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

CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 868 posts

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#511

Post by throwawaymaths »

ak217 wrote: post #441
cyberax wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a 19 bp sequence CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent Sigh. Here's the first line from the patent: "The present invention provides a cDNA of a severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus". You don't think that two coronaviruses just might have similar structural proteins?

No. The patent in question: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9587003B2/en The article: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33... The sequence (reverse complemented) matches positions 2751-2733 of sequence ID 11652 attached to the patent: https://seqdata.uspto.gov/seqdetail?docId=US09587003B2&publi... - as the other person said, it's located in the S1/S2 furin cleavage site, and produces no BL…

no screen necessary. you create a bunch of dnas by robot building from scratch every FCS known to man. the "screen" is "this is the guy that hapoened jump out of the test tube and cause a pandemic". more of a selection than a screen i guess

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#512

Post by wordofx »

lolinder wrote: post #298
whoitwas wrote: post #294

Hasn't this always been the most likely cause? I thought practically all evidence pointed to that. I haven't even heard a competing theory.

The competing theory is that it was transmitted from living animals sold at a wet market in Wuhan. Either story isn't a great look for the CCP: either they failed to maintain sufficient health protocols to keep diseases from spreading in wet markets, or they let a dangerous virus leak from a lab. There's no theory for its origins that have the CCP looking competent, so I'm not sure why it's such a politicized topic.

A lab leaking wouldn’t do any harm to the CCP. The harm they caused themselves was a mixture of lying and trying to cover up the whole thing. Downplaying it. Etc. The WHO says any unknown phenomena must be treated as airborn until proven otherwise. But they followed the CCP in telling us it was fine, it wasn’t transmissible.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#513

Post by wk_end »

Retric wrote: post #300
wk_end wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market... That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.

I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because: “Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018. ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news cov…

They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...

Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged her to move the work to a more secure biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) lab, he testified that she did not heed his recommendation. Because the WIV continued to perform coronavirus research at what he considers an inappropriately low biosafety level, Baric said of a laboratory accident, “You can’t rule that out…. You just can’t.”

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#514

Post by wordofx »

suzumer wrote: post #18
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #9

Wasn't this one of those "forbidden" conspiracy theories, censored from most social media, while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?

Saying COVID-19 leaked from a lab with zero evidence is different than waiting for evidence and then saying it leaked from a lab.

The lab leak theory was started by Chinese netizens. It was mentioned on Chinese media. Hell the name Wu Flu came from Chinese media.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#515

Post by oneshtein »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #181
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article observes, “the new analysis … began under the Biden administration.” The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.

> they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chanc…

Investigation of multiple hypothesis simultaneously is the norm, not an exception.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#517

Post by Izkata »

sleeplessworld wrote: post #470
danenania wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gain-of-function in the virology context doesn’t mean creating helpful microbes/viruses. It means purposely engineering pandemic-caliber viruses so that (the theory goes) we find them before evolution produces them naturally and so have time to study them and create vaccines before they are widespread.

This seems to be one of the most dangerous propositions that I have ever heard of. Given human history, human psychology, human error, politics etc. What am I missing here? That biolabs are the only human made thing that can be made absolutely 100% secure?

As far as I know you're not missing anything and this is why gain-of-function research was banned in the US for a while. EcoHealth Alliance outsourced it to China in the mid-2010s because of the ban, so technically none of it was happening in the US.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#518

Post by oneshtein »

throwaway290 wrote: post #503
oneshtein wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO. And the best solution is to research this... in China?

Yep, another continent from the home is the best place for such kind of research.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#519

Post by throwaway290 »

Fomite wrote: post #464
why_at wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on point 4? Your comment is interesting but I don't entirely follow.

Basically, things like "It started in Wuhan near the WIV" implies that we actually have found the first case, etc., when this is notoriously difficult to do, especially with a disease that can have mild or asymptomatic presentation.

If you followed events at the time and the suppressed rumours from doctors in China end of 2019, the new illness began exactly around that area actually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Wenliang etc).

There were no similar reports in another place on this planet. (Since 99% of other places do not have full control of media and many have better healthcare so if it happened it would be less likely to go unnoticed)

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#520

Post by Retric »

ajmurmann wrote: post #501
Retric wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened. The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

What is there to research with GoF that could be worth the massive risk? We had a vaccine for COVID in a weekend. Approval and manufacturing where the bottlenecks.

There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals.

One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccinated people.

Post reply on HN