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

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#591

Post by kaitaincps » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

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…

I would be much more fascinated to know how two separate lineages both made their first leap to humans at the same market. The odds on THAT occurring are much, MUCH smaller than those of two lineages that had already made the leap to humans (or two branches descended from the first human leap) being found at the same market during the first few months of an epidemic.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#592

Post by mikeyouse » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:52 AM UTC

kaitaincps wrote: post #590

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…

One thing I would point out here: Shi Zhengli is the principal bat-borne sarbecovirus researcher at the WIV. When the pandemic first came to light, the first thought Shi Zhengli had was, "Oh my goodness! That might have have come from our lab! Let's investigate! I wonder if the municipal health authority has got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China." Zhengli goes on t…

You'd have to ask her -- but all of the initial reasons that everyone was unsure also apply to her. There was a novel bat coronavirus pandemic near where her lab studies bat coronaviruses - why wouldn't that be your first thought?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#593

Post by kaitaincps » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:53 AM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #350

thereddaikon wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself. The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it. So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.

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..

No we haven't. At all.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#594

Post by tgv » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:55 AM UTC

johndfsgdgdfg wrote: post #547

stetrain wrote: post #12

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself. 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the…

Thank you for posting this. We know that COVID couldn't have come from China. It came to China through frozen meat packages. WHO-China report already stated that fact. Dr. Fauci also believes that. The only reason we can't find evidence because other countries wouldn't collaborate, for obvious reasons. Racists are trying to blame China because of lack of competence of their leaders.

> Racists

There's the exact reason "why it wasn't a media fixation": people calling anyone a racist for thinking bad of China.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#595

Post by tripletao » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:57 AM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #570

tripletao wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

I follow the steps; I just don't understand why they're treated as dispositive evidence of zoonosis. I also don't think you're correctly describing Bloom's position here. On Twitter, he writes:

> But the first sequences reported by Chinese government are lineage B from seafood market. So either outbreak was not seeded by lineage B at market, or something very complicated happened. I suggest the former, Pekar et al suggest the latter.

https://mobile.twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/153463283456805...

I'm taking this as a statement that he disagrees with Pekar, and believes SARS-CoV-2 probably originated from a single introduction (natural or otherwise) into humans. That seems well beyond "slightly less likely". Am I mistaken?

Pekar's theory makes sense if we believe that sampling in humans has been almost perfectly good, capturing every important lineage. But why would we assume that? Such confidence in the human sampling is particularly odd when Pekar's theory also requires us to believe that sampling in animals has been perfectly bad, since we've still found no animals infected (except those infected by humans).

Assuming that Lineage A evolved into Lineage B in humans, the hidden ancestors don't need to be less pathogenic than SARS-CoV-2; the IFR is relatively low already, and people die of similar respiratory diseases every day. The novel virus wasn't discovered until mortality became alarmingly high, leaving lots of room for undiagnosed deaths from cryptic spread before that.

> 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.

Why does that make his second hypothetical highly unlikely? I don't understand why two zoonotic introductions into the market are more likely than two human introductions into the market. Perhaps you'd expect to see other sparks thrown off from the cryptic human spread; but almost all chains of transmission die out, with highly stochastic spread until enough people get infected for the central limit theorem to take over. So the absence of intermediate lineages doesn't seem too significant to me, especially when the "missing link" (if it even exists; I'll again note the lineages could have formed in a single human-to-human transmission) is literally just a single SNP from either lineage.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#596

Post by kaitaincps » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:57 AM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #375

byecomputer wrote: post #355

Earlier 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…

There are two key problems with this analysis. The first is that the data to which we have access has been subject to gatekeeping by the Chinese authorities. (Is this a conspiracy theory? Yes, very much so, and rationally so given the way the PRC operates.) The second is that workers at the WIV aren't going to leave work and then hang around on the street outside, infecting passers-by in the immediate vicinity, causing a cluster that radiates around the WIV itself. They're going to get on transit and head home, mainly westwards.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#597

Post by imiric » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 6:59 AM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #479

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…

The WHO called for further investigation into the lab leak theory which means they have not dismissed it and believe it deserves a proper investigation.

It's hardly relevant what the WHO says or does in this discussion. They've shown themselves to be biased and untrustworthy on more than one occasion.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#598

Post by kaitaincps » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 7:00 AM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #375

byecomputer wrote: post #355

Earlier 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…

> You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!

Actually, YOU do. You need to explain how a virus made two separate rare hops to humans in the same place, at the same time, in two different forms. This is possible, but statistically unlikely. The (vastly) more likely hypothesis is that it made only a single cross-species hop, which then spread and mutated later.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#599

Post by kaitaincps » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 7:01 AM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #304

harshreality wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't understand biology. It is possible to date the divergence of genomes using a genetic clock. So they know if those spike proteins had been recombinated. Serial passage in mice can't be ruled out but is quite out there. Lots of theories can't be completely ruled out, but wild speculation like that is not very productive. For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) h…

> has to somehow make it into a lab undetected

Undetected? The lab was specifically searching for and storing pandemic-capable viruses, and had applied for grant money to insert furin cleavage sites into them!

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#600

Post by kaitaincps » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 7:04 AM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #345

dpbriggs wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. That's not a necessary condition and it's ridiculous to think that's the only hinge by which the hypothesis stands. Another far more plausible idea is that a mistake occurred somewhere and it was covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before. An input to a mole…

Of course it is a necessary condition. In order to leak from the lab, the virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab. And all the rest isn't plausible if they knew the bat virus they had in their vials had the potential to cause a pandemic. But it must have had some rare "talent" that was as yet undiscovered. Otherwise nothing of the "lab leak" hypothesis makes sense. You can't "gain-of-function" just any…

Wait, wait...does this whole debate hinge around the idea that you think the WIV staff are reliable, honest agents? The very idea is hilarious. They operate within an authoritarian regime that restricts their freedom of speech and makes threats against them and their families for non-compliance. It is irrational to trust anything they report as being true.