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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

unherd.com

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#181

Post by mikeyouse »

barneygale wrote: post #75
kazz wrote: post #38

> As you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places. Ahh yes, definitely the mission statement of a reputable source.

UnHerd has a following among conspiracy theorists, but its journalism is pretty good! E.g. here's an interview with Sajid Javid (UK minister for health) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7yZZKlg-m8

This isn't journalism by contributors to Unherd - it's an (unconvincing) OpEd published on Unherd by two people who are promoting their book.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#182

Post by nicoburns »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #156
ikiris wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to be blunt here. No one with medical training thought this wasn't airborne.

The communication at the beginning was that it was only spread through respiratory droplets, so therefore the combination of social distancing and cloth/surgical masks would be sufficient. Airborne/aerosol transmission was only acknowledged by the WHO and CDC in May of 2021, over a year after the pandemic was declared. And taking that long to acknowledge it makes me think it wasn't just a strategic lie to preserve th…

That was debunked here on HN right from the start though. And this is hardly a specialist medical community. I think the parent is right in asserting that the medical community knew this all along. Probably they didn't know for absolute certain, but it was considered highly likely. And that then got spun into a confusing message by the media. The WHO and the CDC were useless, but plenty of medical bodies around the world did much better than them.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#184

Post by rhino369 »

rdl wrote: post #144
ShannonLimiter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic I have the opposite opinion. If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives. We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airbor…

Airborne was always known; debate was droplet vs aerosol (particle size and thus dwell time/radius). Not really a binary distinction anyway; a matter of degree.

A fair large degree though. However, as I understand it, it wasn't a misconception unique this particular coronavirus. But that the entire medical field just had a longstanding, bad understanding of dynamics. So its not like the Wuhan lab was sitting on some crucial information, they almost certainly had the same misunderstanding.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#185

Post by dekhn »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #165
dekhn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Using BLAST is easy". Yes, it's very easy to use BLAST to convince yourself of something that is not correct. It's a power tool being used by idiots most of the time, no wonder fingers get cut off.

Before implying it's not correct, do the math yourself. Calculate the relative drift among natural sequences and see if the moderna sequence is an outlier. How many single point mutations would it take to get from a known sequence to the moderna one.

Do what math now? I spent 10 years as an academic doing bioinformatics, with deep expertise in BLAST (I helped demonstrate that BLAST E-values accurately represent homology).

If you look, he shows some pages with resuults where the E-value is 282. Normally, an evalue should be 1e-2 or better (ideally 1e-6) before you start making ANY claims.

I've seen hundreds of examples where a person did the math, convinced everybody they were right, and either subtle errors or mistaken assumptions meant the work was useless. These days, if somebody starts with "Here, I'll show you how to use blast to demonstrate that the lab leak hypothesis is true", my priors say "most likely just garbage".

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#186

Post by MisterBastahrd »

sixQuarks wrote: post #48

Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.

Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even though their agencies already had those plans in place for years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies without evidence.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#187

Post by MilnerRoute »

mikeyouse wrote: post #84

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vir…

I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported:

"Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals."

The Unherd article also claims: "There is no evidence of exposure to SARS-like viruses among Wuhan market traders prior to the Covid outbreak." But CNN reported:

Research helped [Michael] Worobey come up with a map of the earliest cases that clusters them all around the market. "That so many of the more than 100 COVID-19 cases from December with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market," he wrote.... "The virus didn't come from some other part of Wuhan and then get to Huanan market. The evidence speaks really quite strongly to the virus starting at the market and then leaking into the neighborhoods around the market.... So many of the early cases were tied to this one Home Depot-sized building in a city of 11 million people, when there are thousands of other places where it would be more likely for early cases to be linked to if the virus had not started there.""

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/18/health/covid-origins-market-t...

Interestingly Worobey actually signed a letter demanding the lab leak theory be investigated. But he now believes there's -- in his words -- "a big red flashing arrow pointing at Huanan Market as the most likely place the pandemic started."

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#188

Post by alkjl4l4tl »

cbb330 wrote: post #118
andai wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact, Covid did leak from a Chinese lab, but it was in December 2021: >A lab worker was bitten and infected by a mouse infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta Variant at a high-biosecurity facility in Taipei. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

Taipei, the capitol of Taiwan, is not a Chinese entity. This is a lab leak from a Taiwanese lab.

No post body was provided.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#189

Post by trhway »

johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #135
mikeyouse wrote: post #84

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vir…

Thank you for posting this. WHO-China report found that COVID almost certainly came out of China and the market is just the amplifying venue. It's the racist and xenophobic groups that are trying to incite hatred against China by spreading propaganda.

Hard to see lab-leak as intrinsically anti-China giving that it was NIH financing those GoF experiments which produced the coronavirus in Wuhan. That same story for example is pushed in Russia, who is making friends with China, as anti-American. So basically the story is interpreted as anti-something depending on your political orientation.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#190

Post by daxfohl »

stetrain wrote: post #12

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself. 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the…

I don't even think it's that different from nuclear. The fact that Iraq had no WMDs (and I have doubts that anybody in the intelligence community really thought they did) got swept under the rug too, after a ton of civilian deaths there and military deaths on both sides. People just make stuff up and then it's too late.
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