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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#311

Post by dash2 »

jeremyjh wrote: post #54
helloworld wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least as of 2011: "Collins remains actively involved in research, studying the molecular genetics of diseases including cancer and adult-onset diabetes. His group also is developing animal models of genetic disorders to test potential therapeutic approaches." [0] [0] Kresge N, Simoni RD, Hill RL. The Molecular Genetics of Cystic Fibrosis: The Work of Francis Collins. J Biol Chem. 2011 Aug 12;286(32):e8–9. doi: 10.…

Yes, that is the management part of his job. He runs a research group and probably has to spend much of his time looking for funding for that group while lightly supervising the actual science it is doing.

That’s what most senior scientists do. It doesn’t condone violating the norms of science, though.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#312

Post by jacquesm »

useragent86 wrote: post #198
decebalus1 wrote: post #182

Dear HNers, please consult the post history of OPs account. It is a newish account which has been used daily to post controversial ideological and political flame baits, mostly related to COVID conspiracies, pandemic denialism and low-key misinformation.

If I'm not mistaken, this comment of yours is itself a violation of HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29902131

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#313

Post by randomsearch »

I have mixed feelings about this, and I certainly think it’s not as clear cut as HN is converging on, although I share the same instincts.

On the one hand, yes, science should be completely open and unhindered by geopolitics.

But recall that Trump was in the White House at the time.

We are a community of generally highly educated nerds with a strong understanding of science and engineering. We understand that all labs will have leaks, we often have first hand experience of the difficulty of making any system truly secure. We’re also probably not interested in making big political gains from this - rather our discussion might be “omg that’s terrible what went wrong and how do we prevent it from happening again.”

But Trump, his party, and many many people in the West would care only for the political capital they could make from it, with potentially catastrophic results that would make COVID look relatively minor.

At a time when a global pandemic requires international cooperation and focus, these decisions are very very difficult and we shouldn’t be too hasty to judge.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#314

Post by lamontcg »

xqcgrek2 wrote: post #10
karpierz wrote: post #4

Is there a way to disprove the lab leak hypothesis?

Yes - an animal host or reservoir is found. It's unusual after 2 years none has been found.

The progenitor of the SARS-1 outbreak in 2003 wasn't found until a decade later in 2013.

There's a lot of research which is getting closer:

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847...

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-885194/v1

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/10/11/in-search-for-co...

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#315

Post by p49k »

synquid wrote: post #303
chx wrote: post #223

I think the clearest article on topic is from Zeynep Tufekci https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h... who says , repeatedly what we do not know and what is disturbing.

Zeynep has been wrong so many times during the pandemic that it hurts. She will not admit to it, though. She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic, in the same way it is claimed for Omicron now. She's very naive about how the immune system works. Her writing is generally more propaganda than science.

> She claimed that the Delta variant would end the pandemic

No she didn't - the article you're referring to is below, and what she said was more nuanced. It's also a reasonable analysis from the perspective of the time it was written (May 2021):

https://www.theinsight.org/p/we-need-to-get-real-about-how-t...

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#316

Post by HPsquared »

ayngg wrote: post #256
vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

"Trust the science" hasn't made people more rational, it has made "science" more dogmatic. I wonder what governments and the media will latch onto once they have eroded the trust in science, because there aren't many other trustworthy institutions left.

When politics is mixed with any other field, that field generally becomes a subfield of politics - not the other way round.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#317

Post by nitrogen »

korantu wrote: post #263
awb wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a Level 2 facility, not studying bats or coronavirus. https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-... > “They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.” > The lab is classified BSL-2, a safety level at which air ventilation controls aren’t particularly strict, as they are in more secure labs. At that level, lab workers…

In 2016, some of the scientists including Shi and the EcoHealth director, Peter Daszak, used the NIH funding to conduct experiments in Wuhan on live coronaviruses in a biosafety level 2 lab, according to published details of the work from [0] They did do coronavirus experiments in level 2 facility. [0] https://archive.is/KwZKn ? [edit] replaced link as FT makes it difficult to refer to them.

Did you paste what you intended to paste: "Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles."?

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#318

Post by 4ggr0 »

t-writescode wrote: post #261
larryflint wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I'm a case in point. At the beginning of this thing i went along with the mainstream narrative like a good sheeple. Now that i've watched how a narrative can go from 'your a crazy person to believe there COULD have been a lab leak' to 'yahhh it was probably a lab leak the whole time'...my faith has probably been permenantly destroyed in main-stream sources of information. Which sucks because idealy i just want t…

The nail in the coffin for me was when they would make articles about “700 people fired from X company for not getting vaccine.” When that company has like 85k people (which they don’t mention in the article and you have to look up yourself, of course), and it’s like “so less than 1% of the employees refused the vaccine?” Even when they tell the technical truth, it’s so full of deception to sell ads I just can’t.

At least for me, in this instance I don't see why the percentage is of more relevancy than the total amount.

Yes, it's only 1% of a company, which is not a lot. But 700 people being fired is quite a lot, if we consider that this affects more than these 700 people. I'm sure a lot of these 700 people have a family at home.

In your example I don't really see why that is proof that they use the total amount for ad-driven clickbait. There are more than enough better examples for this, I think.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#319

Post by lamontcg »

neom wrote: post #119
sudosysgen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't, and that's the issue, we can't know unless we find an ancestor virus. It's also very possible if could have wiped out the original virus in all original reservoirs. It's very difficult to do this now and for endemic viruses in general, and it took a very very long time to do for SARS where this wasn't a problem.

I thought they thought it might be pangolins? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32380510/

That is a very old article in pandemic research time. Pagolins aren't thought to be the likely intermediate animal any more.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#320

Post by raxxorrax »

randomsearch wrote: post #313

I have mixed feelings about this, and I certainly think it’s not as clear cut as HN is converging on, although I share the same instincts. On the one hand, yes, science should be completely open and unhindered by geopolitics. But recall that Trump was in the White House at the time. We are a community of generally highly educated nerds with a strong understanding of science and engineering. We understand that all lab…

Trump is irrelevant here, in fact I believe a lot of people voting for him out of spite because they felt they had been lied to by the other party. You will not improve the situation with more paternalism. That is has degraded to "owning the libs" is a predictable result.

Yes, people jump to conclusion, but if you want to build a society of trust, you let some people jump. Others will hit the breaks if no conclusive information is available. Trump is not an excuse to withhold information at all. You have to make sure that the uncertainty of the information is clearly communicated.

> we shouldn’t be too hasty to judge.

You do judge yourself at the time you withhold information because you declared people incapable to making the same judgement.

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