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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#491

Post by Izkata »

mikeyouse wrote: post #296
elif wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you put on evidence in quotes? The deletion of the bat coronavirus database at Wuhan institute of virology prior to the pandemic is an undisputed and central fact. Your quotation marks do nothing to diminish this fact alone's inherent demand that Occam's razor be inverted.

This is exactly what I mean about insinuation. Spell out specifically what you think a deleted database proves and the sequence of events that would lead to it being deleted. The timeline of this stuff is extremely important to disproving some of the sillier claims. This database that's a "Central Fact" was deleted several months before the first case of a virus with an unmitigated R0 of >5. They would have to know t…

It was taken offline in Sept 2019, and "undetected patient zero" estimations go back to Oct 2019. Not that far off.

Their story for why they took it offline has also changed over time.

And at least as of the beginning of this year, it's still not been made available to other researchers.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#492

Post by tripletao »

mikeyouse wrote: post #473
tripletao wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 occurr…

> Were you previously aware. Yes, of course. > 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 tran…

I've seen the paper, and I don't understand its reasoning. Maybe that's my lack of domain knowledge; but Jesse Bloom is impeccably credentialed and he seems to disagree too.

I believe it's possible that:

1. The mutations that separate Lineages A and B occurred in non-human animals, and were introduced to humans in two zoonotic jumps. This is Pekar's argument.

2. Or, the mutations that separate Lineages A and B occurred in humans during cryptic spread, at the market or elsewhere.

If the two lineages were separated by a large number of mutations, then option (2) would be very unlikely--the virus couldn't spread in humans for long enough to accumulate that many SNPs without exploding into a large enough cluster with enough sickness and mortality that emergence would have been discovered earlier (and we'd have found evidence of that spread retrospectively in sero-surveillance of stored samples, etc.).

But it's just two SNPs--as Jesse Bloom notes, 5-10% of single human-to-human transmissions show at least that much difference, as will many two-transmission chains for which the intermediate never got sampled (or longer chains for which many intermediates never got sampled; the over-dispersed "superspreader" nature of SARS-CoV-2's transmission means almost all chains die out, while a few explode). So what excludes (2)?

ETA: I've never found anyone able to explain in their own words why "two lineages" definitely implies two zoonoses despite the tiny genetic distance between them. I strongly suspect that most people making that claim are simply repeating it, and aren't able to understand the paper, and that the reason none of us can understand is that it's nonsense. If anyone believes otherwise then I'd love to hear, though.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#493

Post by ethbr0 »

incrudible wrote: post #449
ethbr0 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.

That is a substantial value, to be sure.

But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control.

If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#494

Post by skillpass »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #291
aftbit wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source please? Everything I've read about latest Omicrons suggests that they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity, and substantially _less_ severe in terms of hospitalization and deaths. By and large, this is what you'd expect to happen at the end of a pandemic, regardless of our response.

You admit it yourself, I will quote you: "they are more transmissible, more likely to evade immunity" Intrinsic severity of the virus doesn't change the fact it is the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world. Even if it is intrinsically less severe than previous variants, because we are allowing it to spread to EVERYONE in the world we are seeing a much worse impact. Did you miss that in the US alone…

> the most transmissible virus we have ever seen in the world

It's not. Measles, for example, is more transmissible.

> No other virus has had this level of death in the same timeframe.

Not true. Spanish Flu, for example, killed more both in raw numbers and proportionally in a similar time frame.

Here's a helpful infographic: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadli...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#495

Post by chasil »

scarmig wrote: post #474
chasil wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For what it's worth, I neither think the lab leak hypothesis is definitely proven nor that the scientists involved are worthy of some kind of punishment. It's a matter of increasing security at scientific research facilities and banning certain lines of research altogether as too risky.

I agree, forgive before corrective action.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#497

Post by dpbriggs »

rtkwe wrote: post #99
sixQuarks wrote: post #48

Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.

The lab leak hypothesis was also pretty tightly coupled with the bioweapon/intentional release theory which is part of why it received so much push back. Also I don't recall the specific fact check messages but if they were in line with "there's no hard evidence of a lab leak" I'd say that's still pretty accurate.

No, that was some intentional conflation bordering on propaganda.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#498

Post by brippalcharrid »

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…

Yes, Seamless Ligation ("No See'm" technology) has been written about since at least 2006 for its potential to be used in creating biological agents that lack signs of laboratory manipulation.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39652

Suffice it to say, this has been a very active area of research (and DoD/NIH/NIAID funding) for many years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7120940/

In light of this, people that are confidently dismissing or playing down the possibility of a lab l̶e̶a̶k̶ origin at this point seem to be exhibiting some kind of ideological commitment.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#499

Post by uoaei »

acdha wrote: post #332
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.

> 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 concl…

We know in science that sometimes scientific results for analyses based largely on suppositions regress toward the mean, and this effect is stronger when prestige or politics are on the line. This is called "ideological hegemony" and it reproduces itself in the halls of power because those who occupy those halls are all funneled through the same conditioning programs.

I'm not sure what to say further other than "I guess we're going to have to find a way to be comfortable never knowing". The analyses are compromised because the topic is too charged now. Too much is at stake based on one or another direction to trust any conclusions.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#500

Post by b112 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #489
briandear wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we could hold those responsible accountable? Especially if it came from research Fauci said wasn’t happening but actually was? Specifically gain of function. Look at how BP got hammered for an oil spill. Why wouldn’t China proportional penalties given that if it were a lab leak it lead to a global economic and health disaster. That it was coincidence that the virus happening near a research facility where the…

And if we did all of that, how much would it decrease our future risk of zoonotic spillover?

The comment you are responding to, talks about alleged malfeasance, and morally bankrupt acts.

Your response is, oh well?

In terms of spillover, there is zero guarantee it would happen naturally. For any virus, it could, it may, and for some it has.

But for any specific virus, it is absolutely not guaranteed.

And purposefully training for human compatibility in a lab, clearly makes that maybe, a certainty, and if insufficient precautions are taken, that is a crime against humanity.

This whole thing is absurd. We go after corps for spying on people, governments for bias, but if the truth is a lab leak killed 100s of millions, "Oh well".

Come on!

What's the goal here? Is this some weird US political "my guy vs your guy" thing?

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