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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#451

Post by epistasis »

gojomo wrote: post #440
epistasis wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When there are massive institutional incentives to proclaim X, it is only wise to discount, somewhat, proclamations of X. In Vanity Fair's lab-leak theory story, there was an illustrative detail: *> Inside the NIH, which funded such research, the P3CO ["Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight"] framework was largely met with shrugs and eye rolls, said a longtime agency official: “If you ban gain-of-function re…

That's reading an awful lot into an unattributed quote, which includes a direct refutation attributed quotes right above it.

It's clear that there have been moratoriums on GoF without stopping "all of virology," so whatever was meant by this "wink wink nudge nudge" is really unclear.

Also, in the prior paragraph, the reporter talks about "details of proposed experiments being secret" but that's just standard practice for literally all government funding of science. As if they shouldn't be secret for some reason in this case.

If this the sort of weak sauce, I mean, come on.

Just a bunch of weird insinuations, and having read more, saying there's "omerta" on this seems even less likely.

How about at least a little bit of real meat?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#452

Post by epistasis »

pbreit wrote: post #427
epistasis wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Where have I put my thumb on the zoonosis scale?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#453

Post by bitshiftfaced »

dekhn wrote: post #77

With the lack of any really strong unequivocal data supporting any real hypothesis, I think people got tired of arguing about it and recognized that throwing around huge claims with massive implications was probably irresponsible.

If a claim has massive implications, then it would be even more irresponsible to not recognize that possibility. The world can't learn from the past if we're not able to even consider what might have happened in the past.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#454

Post by giantrobot »

eric_cc wrote: post #377
giantrobot wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is unethical about not wanting to carry speech you don't agree with, is inflammatory, or outright misinformation?

Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views that they don’t agree with gives them power to truly shape society by controlling acceptable discourse. What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling p…

> We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it.

Flagging misinformation is attempting to educate people.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#456

Post by rory »

gumby wrote: post #201

What I really want to know is "so what?" I mean, it would be great to learn about the origin and then take steps to reduce the chance of the same thing happening in the future. But it appears most people just want to point the finger and that no change would result. In fact one could imagine potential improvements for either case, some of which might be worth doing regardless of the actual origin.

The change is that western countries could put a halt on transferring incredibly dangerous technology to mainland China, since they have developed a track record of carelessness and coverups.

(Wish I didn't have to say this, but this is not a racial comment-- BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs in the US are filled with ethnically Chinese people and have much stronger safety records.)

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#457

Post by rory »

1024core wrote: post #97

9/11 cost us ~ 3000 lives? And we spent 20 years fighting wars, killing 100s of 1000s of people, bombing the shit out of entire countries, and trillions of dollars in trying to exact revenge. COVID kills 1,000,000 people (and counting...), which is 333X the death toll from 9/11; and we just shrug and do nothing? Just doesn't compute.

The bigger problem there is the response to 9/11, not the response to Covid.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#458

Post by chasil »

scarmig wrote: post #426
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..

> 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 str…

What I will tell you is a thing that I have read, and I hold close:

Forgive one another, and you will be forgiven.

In order to forgive, we must have the truth. Without it, we are in a fog of blind judgement and accusation.

Clarity of the source of this misfortune allows us to forgive.

I cannot say that I hold the full pantheon of the origin of these words to be true, but the four books that imparted this teaching to me have left an indelible imprint, and I cannot escape their mercy, justice, and hope.

I have read many other books, of course, and I believe in compassion. Though great calamity has befallen us, we might find any who have acted wrongly to be worthy of forgiveness.

When we grow beyond apprehension of recrimination, blind to fear of punishment for a cataclysm caused by ourselves and others, and only seek to salve our unwilling harm, perhaps then we will be able to say "move!" to a mountain, and it will move.

Yes, I have loved these books. Sometimes, they are my only solace.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#459

Post by lamontcg »

cameldrv wrote: post #441
lamontcg wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of them thought that no sarbecoviruses had a furin cleavage site and when they were first exposed to the issue by the headlines they assigned an overly high estimate to the FCS as being evidence of human tampering. Then other experts pointed out that isn't uncommon at all, and they all adjusted their thinking. "Woah, that's a million to one odds, that can't be by chance!" "No, it's actually really common, here'…

I don't think that there are any Sarbecoronaviruses other than SARS2 that have an FCS. This paper from 2021 supports that conclusion [1]. There are other Coronaviruses that have an FCS, but not Sarbecoronaviruses, and none of them use PRRA. Those twelve amino acids have essentially come out of nowhere. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/

None of the FCS in that paper are the same: RRAR, RTAR, RSVR, RVRR, RSGR, RRSRR, RRSR, RAKR, RAHR, RRKRR. There's clearly an awful lot of functional sequences that we know of that produce an FCS and uniqueness there isn't special.

You're right that I wrote sarbecoviruses when I meant beta-coronaviruses. We still don't know of any sarbecoviruses with an FCS, but MERS has an FCS and the bat beta-coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5 have an FCS.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#460

Post by tripletao »

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…

These "two distinct lineages" are separated by exactly two single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). For comparison, omicron differs from the original Wuhan virus by more than fifty SNPs. SARS-CoV-2 averages something around a third of an SNP per human-to-human transition.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463060722071...

It's overwhelmingly likely that something around two months of cryptic spread occurred before the market super-spreader event, regardless of whether the origin was natural or research-related. That's plenty of time for these "two distinct lineages" to develop. They could also have developed at the market, either in a single transmission with two mutations, or in two transmissions with an intermediate lineage that died out before it could be sampled.

Were you previously aware that the two lineages were just two SNPs apart? It's bizarre to me that the "two lineages" have received so much press as evidence of natural zoonosis, when they could have arisen so easily in human-to-human transmission.

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