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Lab Leak 2.0?

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#141

Post by [deleted] »

dls2016 wrote: post #74
daxuak wrote: post #25

I don't like certain aspects of publishing with peer review, but if one is so confident with their lab leak theory, try go publish in journals or put it up in one of the preprint servers instead of substack. The key is to demonstrate not that your claims are based, but that you have tried various ways to invalid the conclusions but could not success.

Not regarding omicron, but SARS viruses have escaped the lab numerous times in the past… even killing people. It’s not like the lab-leak hypothesis is the whackiest idea, some might even say it has a “strong prior”. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/ https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/6/news.pdf?ua=1

[deleted]

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#142

Post by netizen-936824 »

ayjchan wrote: post #69
nnx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Omicron could have evolved over an entire year in an immunocompromised individual before finally infecting others" Is it likely that this infected person would not have started any detectable cluster this whole time? How do you explain the ratio of functional vs silent mutations?

Evolution experiments in the lab mimic natural evolution. The ratio of functional vs silent mutations has also been used to characterize the evolution of viruses under natural selection.

According to the blog post that we are commenting on, there is a strange ratio of silent to functional mutations. How can this be accounted for if it was a natural course of evolution?

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#143

Post by peteradio »

cletus wrote: post #93

In some ways this reminds me of the ill-fated flight MH370. It's not that there's compelling evidence that the pilot took deliberate action to divert the plane and assumedly land it in the Indian Ocean in a place where it would be hard to find because of the distance from land and depth of the ocean. It's that it's the only theory that fits the facts. Likewise, it's not that there's compelling evidence of a lab leak…

For Christ's sake with the natural immunity. It's the survivors who wish to have their rights. It's not some pissing match with the vaccinated.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#144

Post by tehjoker »

TeeMassive wrote: post #135
ufo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that the blog post appears to be unaware of is that the absence of samples showing the step-by-step evolution towards omicron doesn't mean that this didn't happen. A lot of places in the world don't have the resources to do covid testing and genomic surveillance.

Yeah but since spring 2020? This variant slept without getting replaced by other more contagious variants? That doesn't seem likely.

The entire world has been blanketed in Coronavirus and as far as I know Africa has seen a mix of action that has been different from how Western countries have experienced it. The rates of infection are different, the rates of vaccination are different. Two VOCs have come out of South Africa, but who's to say that an earlier version from 2020 wasn't bumping around the continent and returned to South Africa?

Everyone likes to posit human intervention when we have very little information, especially people highly motivated to declare COVID-19 a lab leak for geopolitical reasons. Give the science time and we might start to fill in the gaps.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#145

Post by cyounkins »

addicted wrote: post #16
omginternets wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add to that: "is it an intentional means of destabilizing the West?" To be clear: I see no evidence that Omicron is even a second lab-leak, much less that it's part of a sinister plot. My point is that there are immediate geopolitical implications, in addition to the scientific and public-health implications you have highlighted.

Which makes it even more ridiculous that random people on the internet are coming up with the lab leak theories and that American intelligence agencies, spanning 2 wildly divergent administrations, have not said anything to support this.

https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#146

Post by chana_masala »

croes wrote: post #81

Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists. Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator. I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.

You might find the work of David Gelernter (computer scientist) interesting. He's not a creationist, but he has abandoned the theory of evolution.

> Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 10^40 bacteria—yielding around 10^40 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 10^77 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 10^40x(1/10^77)—10^40 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 10^77—which equals 1 in 10^37. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life.

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#147

Post by blix »

mikeyouse wrote: post #102
Sevaris wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plausible, yes. If the data exists, it should be made public. The article still mostly just makes a hypothesis and makes the argument that this is something that should be seriously investigated, not that the author has determined without a doubt that this is a lab leak.

Sure - but what are the chances that whichever hospitals did the sequencing even know they're in possession of the intermediate data? The OPs' method of "just asking questions" is really bad science and feels a whole lot like the God of the Gaps argument style that Creationists are so fond of using.

I'm not sure the best way to judge the quality of a scientific argument is whether it 'feels like good science.'

While the author is obviously only scratching the surface in an article targetted at non-scientists, the several PhDs he cites make decent arguments that are based on a little more than feelings. It would probably be more in line with the ideal of 'good science' to actually investigate the possibilities presented than dismiss them from emotional associations.

It is a worrying trend that the way science feels is increasingly more important than the actual evidence (or lack thereof). One could even describe the current attitude towards science outside of scientitific institutions as religious.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#148

Post by MichaelDickens »

alex_young wrote: post #132

If the author actually had some kind of evidence that there was a lab leak source of Omicron, don’t you think it would be mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the blog? Instead we have a long list of connect-the-dots tweets, out of context quotes, and unsubstantiated speculation going on for 2/3s of the post before we even get to the Omicron stuff. The meat of the speculation is a scary looking graph plotting genet…

The plot on Wikipedia looks to me like it has lots of variants with frequent branches coming off of each variant, except for Omicron, which went a great distance with no branches and then started branching rapidly again. This seems most consistent with a lab leak.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#149

Post by mbreese »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #142
ayjchan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evolution experiments in the lab mimic natural evolution. The ratio of functional vs silent mutations has also been used to characterize the evolution of viruses under natural selection.

According to the blog post that we are commenting on, there is a strange ratio of silent to functional mutations. How can this be accounted for if it was a natural course of evolution?

Without looking more at the variants themselves and just going by the numbers in the post, it’s entirely plausible. It’s not likely, but plausible.

Mainly because we are talking rare events. If the level of success is 33/3.5 (9.42), we’d expect that 4 (or less) silent variants would happen with a probability of ~ 0.042 (Poisson X Anytime you look at numbers like these, remember with a big denominator, even rare events are expected to happen.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#150

Post by XFrequentist »

d23 wrote: post #79

I'm open minded, but my bullshit detectors started going off around the point where it was casually implied that we all know and it is widely accepted that delta was leaked from a lab. I tried googling it but could find nothing. Then I looked at the two sources the author links: > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 Neither of these have nearly enough evidence…

You’re missing something.

The author is saying that there was a lab leak involving delta, not that delta originated via a lab leak.

The latter claim would indeed be a red flag, but the former is just describing a very well-documented event.

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