211–220 of 281 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No source animal was found. Since this was a food market, it's possible and likely that all the source animals were eaten by the time the study was being done.
And this is more likely than a lab leak?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
> ignored scientific evidence Any "scientific evidence" that can be touched by the Chinese government will be corrupted. Any influence they have over "scientific evidence" is not scientific evidence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue. > Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. So if they don't react negativel…
> ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue. Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then le…
Now imagine it's US, not China. Would US let anyone from outside to investigate its labs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The one thing that makes me think the Lab Leak theory is true is that the Chinese government very very strongly denies the story ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue. > Anytime the Chinese government reacts very negatively to a story (Denial, attacking, undermining, deflecting), it usually means the story is true. So if they don't react negativel…
> ...well, yes, of course they do. But they would also strongly deny the story if they thought it was untrue. Then why would block any investigation from outside the Chinese government? If anything, if the Lab Leak theory is provable false, they should be inviting outsiders to investigate and waste their political capital/time/energy. If your advisories want to spin their wheels on something that is not true, then le…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough. Then let's go with: not properly tested and approved in alignment with tradition. The rub for many was / is the quickness of the process in contrast with the cock-sureness of the narrative (i.e., don't worry about it...just trust us...). There was also the disconnect between "trust the science" vs limited data and the shutting down of any question. Real Science is fearless.
But the process was enough to bring sureness. You seem to have a problem with the process being non-traditional, but it was the obvious adaptation to get the same sureness on the shortest possible timeframe. The data wasn't limited in any way. It's funny, because I have the opposite criticism. We just let people die for 6 months because we refused to act on "we are sure it's safe, we are confident it will work" and w…
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/28/moderna-writedown/
The only thing you were sure of is that you were terrified, and wanted anything and anyone to save you.
But hey I'm sure all those auto-immune diseases cropping up from the vaccines fall into the category of "sureness" :D
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would actually be extremely unlikely for a virus that is "medium good at spreading to humans" to stay in an isolated location, especially one that spreads asymptomatically.
If it spreads asymptomatically though isn't that "good" at spreading rather than "medium"? SARS-1 disn't have a presymptomatic infectious phase and the peak of symptoms was roughly the peak of infectiousness, and it was mostly severely virulent, and it didn't produce a global pandemic and was controllable. To have an uncontrollable pandemic you really need that silent spreading, so the pandemic virus that emerges nec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're just two single-nucleotide polymorphisms apart The problem with that argument, is that it doesn't explain the polytomies and is misleading, as you accuse Worobey of being. "Just a few SNPs" is disingenuous and glosses over the usefulness of this evidence that almost everyone agrees on - eg, that it's highly unlikely that lineage B evolved from lineage A. (Even Jesse Bloom agrees on this.) It may take a bit…
You're correct that it's highly unlikely that B evolved from A, but why do you think that's significant? We know the spread of SARS-CoV-2 is highly stochastic, with most lineages dying out and a few exploding, and we know the IFR in humans is small enough that considerable cryptic spread is possible before enough people die to raise the alarm. So why do you take the two lineages as conclusive evidence of two zoonotic…
Have you read Pekar's most recent paper in Science? I raise this in earnest, I'm reading it now. A lot of it follows the preprint, but the update more directly addresses many of the points we're discussing.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337
My problem with the "just a couple mutations" deniers is that that viewpoint doesn't speak to any of the real phylogenic questions here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about violations. The animals are killed because the nature of the data taken from them requires them not to be alive.
Can they sell killed animals (in the live market)?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking generally, every single time a new study is discussed on HN, the first comment talks about how it doesn't do what it is supposed to. For e.g., a topic about "X cures cancer" has a comment that's at the very top that claims "No, X doesn't cure cancer, except in these narrow cases" and then sources the details in the paper. That seems to me the right thing to do. HN does that very well.
If you read closer, you'll notice that it's not at all what is happening here. Maybe 1/10th of the comments are about the actual paper? Fewer? It's just mindless evidence-free conspiracy mongering including fun little subthreads about how you can't rule out that the US actually created the pandemic to punish China; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32252553
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> SARS-COV-2 has never been detected in any Chinese land animals associated with the market. They acted very quickly to sterilize the market which eliminated the evidence. In SARS-1 the market associated with that was allowed to operate until investigators were able to take samples from the animals there and find the related virus. As a containment measure this was probably the right reflex to have, as an investigati…
I'm not really disagreeing, but isn't comparing Ebola and Marburg to SARSes a bit apples-to-bananas? Ebola and Marburg for decades were quite rare. Incredibly deadly, but an outbreak would affect a few tens of people, and invariably in remote locations. By the time the epidemiologists arrived, the outbreak was waning. Clearly the Ebola outbreak in 2010s was much bigger, but that was the first such large outbreak. Als…
I don't understand how those viruses being rare in humans and outbreaks fading is actually making it harder to find them. If anything it is easier because then they don't have to figure out if humans gave it to them or they gave it to humans.