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Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

nytimes.com

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Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#241

Post by wedernoch »

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…

I don't see how then % number means anything. Humans and apes have 4% difference. It depends on thebkind of difference, not the number of different genes

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#242

Post by lamontcg »

sterlind wrote: post #240
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.

How do you arrive at several decades and billions of organisms? You can't extrapolate the current mutation rate to the spillover event; SARS-CoV-2 was already quite fit at infecting humans and didn't need to change much. In contrast, during spillover events there's heavy selection pressure to adapt to the new host. There's also the possibility of recombination events, which can instantly cause significant drift. Now…

The genetic clock was estimated from bat coronavirus mutation rates in the wild, not from SARS-CoV-2 mutation in humans.

And virulence != transmissible. They got sick by inhaling everything that was floating around in that mine. To get more people sick you'd need to take them all to that mine.

Recombination to produce a viable and more successful virus is also very rare, that is unlikely to have happened to any of those miners, much less several of them (over populations it becomes likely but there we're talking many millions of infections as well).

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#243

Post by lern_too_spel »

cameldrv wrote: post #205

The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dangerous. In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic. In the U.S. and Europe, it's sad…

> We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived

What we learned from the FOIA requests is that some authors initially privately believed a lab leak was more likely and some believed that a natural origin was more likely, but after they discussed the evidence, they all agreed that it supported the latter. https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15951210808005386...

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#244

Post by xracy »

ALittleLight wrote: post #147
xracy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

citation needed

No, actually. COVID originated at the location of a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses and the lab had a sketchy safety record. If you need someone to tell you the most likely origin of COVID given these circumstances you have a fundamental inability to reason and a citation wouldn't help you because you lack the ability to comprehend.

Ad hominem attacks are famously the first resort of people who are correct about everything.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#245

Post by xracy »

lamontcg wrote: post #231
wdr1 wrote: post #202

Or, you know, "Lab Leak of Coronavirus casts chill over virology research". I know it's not definitive it was a lab leak, but many US agencies including, notably, the Department of Energy, say it's likely it was. And when you change the headline to reflect that, it sure does change the message.

The National Intelligence Council of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found: > The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019. And that: > As of August 2021, we still have not…

The thing here that confuses me is that the DoE is definitely the gov't agency I most associate with Health. \s

Why are we giving so much wait to the organization that says "Energy" in the name over one that says "Health" in the name? And is there a convincing reason that's not: "It's the department I agree with the most on this issue."

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#246

Post by nvm0n2 »

cbsmith wrote: post #235
nvm0n2 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All government funded work maybe, yeah? It wouldn't make much difference. The consumers of that sort of research are ultimately just pharma companies and they don't use it much because so little replicates to begin with.

You honestly believe that government funded work didn't "make much difference" with dealing with COVID?

Beyond them creating it in the first place you mean?

I spent a long time investigating the effectiveness of everything governments did during COVID. None of it worked and a lot of it backfired badly, lockdowns being only one of the most prominent examples. Even the vaccine programme was a disaster: the data claiming otherwise turns out to have all been juked in various ways. We'd have been better off without governments doing anything at all.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#247

Post by nvm0n2 »

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…

> Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion

If you know it came from a lab then there's a chance that the lab workers have knowledge that can help fight it. If you lie and claim it couldn't have come from a lab, that whole line of investigation gets closed off.

> they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake

They were overly pessimistic and were making those claims back when they thought they'd only get 60-70% uptake. This is the famous Fauci admission that his claims about herd immunity were made up in response to opinion polls. Uptake was higher than expected and effectiveness was drastically lower.

This business whereby scientists are always innocent, it's only politicians and the media that misrepresent them, is crap. Scientists lied and manipulated a naive and plastic public deliberately in order to protect and advance their own careers, they did it at scale and nobody in that community seems to care. Smart people now understand that scientists are both less honest and less wise than both politicians and journalists as a group. At least the latter groups have strong internal competition and different factions trying to establish what's true. Scientists seem to behave as a bloc regardless of what's right or wrong.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#248

Post by shadowgovt »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #247
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…

> Arguing over the origins was completely orthogonal discussion If you know it came from a lab then there's a chance that the lab workers have knowledge that can help fight it. If you lie and claim it couldn't have come from a lab, that whole line of investigation gets closed off. > they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake They were overly pessimistic and were making those claims back when they…

> Scientists lied and manipulated a naive and plastic public deliberately in order to protect and advance their own careers

How do they protect and advance their careers by being wrong?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#249

Post by purpleblue »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #14
purpleblue wrote: post #5

I'm glad that things are slowing down here. Virology research is one of those things no one ever thought about, but the fact that a single careless lab was able to release a virus that killed tens of millions around the world should be a wake up call that the researchers were outpacing the regulations. The entire industry around the world has to be heavily regulated at this point to prevent this from happening again.

Except of course that isn't what happened. All evidence points to zoonotic spillover, aggravated by our encroachment on previously undisturbed natural areas and global warming. Sadly, it was both political useful ('the Chinese did it!'), and ideologically useful ('a few faulty humans did this, like in the movies'), to blame the lab in Wuhan. By doing so, we can absolve ourselves of blame, and of need to take action -…

There is ZERO evidence that it's zoonotic spillover. In almost 4 years they haven't found the source. There's actual hard evidence that it came from the Wuhan lab.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#250

Post by nvm0n2 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #222
nvm0n2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 diseas…

You're a virologist then? That would make sense given your other replies.

> Part of me wishes the international virology community was as coordinated as you imagine

It's pretty damn coordinated and we have the receipts to prove it. Sorry for you if you're not in the loop, but when you read chat transcripts, meeting notes, and emails where they literally organize a conspiracy to shut down all public discussion, and no virologists stand up to say, "this stance is not accurate", then we may as well consider virology to be globally coordinated.

By the way, cut the condescending tone about conspiracy theorists. They utterly won this round, beyond all possible doubt. The people who blithely dismiss any possibility of academic conspiracy turned out to be the naive ones. The people who posited a conspiracy to suppress discussion of lab leaks can now point to reams of hard evidence where scientists literally say they're going to publish statements they don't believe for political reasons, where they say they're going to engineer a SARS-CoV-2 like virus, where they say they're going to do it in order to develop a vaccine against it. Basically every conspiracy theory turned out to be true. You should respect that a lot more!

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