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Lab Leak 2.0?

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#291

Post by flush »

zzt123 wrote: post #188
d23 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where to even begin with this. I'm unfairly biased because I misread what he said? After re-reading, I can see that he may not have been making the point I thought he was making. I'd argue he should make a point like that more clear, but fine, it's on me that I misinterpreted. > the hysteria on HN is ridiculous. "Hysteria"? How do you get hysteria from my response? Because I asked for citations for what I thought was…

"For example, we know that the delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 leaked out of a lab in Taiwan in late 2021." - is exactly (mechanically) true in that Delta did leak out of a lab in Taiwan in late 2021. This statement does not declare that Delta’s origins were a lab leak, since late 2021 is a year after Delta was first detected in late 2020. Can’t have your origins in the future until time travel is invented. Seems therefo…

FWIW, I read it incorrectly the first time too and had to do a double-take. I do think it's not written in the clearest manner.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#292

Post by throwaway829 »

mike00632 wrote: post #272
XFrequentist wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"... very well documented event"

Not sure what you mean by quoting that but there's not much controversy that Delta leaked from a Biosafety Level-3 facility in Taipei.

https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371080

https://www.newsweek.com/taiwan-lab-worker-mouse-bite-covid-...

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#293

Post by fer »

gojomo wrote: post #285
fer wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First detection is an indicator of that, when it was first detected, not a guarantee that it was first there. Only a very small fraction of RT-PCR positive samples are sent for sequencing under normal conditions. > Omicron COVID was in Italy as early as 2021-10-13 – 7 weeks before alarm from South Africa. 7 weeks before the alarm, but only 10 days before in retrospective sampling, and even less in other places in Afr…

But Italy, hit extremely hard by early waves, and now with a much-higher vax rate than South Africa, could more easily miss a rising wave of mild cases in already-immune that don't seek treatment. There are plenty of factors in all directions, and only very spotty variant surveillance most places.

South Africa has absurdly higher seroprevalence though, which generally provides higher protection.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#294

Post by epgui »

rleigh wrote: post #242
epgui wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such gaps in phylogenetic trees actually happen all the time.

Gaps can appear if there are (1) missing data or (2) a big change such as a transposition or elision event. Neither are the case for our coronavirus data. For (1) we have a good random sampling of the population as a whole so it is exceedingly unlikely we would not see intermediate changes and for (2) the overall structure has not changed dramatically--we are looking at the accumulation of point mutations over the co…

Gaps also appear because evolution is not a smooth process, and once in a while a large number of mutations are selected for. We see the same type of pattern even in vitro. Moreover, mutations are not always well described by gaussian processes: the rate of mutation can be seen as having a fat tailed distribution.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#295

Post by epgui »

zarzavat wrote: post #182
TeeMassive wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other viruses are not scanned and studied for other variants like Covid-19 is and Omicron is the only outlier by a large margin.

Sure and if it had arisen in Europe then those questions would have to be asked. But it's a safe assumption that very little analysis is happening in southern central Africa. It doesn't seem that outrageous that a parallel line has been percolating there for quite some time and only recently gained a mutation or two that allowed it to shoot to stratospheric levels.

Even in Europe I wouldn't find it all that difficult to believe. We see the same sort of pattern, qualitatively speaking, even in well controlled in vitro experiments.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#296

Post by hidudeurcool »

ayjchan wrote: post #37

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a…

No post body was provided.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#297

Post by bArray »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #243
bArray wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> /tin-foil Indeed, we will likely never really know what the truth is here - even if the CCP dissolved tomorrow I imagine it would be years upon years before we start seeing anything emerge. A bit like the USSR. > Definitely prefer incompetence to malice here, but maybe a decision was made to "sit back and assess" while the problem grew more serious. I imagine that initially the CCP leadership was making decisions b…

Thanks for joining me under this aluminum tent > > What if instead of that well-trod path of war, they chose to boost the poll numbers by allowing a crisis to occur and saving the day? By this I meant to imply that, as opposed to being faced with rebellion, the government could allow (if not cause) the pandemic to take hold and then show competence vis-a-vis building hospitals and distributing vaccines. By doing a be…

> [..] building hospitals and distributing vaccines.

Eh, I remember those pop-up hospitals they boasted about which ended up being glorified cages. I remember the headlines were something like "China builds a hospital in a week!", and then we heard nothing more after they were forced to tear them down before they fell down. Turns out you can't actually build something to last in a week - the concrete won't even set.

Regarding developing and distributing vaccines, I really suspect this is why the WIV didn't share their latest COVID sequencing data and took their database offline. (They claimed it was due to hackers, but they could have easily sent the database on a shipped hard drive or hosted it in the Alibaba cloud.) It could only serve to incriminate them and it gives them a few weeks head start for generating a vaccine. (It ended up being awful anyway and the local people choose not to take it due to a loss of faith in the CCP - for the same reason they still import their baby milk powder from abroad.)

> By doing a better job at it than democracies, the CCP could buy some praise from the public, but I'm unable to speculate whether the average Chinese citizen feels their government was heroic or not.

If you control all external media, why even bother doing a better job? You can simply claim the rest of the world is awful outside of China and that the CCP is the best thing since sliced bread.

> [..] as long as we keep voting our more radical representatives in, and being angry with the 'other side', the less likely we are to unite and overthrow the corrupt show of two-party politics.

Right, the only thing that happens in a two-party system is that one side is slightly less disappointed than the other. You find yourself voting for what you perceive to be the lesser evil.

> Thanks for joining me under this aluminum tent

I think these ideas are worth probing out as long as everybody involved remembers which parts are fact and which parts are speculation. When we confuse the two it becomes less fruitful.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#298

Post by lenkite »

This virus is just too profitable and many folks at big pharma are unhappy that there are not yet in the top-10 billionaire list. Expect to see more variants and more 'booster' shots in the upcoming years. They will milk this opportunity for all its worth.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#299

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

ayjchan wrote: post #37

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a…

> We know that there is a large immunocompromised population in Africa and that Covid-19 is rampant there.

The fact that developed countries are hoarding vaccines, essential medications and are willing to let it go to garbage than to send it to those who need it there isn't helping either.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#300

Post by dgroshev »

daxuak wrote: post #60
ekianjo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Journals are very unlikely to publish this kind of things, because of massive conflicts of interests. Look at the Lancet.

Lancet sucked hard, yes, I lost every confidence in them.

It's not like it was their first blunder, either. It's the same editor that needed more than a decade to retract Wakefield's fraudulent "vaccines cause autism" paper. He's very much an activist using the journal to further his political views [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Horton_(editor)

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