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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#331

Post by vfclists »

mikeyouse wrote: post #84

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vir…

Doesn't the article have a table of contents?

What happened to plain HTML documents with a table of contents at the top that enables to get an idea of the structure of the document and jump back and forth between the sections?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#332

Post by acdha »

rzz3 wrote: post #278
harshreality wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family. Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed…

Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

> I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#333

Post by mikeyouse »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #273
mikeyouse wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from he rest of the weird conspiracy insinuation I've come to expect - you should probably know that horseshoe bats are endemic to the caves around Wuhan and were studied by virologists in the hills above the biggest animal trade in Hubei.. So it's probably best if you stop making the silly claim about them being 1,000km away if you want to bolster your case. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7824899…

Quoted post unavailable.

The rest of the comment is the same exact meritless insinuation I've replied to 100 other times in this thread. It's tiring replying to people who don't understand the first thing about biology or virology because you have to retrace so much ground just to get them to the point where they can comprehend why they're 'not even wrong'.

But sure, I'll bite. Aside from the completely false claim there aren't horseshoe bats near Wuhan. A small grant (only $1.5M was ever paid) to a lab studying coronaviruses after a huge coronavirus outbreak (SARS) isn't remotely interesting and especially isn't evidence of a lab leak. And the "human subjects" was literally just to run PCRs on people who live near bats to try and catch viruses early.

More to the point, it's not difficult to see whether a virus was engineered or manipulated with GoF research and this one wasn't. So all of the silly distractions about right-wing bogeyman like Peter Daszak secretly funding Chinese bioweapons are irrelevant.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#334

Post by bayesian_horse »

dekhn wrote: post #311
bayesian_horse wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated. Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive. For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) h…

What does "date divergence of genomes using a genetic clock"? I am curious to learn about such a tecnology. If you mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecular_clock that is highly non-quantitative.

It is quite quantitative, just not very precise. Good enough to tell you if a Virus emerged more than a couple of years ago or not.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#335

Post by xadhominemx »

dehrmann wrote: post #263
xadhominemx wrote: post #22

It’s because there was a series of scientific papers that pointed very strongly to a zoonotic origin: https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406148...

Would that exclude a mishap during a specimen-gathering field trip?

Did you read the thread?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#336

Post by giantrobot »

adamrezich wrote: post #295
giantrobot wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The owner of a service has no requirement or duty to carry anyone's speech. A person's freedom of speech doesn't override anyone else's freedom of association. So a private company can censor or reject any speech using their service unless otherwise mandated by law (common carrier etc).

ok, so what's the impetus for censoring it then

It's inflammatory, outright disinformation, outright misinformation, or just something the service owner doesn't want to carry. Discussion a lab leak hypothesis is not the same as claiming COVID leaked from a bioweapon laboratory or was intentionally leaked for .

That being said, social media sites flagging posts is very different from outright censorship. It's not uncommon for someone to actually get censored/removed from a site claiming its censorship over discussing some topic when really it was a history of dipshit behavior and flagrant TOS violations.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#337

Post by qbasic_forever »

dehrmann wrote: post #320
qbasic_forever wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again. Contact tracing and government support for paid sick leave, etc. would control it even further. At no point do harsh lockdowns have to happen.

> No, we literally just need to mandate N95 masks in public settings and get the effective R value down near 1 again. But as soon as people take off masks, it starts spreading again. It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April).

> It's also getting less politically viable when ~70% of Americans have had covid (the CDC estimated 60% in late April)

This means nothing. The virus reinfects people with existing immunity. For example Senator Wicker from MS is on his _third_ infection: https://www.magnoliastatelive.com/2022/06/13/senator-roger-w... Two of those infections have been in the last four months alone!

We have to use NPIs like masking to stop the virus from spreading in order to stop new variants from evolving. There is no herd immunity. There is no natural immunity.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#338

Post by status200 »

I have tried to get a biologist / someone with more scientific knowledge than me to either help peer review, confirm or debunk this paper by Steven Quay:

https://zenodo.org/record/4642956

It seems so scientific and created a buzz when it came out, it has been the most thorough explanation of the lab leak theory, but I never saw a decent discussion that either helped confirm or debunk the ideas within.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#339

Post by dpbriggs »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #304
harshreality wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation. Speculation about how the virus wasn't created wholly synthetically: nobody is seriously arguing it was, or it wouldn't be SARS-family. Arguments that the spike protein binding domain wasn't synthetically engineered: it didn't have to be. It could have been serial passage in humanized mice, considering that's what Daszak and co had literally proposed…

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated. Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive. For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) h…

> For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected.

That's not a necessary condition and it's ridiculous to think that's the only hinge by which the hypothesis stands. Another far more plausible idea is that a mistake occurred somewhere and it was covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before.

An input to a molecular clock is a mutation rate, which I imagine would be hard to quantify given the unknown source and the possibility of gain of function research.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#340

Post by bayesian_horse »

uoaei wrote: post #313
bayesian_horse wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated. Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive. For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) h…

> "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. This is the opposite of what I understood the lab-leak theory to be: that an initially-zoonotic virus was identified and bred in a lab until someone working at that lab with lax security standards accidentally brought it out of the quarantine. This is plausible at face value. I think a lot of the really extreme vitriolic…

There's a spectrum... The zoonotic virus would need to have some rare "talent" to start with. Then there is the ominous "breeding" part, which many people describe as reckless or evil. In any case this isn't done in Humans but rather some kind of humanized model (and it's not clear that could work at all). Which is why it is quite a coincidence or accident that this process would end with a virus so well adapted to Humans that it is able to cause a pandemic. It's like winning a chess tournament after training for a Marathon.

It's only plausible if you know very little about biology. Very few people who know a lot about viruses believe that this is possible and even those usually say the zoonosis hypothesis is more likely.

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