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Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

theintercept.com

361–370 of 494 posts

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#361

Guys, two points here. One, this proposal was rejected. This did not happen! Two, their proposal was for genetic manipulation of an existing virus, which research on the existing corona virus shows was not the case. This has nothing to do with the corona virus strains we are currently dealing with, and more importantly, there has never been any credible research proving that Covid was made in a lab. The only paper th…

This novel virus started spreading pretty close to a lab that studies viruses. I think that counts as "actual evidence" that it came out of a lab. Of course, evidence != proof. And even if it did come from the lab, that in itself does not imply malice.

"Came from a lab" in this context means "engineered in a lab".

There is only circumstancial evidence for it, but it is reasonable to suspect COVID-19 is the result of a researcher getting infected, not noticing, and introducing the virus to the human population. There is no evidence for, and it is very unreasonable to believe it was created in a lab.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This novel virus started spreading pretty close to a lab that studies viruses. I think that counts as "actual evidence" that it came out of a lab. Of course, evidence != proof. And even if it did come from the lab, that in itself does not imply malice.

That is not evidence! It is at best a coincidence. An even stronger coincidence would be that this lab had a genotypically similar virus stored prior to its detection. But even that is not evidence of release; it is just a stronger hypothesis. If I was near a bank robbery at the time of occurrence, it does not count as evidence that I did it. Not even if I have a history of robbing banks. It must be combined with oth…

But it is the only evidence, coincidental or otherwise. No other evidences have been found.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#364
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. The internet doesn't handle subtlety well, so just to spell it out... If we admit things are coincidences then they can't be added up to get evidence. Lots of coincidences isn't evidence. The point is these things aren't coincidences. If a new coronavirus breaks out next door to a lab studying coronaviruses, then the lab is a possible source of the…

And there are three completely plausible explanations for why Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak's research could have led to the outbreak:

(a) It was successfully created in the lab using gain of function research they were developing

(b) It was accidentally or purposefully cultured naturally from one of the many strains they had collected from the field

(c) A researcher, assistant, or contractor was infected in the field as they were doing field work

Option (c) is particularly compelling because it doesn't require much additional complexity beyond the "official explanation". It still maintains that the origin of Covid-19 was a zoonotic spillover event, but points to the research as the direct cause of that event. And it's not necessarily the case that if the virus was in the bat population already that it necessarily would have spread. Rural populations might become briefly infected with a pandemic-level virus, but the spread is naturally quarantined since they have little contact with major metropolitan areas.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#365
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It all comes down to burden of proof. The more circumstantial evidence of a lab leak piles up, the more reasonably open-minded people will tend to shift their priors in that direction. You will only accept hard evidence, yet you are aware that parties in China have actively removed some possible evidentiary sources. And others in USA promoted a campaign to shut down lin…

For me the things that sticks out is that they found the origin of the original sars in mere months, but nothing when it comes to Sars-cov-2. I don’t know how big animal reservoirs can be tbh. Btw A conspiracy theorist doesn’t change his conspiracy when new evidence comes to light. So if you are a critical thinker, you just want to know what happened there, whether lab or natural origin (or a combination of both?)

As I remember for SARS-1 it was bats via palm civets sold in wet markets.

It would be interesting to see an updating Bayesian model played out over 18 months of investigation into SARS-COV-19 natural origin with no result so far. Absence of evidence is not proof of non-natural origins, but it does shift one's priors.

Thanks. I guess beyond the stereotypes there's no actual conspiracy theorists. Just people reasoning imperfectly with imperfect data.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#366

The stridency with which people attempt to shut down discussion of a lab origin points in the direction of a coverup. An example of this happening is on Wikipedia where one editor in particular seems to have declared it to be a “conspiracy theory” and scrubs every mention of it. The editor in question scrubs talk pages and their own talk page, thus effectively preventing any kind of consensus forming, which is out of…

Link to the editor?

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#367

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 4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites 5. Furi…

All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? Can you conclusively rule out that this virus wasn’t engineered (and then maliciously covered up) in a lab? The reason this approach is important is because the stakes here are higher. This means people who should have been careful weren’t, and are responsible for the death of millions and they’re happy continuing to cover up their part in it. The…

You can disprove it by showing there are restriction enzyme, or Gibson, or Cre recombinase genetic element sites present in the genome, left over as artifacts from engineering. Find the sequenced genome and BLAST it for these sequences, easy peasy.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.

Maybe it's the other way around. They put the lab in Wuhan because it's easy to get many samples of the zoonotic viruses of concern due to the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.

In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires.

Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution.

The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs.

Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research.

So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.

It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#369

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…

Daszak in a famous interview has said: "You can manipulate coronaviruses in a lab quite easily". It was a month or two before COVID outbreak in Wuhan.

Re: Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This novel virus started spreading pretty close to a lab that studies viruses. I think that counts as "actual evidence" that it came out of a lab. Of course, evidence != proof. And even if it did come from the lab, that in itself does not imply malice.

That is not evidence! It is at best a coincidence. An even stronger coincidence would be that this lab had a genotypically similar virus stored prior to its detection. But even that is not evidence of release; it is just a stronger hypothesis. If I was near a bank robbery at the time of occurrence, it does not count as evidence that I did it. Not even if I have a history of robbing banks. It must be combined with oth…

I've seen enough police/crime/legal dramas to know that's 'circumstantial evidence'..! Of course that doesn't preclude it being a coincidence. (Hence the phrases 'that's just circumstantial' and 'that's one hell of a coincidence').

(I'm only commenting on the words, I don't think I care where it came from at this point, not sure I could ever really believe it, whatever was concluded. Unless perhaps a bunch of countries/labs agreed, including the blamed one if applicable.)

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