What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#551

Post by johndfsgdgdfg » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 2:43 AM UTC

generj wrote: post #467

user3939382 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm more cynical, maybe even conspiratorial. My theory is that NIH was possibly, even if indirectly, contributing funding to the research that caused the outbreak, and that the major corporate media networks are there to shill for the establishment forces in the government and hushed this story as not to humiliate Fauci and the NIH. I've seen Rand Paul credibly grilling Fauci on this issue a number of times a…

Rand Paul isn’t credible on nearly any topic, but especially not SARS-CoV-2. We are talking about a man who proposed banning masks on public transit, knew he had COVID but didn’t inform anyone but instead spread COVID amongst a bunch of elderly Senators, and spent time railing against vaccines for children. The man is a non-practicing eye doctor who pretends to medical knowledge he doesn’t have.

Yes, Rand Paul claims COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation has found that COVID couldn't have come from China. Many scientists support Chinese scientists' fuindings [1].

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#552

Post by jpeloquin » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 2:56 AM UTC

trhway wrote: post #541

jpeloquin wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> during 2014-2019 NIH actually paid $3.6M to EcoHealth Alliance under the grants clearly specifying the coronavirus GoF experiments in Wuhan with the "Human subjects included" checked. Is this is the grant you're referring to? https://reporter.nih.gov/search/me9X23pZWEigATS-4XTBfA/proje... From your comment it was unclear to me what the human subjects component was. It appears to have been population surveillance us…

I don't have the link right now to that 2014 EcoHealth grant. That link though describes it pretty good: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/1027290/gain-of-... " Baric had developed a way around that problem—a technique for “reverse genetics” in coronaviruses. Not only did it allow him to bring an actual virus to life from its genetic code, but he could mix and match parts of multiple viruses. He wanted to t…

Yep, acknowledgments in the 2017 paper linked by the MIT article check out as referencing the grant I linked, and the paper does describe work with chimeric viruses.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#553

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:05 AM UTC

ayjchan wrote: post #531

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments. 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book? Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin... The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication…

[deleted]

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#554

Post by rkagerer » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:05 AM UTC

ayjchan wrote: post #531

This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. I’m going to answer some of the questions that have come up in the comments. 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book? Yes, the updated paperback comes out in the US next week: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/viral-matt-ridleyalin... The updated epilogue now discusses three significant new developments since the publication…

Thanks for posting this here, and thanks for including some non-Twitter links.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#555

Post by Supermancho » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:08 AM UTC

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?

Magic Bullet Theory was an obvious consequence of a coverup at multiple levels, which most elementary school children understand.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#556

Post by ironmagma » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:16 AM UTC

rdl wrote: post #521

ironmagma wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the World Health Organization said that there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00974-w

Ah yeah, you are right, airborne is defined as "aerosol" but "through the air in droplets" is not. It seemed pretty obvious it was aerosol but not proven early on/suppressed for reasons.

I think it’s a textbook example of poor science communication. The words of science do not mean to the public what they mean to scientists. Further, it’s safest to assume the worst in a situation like that. I think they should have erred on the side of “assume it’s airborne.”

Unfortunately, special interests (hospitals and other medical groups) had an incentive (security of their own access to masks) to mis-state the facts.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#557

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:30 AM UTC

tripletao wrote: post #466

lamontcg wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were two distinct lineages at the market No there were two distinct lineages in two separate crossover events, the market was just one of them. Which is even worse for the lab-leak hypothesis.

They're literally just two SNPs apart, per my reply to the grandparent and link to Jesse Bloom's Twitter. What do you think excludes the possibility that those arose during human-to-human transmission, whether at the market or during cryptic spread before that?

[deleted]

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#558

Post by rcpt » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:37 AM UTC

trashtester wrote: post #478

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…

Here is a hypothesis that fits the data perfectly (but that could have a somewhat low prior): - A poor studen has discovered that there is a demand in the wet market for bats. - The student works at a lab that either has an in-house breeding area for presumably healthy bats, or that buy such bats from an external vendor. - The student sees the opportunity for some extra income by selling some of those bats to the loc…

The prior might be higher than you think

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#559

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

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…

That's the problem with lab-leak theory that it's basically unfalsifiable. No matter how strong evidence you gather against it you can always dismiss it with ease.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#560

Post by upwardbound » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 3:55 AM UTC

tripletao wrote: post #504

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…

> Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? If the virus is a laboratory construct (e.g., a recombinant of two novel natural viruses with a human-chosen FCS; we can argue about how likely that was, but no genomic evidence can exclude that), then it would near-certainly never have existed without that laboratory manipulation. The pandemic could near-certainly have been permanently avoided…

That's really sad about the 1977 flu. Was there evidence that it was human-caused, and that proper procedures weren't followed? Could local prosecutors have pursued a case based on something like manslaughter or criminal negligence? Would it even be possible to still build such a case? (i.e. maybe the statute of limitations didn't expire yet?)