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The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

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Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#71

Post by flukus »

inciampati wrote: post #55
guesst wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

> If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if), It seems like we don't have evidence, but the natural evolutionary experiment that's occurred provides a staggering amount. We can see from the virus phylogeny that: 1. The virus entered the human population in October 2019. All known SARS2 sequences are related in a single clade that, under very soft assumptions about mutation rate, would coalesce in late…

> What this evidence shows is that is appeared already optimized.

There are plenty of viruses from animals known to infect humans, viruses that have never been in humans and are not evolved to infect them, this happens alarmingly regularly. Here's a couple you've probably never heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_bat_lyssavirus , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendra_virus

There is absolutely nothing amazing about covid being able to infect humans, it's exceptional because it can pass from human to human and because it's airborne(ish).

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#72

Post by yosito »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

China can't reimburse the world. You're right. But China is poised for economic hegemony in large parts of the world and has an alarmingly authoritarian government with disregard for human rights. Their handling of COVID ought to be a reason for countries to push back against their attempts at hegemony.

And before anyone accuses me of racism: I am speaking about the Chinese government, not Chinese people, who are the first victims of the government.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#73

Post by mpfundstein »

DSingularity wrote: post #33
bpodgursky wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could read articles by a guy who was the NYTimes science writer for 30 years though.

I won’t read articles by scientists who whitewash colonial European exploitation with pseudo-science which claims that Africans are poor because they have genes inferior to the rich white men of Europe. Yeah, the same men who colonized and brutally exploited Africa and India and China and the Middle East. Yeah, those that robbed the world like common bandits while pretending they had a burden to civilize the “savage”…

feel free to stay dumb then. probably the majority of great scientists before WWII was 'racist' one way or another.

but hey. at least you are virtue signaling

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#74

Post by imiric »

bpodgursky wrote: post #13
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

Um, we could stop doing gain-of-function research for one. This would be a pretty important datapoint on that risk analysis.

I'm a layperson, but AFAIU GoF research in principle is a good thing. It helps us anticipate future viruses, study how they impact humans, and prepare for an eventual outbreak.

It's obviously very risky to do, but we should focus on adopting and enforcing better security practices to minimize the risks, not ban GoF altogether.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#75

Post by chipotle_coyote »

thu2111 wrote: post #44
mromanuk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don’t read articles written by racists. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2834627 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-...

You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing. And at any rate, the attempted smearing of anyone who points to problems in establishment thinking as a racist is trivial, completely expected of a certain segment of society and of no importance relative to the topic at hand. Wade's article not only builds an extremely stron…

> You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing.

I'm not sure you read past the first sentence of that article, since the second sentence makes it clear that Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science." It's pretty clear the reviewer -- in Scientific American, which I believe does have some bona fides -- is laying out the case that, in fact, it's prejudice, not science, and lays it out in a pretty convincing manner. The book being reviewed, as I understand it, has been pretty widely criticized not only by reviewers, but by scientists arguing that Wade misrepresented their research.

Does that have any bearing on Wade's case for SARS-CoV-2 being a lab-created virus? Certainly not directly; maybe not at all. I read the whole article, and it certainly makes a plausible and compelling case! But like it or not, a lot of the conversation around "the lab creation theory" for SARS-CoV-2 has had a decidedly racial tinge. Having it turn out that this plausible and compelling case has been made by a science writer who had a recent, major work widely criticized for, ah, a decidedly racial tinge is, well... let's say "interesting."

As a final note, gain-of-function research certainly sounds fraught with peril even under the best of circumstances, and these do not sound like they were the best of circumstances. I question whether that means "virology as a field needs to be shut down."

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#76

Post by tgv »

seymore_12 wrote: post #61

If we apply Occam's razor [1] decision between "Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" and "Wuhan, there is a wet market where under certain conditions virus can jump from bat to monkey to person" is relatively straightforward But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2] "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explain…

Nobody has spoken of malice. It could have been a simple case of one lab worker getting infected. That would count towards stupidity.

Rhetorically speaking, Hanlon's razor doesn't quite have the same weight as Occam's, if only because people tend to view behavior they don't understand as stupid. But I'll add another "razor": don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to self-interested.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#77

Post by nl »

roca wrote: post #68
nl wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the probability of this pattern occuring in the case of a natural spillover? It's 1:atoms-in-the universe level. This is untrue. I'd point to this quote: “It’s pretty apparent that there’s this evolutionary arms race between the receptor binding domain and ACE2 that’s happening within the bats themselves,” says Tyler Starr, a postdoc in the lab of genome scientist Jesse Bloom at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Resea…

If that's true, then there's a straightforward experiment that would boost confidence in the natural-origin theory: culture the earliest available SARS-CoV-2 virus, and see what it's good at infecting other than humans. Surely someone has done this?

Yeah, it's pretty good with Pangolin.

This is a good summary of the current consensus:

It is clear from our analysis that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 have been circulating in horseshoe bats for many decades. The unsampled diversity descended from the SARS-CoV-2/RaTG13 common ancestor forms a clade of bat sarbecoviruses with generalist properties—with respect to their ability to infect a range of mammalian cells—that facilitated its jump to humans and may do so again. Although the human ACE2-compatible RBD was very likely to have been present in a bat sarbecovirus lineage that ultimately led to SARS-CoV-2, this RBD sequence has hitherto been found in only a few pangolin viruses. Furthermore, the other key feature thought to be instrumental in the ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans—a polybasic cleavage site insertion in the S protein—has not yet been seen in another close bat relative of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#78

Post by secondcoming »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

What's to stop the rest of the world from confiscating chinese overseas assets or writing off loans owed to china?

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#79

Post by BlueTemplar »

guesst wrote: post #15
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #3

We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plen…

The China aspect is probably a red herring. Gain-of-function research was internationally funded, including by the US. The perils had been pointed out for years by virologists [1], some of whom managed to get an editorial in the New York Times against it [2]. If Covid turns out to be a lab escape (which is a big if ), the nation or lab it happened in is just the proximate cause. Deeper responsibility would lie with t…

I remember an article from about a decade ago where a virologist was saying that China shouldn't be trusted with the highest danger (lvl 4?) labs (IIRC at the time when Westerners were about to or starting to help them build them) because Western labs themselves could barely (or not) be trusted with something as dangerous, and (s)he expected the Chinese to not be able and/or not be willing to fully respect the procedures involved.

This article suggests that lvl2 protocols were indeed used for lvl4 biohazards.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#80

Post by dehrmann »

seymore_12 wrote: post #61

If we apply Occam's razor [1] decision between "Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" and "Wuhan, there is a wet market where under certain conditions virus can jump from bat to monkey to person" is relatively straightforward But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2] "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explain…

I assume practically every city in China has wet markets. I wonder how many cities have facilities that do virus research. It might actually be more than you'd assume; I have no idea what sort of research might happen at universities, You also have to weigh this with SARS Classic originating in China.
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