The people who lied and censored the people who talked about the theory realized that there was just about nothing in this world that showed that it was false, or really true. https://thehill.com/policy/3517712-who-report-on-covid-19-or...
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
561–570 of 792 posts
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#562Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> that only form a cohesive whole by virtue of the layout rules in a html rendering engine
That got me laughing out loud in the elevator hahahaha, love it.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#563This 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…
Thank you for posting. Regarding your answer to 8, how important is gain of function research in the virology eco-system, is there sufficient reason amongst the powers that be within the discipline (that is, well-known researchers, leaders of departments or labs, funders and program managers, etc) to be wary of a funding cut for this research that they might be biased in dismissing the idea of a lab leak? My analogy…
The elephant in the room, as far as support for GOFROC (gain of function research of concern) goes, is Fauci. Several leading biologists (Marc Lipsitch, David Relman and others) have argued for years that the risk/reward ratio for GOFROC is too high to justify it. But it had to go all the way to Obama for Fauci to change course. Obama imposed a 3-year moratorium from 2014-17, which was lifted soon after he left office.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-flu-virus-risk-wor...
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#564Earlier 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…
>Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? Meaning, someone who didn’t walk in with a bias and look around the room for things that support said bias. This debate is packed with armchair experts who seem to have a larger interest in the politics than the science. >If it was a lab leak, "Oops." … Oops?! >Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a la…
> If you’re like most of us on HN, at work, when we make big mistakes that cost our companies money and users, we have thorough retrospectives, learn from our mistakes, identify root causes, build for redundancy and high availability, and prevent the same incident from ever happening twice.
Depends on the process. If the retrospective process is a big PITA that goes nowhere, and management is only going to support changes that it wanted before the incident, regardless of any knowledge uncovered by the evidence, then minimize the reporting and hide under a rock for a while, try not to get management attention again.
Which scenario seems more applicable to a government lab in Wuhan?
I don't think we're going to get the straight information from the lab, because the incentives aren't there. If they admit they did it, everybody is mad, and CCP has to take action to save face, and the lab team doesn't want to face that. If they admit they didn't do it, nobody believes them.
Outside of finding some lucky samples, like a good match from outside the area in say October or November, I don't think we're going to get anything definitive from forensic analysis of virus DNA. I'm not an expert in the field, but the same sequence gets interpreted different ways by different experts; and usually with some wishy-washyness.
The data quality for the early pandemic isn't getting any better or more independent from the same officials we don't trust.
If we can't get a story we trust from the horse's mouth, and we can't figure it out through forensic analysis, the best way forward is to figure out what interventions would be reasonable if we assume lab origin and what would be reasonable if we assume natural origin and do the practical interventions.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#565The whole world is tired of COVID. We all just want to move on.
Besides, what are we going to do when we do confirm it was a lab leak? We can hardly make these lvl 3/4 facilities any more secure than they already are, and it’s not as if China will ever actually take any form of blame (nor would the US, if it leaked there).
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#566This 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…
Hey Alina, thanks for contributing so much to the discussion.
One thing that always made me balk was this interview on CCTV which shows researchers collecting bat samples (feces etc) while seemingly skimping on PPE and admitting to getting bit by the wild animals and having a clear skin reaction all the way back in 2017 [1] - Do you have any comment on that in particular? Supposedly these are researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology but all I have to go by on that notion is some news from Taiwan and the New York Post, since I don't speak Chinese this video is a little harder for me to personally verify...
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#567The whole world is tired of COVID. We all just want to move on. Besides, what are we going to do when we do confirm it was a lab leak? We can hardly make these lvl 3/4 facilities any more secure than they already are, and it’s not as if China will ever actually take any form of blame (nor would the US, if it leaked there).
Not have those labs? That’s one solution. Is the study of virology worth all the loss and suffering caused by a pandemic?
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?)
There's very little question that the 1977 flu pandemic was human-caused. Even Gigi Gronvall opens her paper with:
> The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, [...]
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/
She goes on to say it wasn't a "laboratory accident", because it was probably a vaccine accident, either an incompletely attenuated vaccine or a trial in which vaccine recipients were deliberately challenged with live virus to test their immunity. That distinction seems like a legalistic game to me, intended to distract from the lesson that pandemic may teach us about this one; but I believe her historical background is good.
I don't know any mechanism by which those responsible would be punished, even if the exact truth came out, and even if they're still alive. I'm not even sure they should be--virology was still in its infancy then, and the escape presumably really was an honest mistake. Of course the more times this happens, the harder it gets to accept such an excuse, especially when deliberate efforts are made to minimize and distract from the lessons of the past.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before find…
You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction? You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread? In any case, they directly address this; > Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no…
A bunch of equipment was moved from WIV to the spot next to the market a few days before the outbreak. That is the lab leak hypothesis.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 occurr…
> 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.
Plenty of us understand - even Bloom, who I generally respect (aside from some sloppy work at the beginning of the pandemic) understands but thinks it's slightly less likely than the theory you're implying. I (and many others!) disagree.
Pekar does a lot of complicated testing and statistics to shore up his case, but "in my own words", it all comes down to timing. We know in which direction the genetic drift of SC2 occurs, which lets us know that Lineage A is the closer than Lineage B to the ancestral bat coronavirus. So Lineage A could mutate into Lineage B, but the opposite is very unlikely.
However, the very first cases reported to the Chinese government - e.g. the very first patients actually were infected with Lineage B. It was several days later until patients began showing up with Lineage A infections. They've reconstructed the phylo trees to the extent possible with the genomes from those first patients and they just don't leave any real possibility that B came from A. The timing just doesn't work. Pekar estimates that Lineage B infections precede Lineage A ones by ~7 days.
This is further buoyed by the rate of divergence in both Lineages being almost exactly the same even though the basic characteristics of each virus are identical. For that to be true, Lineage A. would've had to quietly spread without being IDed, would need to quickly mutate to Lineage B in order for the first sicknesses to be IDed as Lineage B, and then greatly slow down the rate of mutation to maintain the same divergence as B.
This doesn't "disprove" that a single infection could have sparked both lineages - though it's extremely unlikely to have caused two viable viruses and left no trail whatsoever before them in the genetics. It's all a matter or probabilities and IMO, this shows it's far more likely to have had two jumps (similar to how SARS1 and MERS spread) than some hidden ancestor that was extremely similar to SC2 but wasn't noticeably pathogenic.
At very least, this greatly narrows the timeframe and the location of the very first infection. If various vendors at the market were infected with viruses of different lineage within a handful of days of each other, it's completely obvious that this was the site of the first spread. That may seem like an anodyne observation but unfortunately there are still a lot of people who dispute even that much.
I think Bloom is missing something here that would further change his odds in favor of the multiple zoonosis;
https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153466370506077...
> Agreed & one scenario under "not seeded by lineage B at market" is seeded by lineage A at market which then evolved into lineage B in humans. Alternatively could have been seeded by lineage A elsewhere & superspreading of derived lineage B at market.
Guo found environmental samples of both Lineage A and Lineage B at the market -- so both were present there -- his second hypothetical would then be highly unlikely.