Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

unherd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 792 posts

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#421

Post by SiempreViernes »

mw888 wrote: post #238
epgui wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how you do scientific criticism. Your comment is unsubstantiated opinion/accusation.

It’s an order of magnitude more information than you or the other commenter provided. Saying: “Wrong, I don’t like that.” is saying nothing at all. Be specific you fool.

If you know anything about how arguments work, and you actually read the parent to the comment you attack you would see that saying "that's not actually how you do it" is a perfectly fair response.

What EA_itsinthegame posted was a series of disconnected statements that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of the layout rules in a html rendering engine. It's certainly not anything approaching a criticism of the tweet thread as it never even manges to quote from it.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#422

Post by mikeyouse »

Symmetry wrote: post #236
MilnerRoute wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Unherd's article is actually misstating things. For example, "no infected animal on sale in the market or elsewhere in China has been found..." In fact, Bloomberg reported: "Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SA…

I don't think anybody doubts that the first superspreader event happened at the Hunan market. The question is whether the first human/animal crossover happened there. With a high k disease like Covid-19 you might very well have a chain of transmission many links long before it starts going exponential as in, for example, what contact tracers uncovered about how the virus first got into France.

Unfortunately, tons of people dispute it still. There's prominent people insisting Covid was in Italy in mid 2019 among other ridiculous things. Unfortunately they're common travelers with the more intellectually honest lab leak folks so it's hard to separate them.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#423

Post by est31 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #410
rzz3 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from. If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people…

You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century.

If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#424

Post by arinlen »

harshreality wrote: post #213
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…

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…

> Most of the "evidence" against lab-leak is just weird insinuation.

Trying to refute evidence rejecting a theory is not equivalent to proving a theory, though. It's just broken reasoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_conclusion_from_a_...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#425

Post by pbreit »

mikeyouse wrote: post #307
gojomo wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overfocusing on the market cluster is an error. 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. And second, early overemphasis on the market cluster caused authorities to search for every case there, and ignore cases elsewhere – just as in the US, authorities missed early community spread because they didn't even consider…

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…

Two lineages do not preclude lab origin.

And the data collection was absolutely biased to the market.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#426

Post by scarmig »

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..

> 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..

For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it in the city the virology lab was based.

The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the strong theory weaker.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#427

Post by pbreit »

epistasis wrote: post #419
gojomo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No heavier than your thumb on the zoonosis scale.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#428

Post by byecomputer »

cameldrv wrote: post #398
mikeyouse wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV. Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence. In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome…

> insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.

Saved a lot of money this year making Covid-19 at home using the SARS viruses I already have. Takes like 2 seconds

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#429

Post by nraynaud »

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…

And saying that China would have an interest in spreading the virus seems fishy to me too, they almost decapitated the Communist Party by having a giant dinner at the onset of the pandemic.
Post reply on HN