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

Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 253 posts

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#221

Post by peteradio »

cbsmith wrote: post #195
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't agree that regularly putting [gain of function researchers] on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk. This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.

> This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society. So you would add months of delay, significantly impaired observability, and far less agility to our response to emerging threats. Congratulations, you've just increased risk.

Are researchers acting as result couriers? Your responses come across as very daft and fighting for status quo of everything as it relates to virology research.. why?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#222

Post by shadowgovt »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #211
cbsmith wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sequencing is something done by many types of biologist, there's nothing special about virologists there. Sequencing can be done by a high school student in a lab. Of course, to obtain a sequence for a novel virus, you have to do a lot more than that, but let's pretend that's all you have to do; the fact remains that the sequencing wasn't done by a high school student in a lab, but by virologists. I agree that ever…

Of course it was sequenced by virologists, they're the ones who were there at the start when they let it escape, they're the ones who were splicing cleavage sites into it and developing vaccines against what they'd developed. It's all in the grant application to read about there. Then they provided the sequences to allies via back channels early on. So they don't get points for being first, when they're the ones who…

Part of me wishes the international virology community was as coordinated as you imagine. It would be nice if we could place the blame on a shadow cabal who sickened the world on purpose for grant money. It would be convenient.

The real world is not nearly that tidy. Most of the Wuhan lab researchers' counterparts don't even speak Chinese, and you're imagining some kind of international conspiracy to drum up a disease and the cure for it.

Oh, to have the naive optimism of the conspiracy theorist. A lot of my projects would be so much more easy if people worked that way.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#223

Post by uiberto »

sterlind wrote: post #146
dhdudbd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>96% similar what does this mean

the SARS-CoV-2 genome is ~29.8K nucleotides long. 96% of that sequence is identical to the genome of RaTG13, i.e. all but ~1200 match. for reference, SARS-CoV-1 is only 82% similar to SARS-CoV-2. at a mutation rate of 8*10^-4, this means the current strains of COVID are ~97% identical to the original 2019 sequence. so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just…

Sophisticated evolutionary models are needed to accurately estimated expected mean and variance in genetic distances. For example, rare events of large effect (e.g. recombination) also introduces variation beyond within-strain mutation.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#224

Post by Amezarak »

shadowgovt wrote: post #220
nvm0n2 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instrumental in prediction of the rate of mutation of the spike protein The research must have been pretty misleading then, because all the experts appeared to be taken by surprise by the fact that it mutated at all, given their original plan was "two shots and done". Something that has now become promoting infinity boosters to a world that has stopped listening (uptake of the current round is extremely low). But a…

Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion to figuring out how to mitigate spread and severity, and I think most virologists made the wise decision to stay out of a fundamentally political argument. It doesn't matter if the virus came from the moon as long as we can quarantine and vaccinate against it. And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surpris…

An injected vaccine was never going to cut a respiratory virus off from human reservoirs. The mucosal immune compartment has a nearly independent immune response, including antibody production. Mild and asymptomatic cases were never going to be prevented, and therefore neither was person-to-person spread. This is textbook immunology knowledge, so clearly the experts would have known this.

That's why the vaccine protects against serious illness and death, because at that point the virus has spread beyond the mucous membranes.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#225

Post by vfclists »

See how paid actors and shills quickly jump in push the "it was not a lab leak" concerning a virus that was deliberately engineered with the additional benefit of creating profit from patented cures.

Very early on after the virus genome was released a group of Indian researchers quickly noted that the virus had been deliberately engineered and they were quickly shut down,

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v2....

then one Peter Daszak who was financing GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology got a group of scientists to publish a paper saying it was not engineered and the Chinese were not involved in any such thing.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Here is the BBC featuring Peter Daszak given Wuhan a clean bill of health while forgetting to tell viewers about his relationship with the Wuhan institute - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-56002216

Peter Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance passing on NIH funding to WIV - with receipts - https://www.foxnews.com/video/6227902415001

We now have leaked Slack conversations from a group of scientists who jumped in to say the virus was a naturally evolved was admitting privately in the conversations that the evidence pointed to deliberate engineering.

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/07/19/so-friggin-likely-an...

Isn't that the same Kristian Andersen who received a huge load of money from Tony Fauci after backtracking on the lableak/artificial origins theory?

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/03/scicheck-no-evidence-scien...

Now here are some researchers who maintain that the new variants did not evolve naturally.

https://zenodo.org/records/8361577

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#226

Post by shadowgovt »

Amezarak wrote: post #224
shadowgovt wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion to figuring out how to mitigate spread and severity, and I think most virologists made the wise decision to stay out of a fundamentally political argument. It doesn't matter if the virus came from the moon as long as we can quarantine and vaccinate against it. And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surpris…

An injected vaccine was never going to cut a respiratory virus off from human reservoirs. The mucosal immune compartment has a nearly independent immune response, including antibody production. Mild and asymptomatic cases were never going to be prevented, and therefore neither was person-to-person spread. This is textbook immunology knowledge, so clearly the experts would have known this. That's why the vaccine prote…

Good point. Now that you mention it, I can't think of any virologists that were claiming it was a two shots and done disease.

It's more likely that people misinterpreted "after two shots quarantine is no longer necessary" as "the disease is eradicated after two shots."

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#227

Post by pmarreck »

wredue wrote: post #40
galangalalgol wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read much in the last year that didn't consider it extremely likely. The lab was receiving funding from other nations including the US, so I don't think hatred specifically and only for China is rational, but being rational is so cliche. What is 100% accepted and documented is that the lab in question had a history of repeated leaks and failures to follow protocol. When a Chinese nuke plant doesn't follow p…

Sorry, where is this documented that this lab is known for leaks? To my knowledge, as of 3 months ago, the only “tangible” evidence for a lab leak was that china cleaned up before the WHO arrived and could better investigate. You are the first person I have ever seen, after hundreds of articles, claim that the lab is known for leaks.

https://www.voanews.com/a/covid-19-pandemic_chinese-lab-chec...

> Two State Department cables show that American embassy officials in Beijing made several visits to the research facility and sent two official warnings back to Washington in early 2018 about the lab’s inadequate safety measures. This was at a time when researchers were conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats, The Washington Post reported, citing intelligence sources.

The thing that China does which deserves the most hatred, however, is not the accident: It is the coverup. It's one thing to fuck up; it's another thing to hinder investigation of the fuckup, while trying in vain to "save face," which ends up just resulting in more deaths. A sincere person or organization would say "OK, one of us screwed up, now please help us fix it". It's literally the most basic ethics/honesty lesson we teach kids (at least in the West)- "if you screwed up, 'fess up, and the punishment will be less":

> While the U.S. investigates, officials say the Chinese government’s continuing lack of transparency, including with respect to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, raises questions over how the outbreak began. Officials also accuse Beijing of still not sharing all of their data with the international community.

> Instead, there is Chinese evidence that the lab had safety problems. VOA has located state media reports showing that there were security incidents flagged by national inspections as well as reported accidents that occurred when workers were trying to catch bats for study.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#228

Post by lamontcg »

dhdudbd wrote: post #119
sterlind wrote: post #107

Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous. WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn'…

>96% similar what does this mean

That means they were several decades of evolution in the wild away from each other.

It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2.

Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#229

Post by peteradio »

lamontcg wrote: post #228
dhdudbd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>96% similar what does this mean

That means they were several decades of evolution in the wild away from each other. It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2. Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.

DEFUSE proposed insertion of human-specific cleavage sites not serial passage.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#230

Post by lamontcg »

peteradio wrote: post #229
lamontcg wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That means they were several decades of evolution in the wild away from each other. It would take passage through billions of organisms to turn RaTG13 into SARS-CoV-2. Which is probably what happened naturally through many, many millions of bats (and whatever intermediate animal) being infected and passing it on. Something that is well outside the scale of serial passage experiments in a lab.

DEFUSE proposed insertion of human-specific cleavage sites not serial passage.

RaTG13 differs from SARS-CoV-2 by a lot more than just an FCS
Post reply on HN