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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#661

Post by jtc331 »

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..

Serial passaging is effectively all “natural” (but intentional) infection. That wouldn’t leave signs of molecular techniques since none would be involved.

Anyone claiming to disprove the lab leak hypothesis by making a claim against solely molecular engineering is either hilariously uninformed or intentionally misleading you.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#662

Post by wesleywt »

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…

All of this post is pure speculation with zero evidence to support it.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#663

Post by ayjchan »

trompetenaccoun wrote: post #645
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…

Hey Alina, thank you for doing the work that some others are seemingly afraid to touch! There are many fair-weather scientists, but researchers who consider all credible leads and data, no matter the popularity or political implications of the results, are much rarer. I have two questions: 1. There were genome sequences removed from the 'Sequence Read Archive', at the request of Chinese scientists.¹ It was later port…

Hi,

Thank you for the support! :)

1. The deletion of published data is thankfully not something that commonly happens, but it is not against the rules of the NCBI database. Scientists who deposit their data into the database have the right to ask for that data to be taken down even if it has been published. That's why there is a concern that some scientists may have used this mechanism to delete original data with early Covid-19 sequences in it. Some scientists have called for NCBI to please allow them to search through deleted or suppressed data for these early Covid-19 sequences, but they have not been granted permission. Please see Vanity Fair's report on this: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

2. I have seen an archived version of that job posting but, like you said, it didn't surprise me that they were looking for more coronavirologists - the Wuhan Institute of Virology does have one of the world's largest (if not the largest) bat coronavirus hunting programs. The website being revamped kind of goes into speculative territory - maybe it was just time to upgrade the site or maybe they did it to avoid negative attention. The more disturbing thing to me is that they did not share their pathogen database (taken offline in Sep 2019) despite a pandemic happening. The database was meant to help inform pandemic response, but when a real pandemic happened, the database could not be found anywhere. None of their collaborators, including in the US, have seemed to be able to provide a copy.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#664

Post by uoaei »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #631
peteradio wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gain-of-function research is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range. Isn't the goal to end up with an infectious agent? I don't understand why it seems so implausible that they would succeed? Why would someone give a lab money for a truly impossible task?

A virus that is optimized for mice or bats doesn't normally work well in Humans. If a bat virus somehow evolves in a lab into a pandemic in Humans, without essentially breeding the virus in Human subjects, that would be somewhat of an accidental development because the viral particles aren't specifically selected for that reason.

Something tells me those scientists were more interested in the effects on humans than on mice, and do their best to modify their analogues (ie "humanize" them) to achieve comparable results.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#665

Post by p_eter_p »

epgui wrote: post #576
jcrash wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple sources in USA claimed masks were not needed for people without the disease. Heavily implying it was useless. I of course knew that was BS from the get-go. But nonetheless they did say it. https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/

Yes, we used to think non-N95 masks (let alone cotton masks) wouldn't help, and then when we got more data to the contrary, we had to update this belief. That's unfortunate, but normal.

Wait, people change their beliefs in response to new data? That's unpossible!

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#666

Post by ayjchan »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #566
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…

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 Wuh…

Hi Jamal, Yes, there is quite a bit of evidence (photos and interviews of the scientists) showing that the virus hunters in Wuhan did not always wear appropriate protective equipment while hunting for potential pandemic viruses in remote areas. We describe this and provide citations in VIRAL (will be on page 127 in the paperback). In any case, even with full PPE, you can get bitten or exposed to animals and their pathogens. Accidents happen, especially in an uncontrolled environment, e.g., a cave swarming with millions of live bats that you're trying to catch and sample.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#667

Post by ayjchan »

wildmanx wrote: post #650
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…

> 1. Are Chan and Ridley selling a book? Hej Alina! Thanks for being open with having an economic interest in this topic being dragged out into the open again. > It is very surprising to me that these feasible routes of inquiry have not been explored more than 2 years into the pandemic. It's not too surprising to me. International diplomacy works like this. With a more general picture in mind, specific topics often n…

Hi, My perspective is that, if the pandemic started due to the virus hunting program which was a very international collaboration (US, China, several European, African, Asian, Middle Eastern countries), then it's not really a China-specific thing. It could just be that China is so much further along in their virus discovery and characterization pipeline (as the scientific literature points out) that unfortunately they were the first to leak one of these pandemic level viruses either found in the wild and sent to the lab or created in the lab during the process of characterization.

I don't think that a country should be singled out for punishment for having a lab accident (unless it can be demonstrated that they do not have proper biosafety protocols and accountability mechanisms in place; a case of reckless negligence). But I do think there should be new international agreements and penalties for suppressing information about an emerging outbreak, e.g., transmissibility of the virus, its genomic sequence, number of cases and geographic spread etc., and costing other countries time in preparing to respond to the outbreak.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#668

Post by ayjchan »

onetimeusename wrote: post #549
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…

Is there any evidence of a link between sars-cov-2 to other previously known viruses that the Wuhan lab might have had in its possession? Could there be a plausible candidate virus that might have escaped from the lab? Was any of this data public prior to the pandemic?

We cover this quite extensively in our book. I also have a manuscript that will soon be in peer review describing the relationship between SARS-CoV-2 and other known viruses. None of the publicly disclosed viruses could have plausibly been the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

However we now know that when news emerged of a novel SARSrCoV with a novel cleavage site causing an outbreak in Wuhan… scientists in Wuhan did not tell us that they were working with 9 of its closest relatives, linked to mysterious pneumonia cases, and that they had been collecting 1,000s of unpublished high-risk samples from animals & humans across 8 countries, with a clear roadmap for synthesizing consensus SARSrCoV genomes and inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARSrCoVs. Their database meant to inform pandemic prediction & response remains inaccessible.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#669

Post by ayjchan »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #617
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…

From the article, it seems that there's a general conspiracy to sabotage your book. I really don't understand why. Have you tried contacting Bill Gates and ask him to support you, and give your book more visibility?

I'm still an early career scientist so I do not have a way to contact Bill Gates.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#670

Post by elil17 »

tripletao wrote: post #519
elil17 wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue should be doing more to ensure lab biohazard safety regardless of the origin of COVID-19, which is one reason I don't think knowing the answer has a lot of practical significance.

If you'd like to see greater regulation of biological research, then I'm pretty sure strong evidence that it killed millions of people would help with political support for that? So I'm not sure why we wouldn't look, especially when many obvious paths (e.g. subpoenas for all data potentially containing early viral genomes as contamination, like from Illumina's cloud services) remain unexplored.

I think practically it would be used to generate hostile sentiment between countries and wouldn’t drive good regulations. But maybe I’m just a pessimist!
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