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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#411

Post by epistasis »

ChemSpider wrote: post #354
mikeyouse wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as eviden…

> all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that? None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They ref…

> None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020.

Really? Can you point to interviews with these people that have no answer when asked why they change their mind?

It's quite a strong statement to say what you said, and it would surprise me to see an entire group of people refuse to answer a question. That would be quite something.

But I suspect a more likely description of the scenario is that you just don't want to accept their judgements, and replace their actual answer with "no answer." I'd love to have my suspicions proven to be wrong! Show the evidence.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#413

Post by notananthem »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #372

The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a politically unauthorized thought. If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.

lol jet fuel melt zoonotic origin beams right

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#414

Post by pbreit »

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…

Less probable than such a coronavirus originating in Wuhan of all places?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#415

Post by tim333 »

mikeyouse wrote: post #350
thereddaikon wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself. The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it. So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.

But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..

Modern molecular techniques don't really have to leave signs. Indeed scientists synthesised a copy of sars-cov-2 from the sequence data a few months after the sequence was published:

"it is possible for researchers to reconstruct the virus in a lab, using either fragments of virus from patients, or fragments of DNA that are synthesised chemically by biotech companies. " https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/19172

It seems you can basically type any sequence you want and have it made up.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#416

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #2

The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions: 1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses. 2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence. We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal…

>> The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions:

When and where were those two predictions published? Can you give a link?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#417

Post by epistasis »

_jal wrote: post #373
ChemSpider wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that? None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They ref…

So, more weird insinuation. Got it.

You are downvoted, but it appears to me that you are accurate in your assessment. I haven't followed this debate much, but every time I look I to it I see weird insinuations, misrepresentations, and "obvious" assertions that are not in any way obvious. It seems like a gigantic waste of time, like debating creationists. I'll wait for my scientific peers to blow the whistle if any of the claims have credibility.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#418

Post by warning26 »

fortuna86 wrote: post #258
warning26 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering this literally happened before at the Wuhan lab (among a group of sample collectors), this is, I think, the most likely scenario.

I agree. What is the previous case you mentioned, do you have a citation ?

Ah, of course! I was thinking of this incident specifically, though it seems I remembered the details wrong; the miners who died seemingly did so before the WIV got involved:

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

> From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine. (...) The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other "SARS-type" coronavirus samples taken from the site.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#419

Post by epistasis »

gojomo wrote: post #329
mikeyouse wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post.. > First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came t…

The prior linked post is a gish-gallop of overconfident motivated reasoning. "Two lineages" in rapid-succession is weird - but no better explained by two zoonoses (that left no hints in any animal population) than two lab-leaks. Worobey et al's analysis is at the mercy of Chinese data sources, and even if all early cases were exclusively in the market, and even the live-animal section, that doesn't disprove lab origi…

> There's a field-wide omerta about gain-of-function risks – who wants to ruin their relationship with the NIH, & admit research that's pretty typical across many leaky labs worldwide, may have killed 20 million people (and counting)?

Claims like this, without evidence, reallt detract from any other point you want to make. Because it seems that your thumb is pretty heavy in the scale, without any evidence.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#420

Post by ethbr0 »

themitigating wrote: post #407
peteradio wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JFK was an obvious government coverup not sure why you would choose to group the two.

Obvious?

I like that the two sibling comments above are "Obviously, everyone knows {polar opposites}."
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