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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#691

Post by kaitaincps »

mikeyouse wrote: post #592
kaitaincps wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

She’s a scientist and a bat virus expert. One would expect her mind to gravitate towards what she saw as being the most plausible explanation. If a zoonotic jump had been overwhelmingly probable, why would the news have triggered the kind of reaction she later reported having?

Bear in mind that your analysis is predicated on the falsehood that the WIV had been set up in Wuhan because that was a bat virus hotspot. So you’ll need to revisit that line of reasoning.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#692

Post by kaitaincps »

mikeyouse wrote: post #422
Symmetry wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anybody doubts that the first superspreader event happened at the Hunan market. The question is whether the first human/animal crossover happened there. With a high k disease like Covid-19 you might very well have a chain of transmission many links long before it starts going exponential as in, for example, what contact tracers uncovered about how the virus first got into France.

Unfortunately, tons of people dispute it still. There's prominent people insisting Covid was in Italy in mid 2019 among other ridiculous things. Unfortunately they're common travelers with the more intellectually honest lab leak folks so it's hard to separate them.

They seem to me to be a totally separate group. They’re more fellow travellers with the “Bill Gates’s Plandemic” crowd.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#693

Post by bayesian_horse »

noptd wrote: post #638
bayesian_horse wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point is that the virus that was collected would already need to have some properties that predispose it to become a dangerous pandemic. Which is unlikely because those Viruses are pretty rare. And the rest of your comment just tells me you know nothing about biology.

So the crux of your argument is that it's more likely that a virus with that type of predisposition occured in nature in a specific area around the Wuhan market as opposed to being sampled from one of many areas, potentially modified, and then leaked into said area? Seems unlikely considering the rarity as you pointed out. >And the rest of your comment just tells me you know nothing about biology. No need to resort t…

It's not ad-hominem if it's true. I really don't have the energy to debunk every "argument" that is borne out of misunderstandings about basic biology.

The alternative hypothesis is not that a very dangerous zoonotic virus emerges in a specific area around Wuhan (which also isn't really the agreed upon origin anyway), but rather that it emerges anywhere and causes a pandemic. Your argument here is a basic misunderstanding about how random processes work. Our observation that Wuhan was the first epicenter of this pandemic already preconditions us to assume a pandemic-capable Virus emerged there in some form or another.

Such viruses are indeed rarities. But they exist and every once in a while they come into contact with Humans and cause a pandemic. However this is not the same likelihood as with the lab leak hypothesis, because collecting viruses for labs is an event that happens multiple orders of magnitude less often than contacts between animals and Humans. So while it is a rare coincidence that a lab would collect a killer virus when randomly collecting bat viruses, it is not so strange that every once in a while a novel pandemic virus makes the jump from animals to Humans somewhere in the world.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#694

Post by kaitaincps »

mikeyouse wrote: post #237
tomp wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your explanation for the fact that Moderna patented the very specific 19-nucleotide sequence that codes Sars-COV-2 furin cleavage site in 2018?

Just think about what you're claiming here with this silly question. You honestly think Moderna patented a sequence multiple years ago, and then what, shared their research with the Chinese to unleash a virus and create demand for a vaccine they hadn't invented yet? Why in the world would they patent it before that? It's literally the dumbest nonsense. A more direct refutation though is that the authors were extremel…

Also: Even the founders of Moderna would have had their lives made worse overall by SARS-COV-2. Money and utility are different things. They and their families now live in a shittier world. Even a (rational) psychopath would not gain overall from unleashing COVID on the world. Nobody wins.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#695

Post by bayesian_horse »

uoaei wrote: post #664
bayesian_horse wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something tells me you know virtually nothing about biology, medicine or the experiments involved.

It's really not that simple.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#696

Post by bayesian_horse »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #358
bayesian_horse wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a spectrum... The zoonotic virus would need to have some rare "talent" to start with. Then there is the ominous "breeding" part, which many people describe as reckless or evil. In any case this isn't done in Humans but rather some kind of humanized model (and it's not clear that could work at all). Which is why it is quite a coincidence or accident that this process would end with a virus so well adapted to H…

> It's only plausible if you know very little about biology. Not trolling, series question: what would these same ppl say about the monkey pox outbreaks? Why now? Why so random?

As far as I know the experts say they don't know all that much. Also the awareness of such issues has shifted a lot...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#697

Post by bayesian_horse »

kaitaincps wrote: post #602
mikeyouse wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The WIV was in Wuhan due to the proximity of coronaviruses and other bat-borne diseases like rhabdovirusus.. this line of logic is akin to blaming shark research centers in South Africa for nearby attacks.

It was not. This is a widespread misconception. The local bat populations in Wuhan were negligible and their viruses were not being studied. Indeed, the local human population in Wuhan was used as a control in the WIV's studies because of their lack of any significant encounters with bats and their diseases. Shi Zhengli, the "bat woman" who conducted most of her research 1000 miles south, in Yunnan province, had this…

There is no proof that the Virus was passed directly from bats. And as far as I recall there was evidence for at least one intermediate host. Which makes the bat-hunting rather pointless.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#698

Post by dekhn »

peteradio wrote: post #684
dekhn wrote: post #675

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in medical biology. It doesn't work that way.

In anything that is true, if you can't describe it to funders what you are hoping to accomplish in laymans terms then you will not get funded. Funders understand that particle physics searches for new particles no need to understand the nitty gritty, they can even ask interesting questions "can a new particle cause us any sort of worry that we might destroy ourselves?" etc. You apparently argue that we can't even str…

I don't want to argue with you; you can choose to ignore what I said. but the funders who pay for molecular biology typically are scientists who understand, or wealthy people who hire people who understand, that medical biology, while scientific, is not like the highly quantitative physical sciences, nor is it easily appreciated by novices.

Everything about causation in biology works differently than in other sciences.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#699

Post by kaitaincps »

mikeyouse wrote: post #257
trhway wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear - 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. EcoHealth naturally kept about 75% of it as "commission/management fee/whatever" because conducting those experiments at BSL2 in Wuhan was much cheaper than the original experiments in US at BSL3+ (in those original experi…

Aside from he rest of the weird conspiracy insinuation I've come to expect - you should probably know that horseshoe bats are endemic to the caves around Wuhan and were studied by virologists in the hills above the biggest animal trade in Hubei.. So it's probably best if you stop making the silly claim about them being 1,000km away if you want to bolster your case. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7824899…

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12250-018-0012-7

“In October 2015, we collected serum samples from 218 residents in four villages in Jinning County, Yunnan province, China (Fig. 1A), located 1.1–6.0 km from two caves (Yanzi and Shitou). We have been conducting longitudinal molecular surveillance of bats for CoVs in these caves since 2011 and have found that they are inhabited by large numbers of bats including Rhinolophus spp., a major reservoir of SARSr-CoVs. […] As a control, we also collected 240 serum samples from random blood donors in 2015 in Wuhan, Hubei Province more than 1000 km away from Jinning (Fig. 1A) and where inhabitants have a much lower likelihood of contact with bats due to its urban setting.”

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#700

Post by native_samples »

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…

"Nobody is helped if China leaves the WHO"

Are you sure? Is the goal of the WHO to generate accurate health advice, or to accumulate memberships?

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