Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research • Hacker News Board

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#301

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:30 AM UTC

passivate wrote: post #235

darawk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things…

I think employing probabilities and likelihoods which are subjective and will needlessly cause back and forth arguments over their use and validity. Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anyth…

Yeah, because all those things weren’t scrubbed in the first 4 hours after this became globally known. All the evidence we have is by necessity circumstantial.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#302

Post by cfn » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:31 AM UTC

zhdc1 wrote: post #296

gfodor wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “zero evidence” claim is fun because every day there is a failure to discover an origin species is de facto evidence of a non-zootonic origin, since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory.

> since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact. I'm…

I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#303

Post by bawolff » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:32 AM UTC

stablechaos wrote: post #222

lamontcg wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at the end of the day you have zero evidence of any of that actually happened. The backbone doesn't exist, the spike doesn't exist, the effort necessary to culture that completely unknown virus in the lab isn't documented anywhere. And the grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2. And going from sequence to live culturable virus that you…

"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a major virology lab which was specifically studying these viruses, collecting hundreds of wild strains from field operations, in research DARPA said before the fact endangers the local community and was banned by NIH, trying to specifically create this virus as…

> It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames.

The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke.

> Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.

Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness.

At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#304

Post by phreeza » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

stablechaos wrote: post #249

fsh wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SARS was first discovered in a major city too. This makes a lot of sense. If there is an outbreak in a rural village, the chances of it spreading worldwide are slim. It is quite possible that small outbreaks happen occasionally without anyone noticing. Who is going to test a few villagers that got pneumonia for novel coronaviruses? I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human…

It's the totality of the evidence taken together, not a series of things to be considered independently. When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. Or, at the very least, if there's no serious investigation by the people in charge of something so significant, an injustice is being done. Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and…

Which other coincidence is there apart from the proximity of the lab to the initial detection site?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#305

Post by Gatsky » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:33 AM UTC

I don’t think there is ever going to be any satisfaction on this issue. A lab leak is pretty unlikely, has nonzero probability and will never be falsified or proven. The pandemic has happened. The seeming weirdness from virologists is understandable because they don’t want to be stigmatised/regulated more/defunded/have their labs moved to the dark side of the moon. If you doubt this explanation then you must not hang out with academics very much, their capacity for self-interest is astounding. In fact they see the pandemic as a huge opportunity to get a lot more funding, and wouldn’t be so foolish to derail that by engaging with the lab leak issue in the slightest.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#306

Post by phreeza » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:37 AM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #61

Some people: >> Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email. There seems to be zero data to support his spillover idea too. But now we have documentation of pe…

The question is if it is possible to stop this kind of research at all, given the potential military applications. Will it not just push research from publicly known and inspected (like Wuhan) into secret military labs?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#307

Post by ImaCake » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:39 AM UTC

I don't find this evidence compelling. Also did any of you read the leaked proposal? [0] It would have been super useful to fund this! The intercept has done a massive disservice to the grant proposal here with their poor portrayal of it.

Reading the introduction, it looks like it would have been incredibly useful data to have for the origins of COVID-19 since much of the work looks like it would have been surveillance for bat coronaviruses. I note that the second work program would be research on effectively vaccinating bats to prevent spread of coronaviruses. Australia did something similar by vaccinating horses against Hendra virus.

Unfortunately it doesn't matter in the end what evidence is put forth. People are going to believe the lab escape hypothesis because there are powerful interests intent on pushing that narrative. The arguments in favour of lab escape seem plausible, even if they conflict with the molecular evidence. Most people don't know enough about the arcanery of molecular biology to trust it over the hearsay of documents and politicians.

0. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop...

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#308

Post by phreeza » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:48 AM UTC

I really hate the way everything around the coronavirus has been politicized. It is a very important question to investigate the lab leak hypothesis thoroughly. However, the hypothesis seems to have gone from "the virus leaked from a lab" to "the virus has leaked from a lab and thus the chinese communist party is responsible for any and all consequences", which drives people into their political camps depending on who they want to assign blame to, which is a total mind killer.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#309

Post by qaq » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

I have no clue what actually happened but this sequence looks weird to me:

* Event occurs

* Access to investigate is limited

* A deep independent investigation is blocked

*Internet is flooded with msging that unless there are hard facts uncovered by independent investigation some of the origin theories are def conspiracy theories

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#310

Post by AlbertoGP » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 9:04 AM UTC

xenophonf wrote: post #267

taurusnoises wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Video removed by uploader." Is there anything about this virus that isn't suspicious!? Like, can't even a YouTube video stay up when it's supposed to?

I only have the GP's word that the removed video was about the topic they claim it was. For all I know, this video could have been a rickroll.

You are right to be skeptical.

It would be nice if they could be left up in YouTube, but it’s either removing them right after the stream ends, or YouTube takes it down and blocks his account, which has happened multiple times in the last 18 months.

You can find all of them in his website after registration (e-mail and password): https://www.mccairndojo.com/

Some of the videos are still available in YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy2-l7Y87DC_3SBAKPk2M1Q

His surviving Twitter account: https://twitter.com/w_mccairn