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”.
No post body was provided.
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
211–220 of 792 posts
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 everyb…
The amount of people that use BLAST every day and cannot define E-values (despite being explained in its FAQ! [1]) is baffling.
[1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi?CMD=Web&PAGE_TYPE=B...
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#213For 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…
Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation.
Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family.
Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed years before the outbreak.
Arguments that because the original SARS-CoV-2 wasn't perfectly optimized to bind to ACE2, it obviously didn't come from a lab: Obvious nonsense. Why would you expect serial passage through a small number of humanized mice be as effective at optimizing binding to ACE2 as an epidemic sweeping through tens, then hundreds of millions of humans?
The Laos expedition is interesting, but having only just skimmed it I'm not yet convinced it means anything. Any samples with very similar spike proteins collected AFTER SARS-CoV-2 became an epidemic could indicate that SARS-CoV-2 had recombined with existing bat coronaviruses, rather than being a zoonotic source of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
The sloppiness and drumbeat nature of these anti-lab-leak essays makes me not trust them. The lab-leak argument is speculative, sure, but we've sent people to prison for murder based on speculative inferences from circumstantial evidence; meanwhile, none of the arguments against lab-leak are solid.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be clear - the NIH never financed any GoF experiments in Wuhan. There was a proposal that was never funded, and even in that proposal, the GoF work would happen in Baric's North Carolina lab.
To be clear - during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked. EcoHealth naturally kept about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever" because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+ (in those original experiments they were able to increase virality of the deadly, yet low viral original SARS by inserting spike protein to allow for ACE2 based cell entry - the hallmark of the coronavirus - and after that the research was moved to Wuhan https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-...).
It was the 2018 proposal for additional money - EcoHealth naturally trying to double dip - for those GoF experiments in Wuhan to insert very human specific gene sequences into the coronavirus which was rejected as "Hell no, that is too risky!" by .. wait for it ... DARPA. Well as DARPA rejected it was still funded after that by the Fauci's NIAID.
And the rest is history - in November 2019 the coronavirus magically "naturally" jumped onto humans supposedly in the Wuhan market a thousand kilometers from the natural habitat of its closest natural siblings. We are all free to choose our Morpheus' pill, blue or red :)
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it does. It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research.
> It will impact other countries relationships with china. And it would impact the kind and level of scrutiny over this kind of research. I think the point is that neither of those would have had an effect on the pandemic . By the time it was major news in the US, it was too late for any of that to matter in terms of what to do about this pandemic . Not the next one, or our future relations with China, but with this…
A) I guess I interpreted "consequences" more generally to also include the consequences beyond the disease itself.
B) I still believe that it would have been important. If it escaped from a lab, then those working in the lab could potentially have important information to share with the world about it. E.g. is it airborne, how much does it mutate, etc. They would have been studying it for a reason.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#216I 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…
> 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…
I really have to ask. Did we really not have any idea how corona viruses spread before? If so, what other virus families we are unaware now and why aren't we spending lot of money to prepare for all of them?
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#217For 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…
> China is a bad actor and definitely contributed to the conspiracy madness around the virus by being so shut-down and performing such a half-assed investigation It definitely seems that the default reaction of any authoritaian/police-state environment like mainland China is to clamp down on things and restrict information whether or not it's necessary . One needs to only look at the many examples of various scandals…
>whether or not it's necessary
The thing is they've studied the revolutions of 89 and the more recent ones too. They know they don't know what will be the thing that will finally get people out in the streets so they clamp down on everything. Who could know before hand that Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire would trigger the Tunisian revolution, and that that would help trigger the Arab Spring? China is very worried about potential Mohamed Bouazizis.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#218For 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…
>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
No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very proximal to the origin of the outbreak.
The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak.
https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#219Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#220A hypothesis is something that can be disproven. Lab leak was never a hypothesis. It was never more than a talking point. Even just looking at the inconclusive evidence, there was zero indication it was true (the genetic changes between covid 19 and it's natural cousins were random for instance, not targeted as they would be for a man made pathogen).