations you want, if people are involved then eventually someone or a group of someones will do something idiotic or malicious and break everything. There's literally an entire Wikipedia page about lab outbreaks. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#824

Post by Eisenstein »

stormfather wrote: post #815
Eisenstein wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Common sense' says that the thing which has occurred periodically throughout human history (plagues and epidemics) completely naturally and is occurring around the same period after the last one ('Spanish' flu of 1918-20) would have the same causes as those before it, but with accelerated time frames due to ease of travel and population density.

There have been plenty of lab leaks in history too.

There have been more cases of 'almost epidemic but for action by health officials' with SARS and avian flu etc which makes it 'common sense' that these things occur pretty frequently and would be happening more often naturally if not for luck and structures in place to mitigate them. Those structures also happened to be dissolved by the US leaders in charge at the time, which seems to fit the puzzle.

So, 'things happened before' are heavily tilted towards 'nature did it' in any case.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#825

Post by wizofaus »

snowwrestler wrote: post #794
stormfather wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the “lab leak” theory tends to be people pushing an unsubstantiated theory to either For me it's just common sense. It probably came from the coronavirus lab with a bad safety record it popped up next to. Duh. And I "push" it because I value the truth and want to live in a rational society where the truth isn't gamed for emotional or political reasons. And that's probably the same for most of us.

It’s absolutely not common sense, we have tens of thousands of years of evidence that viruses can evolve to cause human illness, and zero documented examples of a man-made novel virus doing so. It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.

Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made? Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on. That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure how virus research is usually done but I would have thought genome sequencing would be one of the first procedures you'd undertake, and there's no suggestion the Wuhan lab had done such sequencing (implying if they had, it was covered up).

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#826

Post by George83728 »

bena wrote: post #678
hospitalJail wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Disclaimer, this was for one of the most principled politicians I've ever met. To this day, he will say he is an anarchist in public. (Although, he would say it in a pleasurable way) Sure, so to change 0.5% of the vote, we would find people with demographics that people vote for. For instance, if there is a women on the ballot, run another women because at least 0.5% of people vote for a women, so this splits t…

Well, if you said it, it must be true and we must accept these anecdotes as the complete truth and you as the best source of it.

Well since you've responded sarcastically, it must be debunked.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#827

Post by George83728 »

defrost wrote: post #488
nwienert wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is extremely far left but had a new show coming out and needed to generate a bit of hype

"extremely far left" by US standards, sure .. otherwise pretty moderate middle of the road.

Unsurprisingly, Americans generally evaluate American media by American standards.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#828

Post by dekhn »

tripletao wrote: post #390
dekhn wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 human…

While many people define gain-of-function in virology as "enhancing existing attributes which would promote virulence", molecular biologists in general are more open to the idea that other functions, such as gene therapy, would also qualify as gain-of-function.

Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#829

Post by wizofaus »

wizofaus wrote: post #825
snowwrestler wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s absolutely not common sense, we have tens of thousands of years of evidence that viruses can evolve to cause human illness, and zero documented examples of a man-made novel virus doing so. It would be an extraordinarily rare and noteworthy event in human history. The bar to prove that it happened to cause COVID is very high and the direct evidence (not circumstantial) for it is so far very low.

Did GP imply if a virus was leaked it must be man-made? Obviously the fact that the exact virus hadn't been seen before is suggestive of that but it's not inconceivable the lab happened to have samples of a never-before-seen naturally occurring virus that they were planning to do research on. That wasn't the same lab that released the first genome sequencing of the virus though (I gather it was in Shanghai). Not sure…

Btw this seems to be a pretty thorough and technical overview of the various hypotheses: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00583-23 It concludes zoonotic origin to be the most likely, though certainly doesn't rule out other alternatives.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#830

Post by dang »

th0ma5 wrote: post #505
Biorealism wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nonsense. The Times is one of the main UK publications along with the Guardian and The Telegraph.

[flagged]

You posted 68 (!) comments in this thread, most of which were either unsubstantive (like this one), or flamebait, or both. That's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We have to ban accounts that post like this, so please don't do it again.

The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do. And please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the guidelines in the future.

Post reply on HN