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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#711

Post by kaitaincps »

coupdejarnac wrote: post #268
mikeyouse wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Infected worker To be honest, I hadn't even encountered the idea that lab employees were what, selling infected animals at the market? Is this a real thing people are arguing? Who even comes up with this stuff.

That's been my pet hypothesis for a few years, but I wouldn't argue for it. I just base it on some of the disgusting, unethical things I saw while living in China.

Certainly there is a culture within China of taking dangerous short cuts to save money. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/26/opinion/beware-of-chinas-...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#712

Post by kaitaincps »

ttpphd wrote: post #433
throwawaymaths wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that I used to believe the zoonotic hypothesis the assertion of confirmation bias is a bit surprising to me.

The comment this is a reply to is what's known as rhetoric. The goal of rhetoric is to persuade the audience in the absence of logic or evidence. The comment is offering "testimony of conversion" which is not scientific.

Not really. The poster is saying they used to believe X but was persuaded subsequently that ~X was more likely. This seems to indicate at least a recent pattern of avoiding confirmation bias.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#713

Post by bell-cot »

martythemaniak wrote: post #543
bell-cot wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article tries to define it: > an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip Which, yes, is incredibly vague. I give them credit for at least ruling out the "Evil Chinese Scientists intentionally create and release deadly virus!" bullsh*t. One plausible "lab" scenario: A baggage-hauling laborer caught the proto-COVID-19 virus in a bat-filled cave during a routine "collect samples of germs from bats"…

Thing is, isn't "during a field trip" actually the zoonotic theory? Ie, if there's a super contagious virus circulating around in bats, and a researcher was in a cave, then went to the market... that's the same as a tourist visiting a cave (as I have done) or a worker harvesting Bird's Next from cave, then selling at the market.

Objectively? Yes. But the moment you involve the lab - even if the only "lab involvement" was some grunt laborer, who harvests guano for fertilizer from the exact same cave on the other 29 days of the month, to feed his family - a whole lot of people's emotions and imaginations go "BOOM!".

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#714

Post by kaitaincps »

ttpphd wrote: post #113
throwawaymaths wrote: post #2

The lab-leak hypothesis is meta-scientific. When it was first tossed around, the lab leak hypothesis generated two predictions: 1. We would find evidence that someone was doing experiments on furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses. 2. We would find that the furin cleavage site matched a known sequence. We did not find 2, which should have been easy to find. Eventually, we found 1, since a rejected DARPA grant proposal…

Sorry but the post above is unscientific sophistry. Science is about weighing competing theories by examining the relative strength of evidence. The evidence is strongly in favor of zoonotic origin. What's posted here is an exercise in confirmation bias, not rigorous scientific thinking.

You’d need to clarify what specifically is entailed by zoonotic origin (and what would count as not-zoonotic-origin) in order for your claim to be evaluated.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#715

Post by anarticle »

ethbr0 wrote: post #410
rzz3 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

> 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…

There is no way to say if there would have been spillover, or it coming from nature. This feels a bit like the way people have said "every new variant is less dangerous." There are no guarantees on that one, there is equal possibility that COVID turns into something worse. COVID doesn't have to kill you, it just has to copy better.

If it turns out it was a lab leak, from using SCID mice or other human analogues, we might get new systems to prevent such a thing from happening again. Maybe researchers have to work in a diving bell system, who knows. We get to decide! We can create whatever we think we need. The system is not fixed. Look at animal research support systems like IACUC, created in the 80s, and now a useful fixture in biomedical research. In the lab, we lament IACUC sometimes, but they are a good check in the system. Why couldn't someone like IACUC raise the bar?

I agree with you that knowing it was a lab leak does not fix the past, and can increase the blame game near term. On the longer arc, it is important to know.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#716

Post by kaitaincps »

walls wrote: post #168
khazhoux wrote: post #3

Jon Stewart's classic lab-leak rant on Colbert's show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8&t=178s

There's all these tornado research facilities in the same place we keep getting tornados!

The WIV was not set up in Wuhan to study bat-borne coronaviruses in the surrounding area. This is a widespread myth, one popularized by Maggie Koerth on Twitter.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#718

Post by kaitaincps »

warning26 wrote: post #110
jiggawatts wrote: post #55

I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane. Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly. And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our ex…

I think the more likely case is Hanlon’s Razor — Chinese government officials figure it could have leaked due to their lax safety standards, and just don’t want to look into it for fear of someone conclusively proving this.

This seems probable to me as well: they don’t know that a lab leak occurred, but believe it’s a plausible explanation, and one whose investigation needs to be suppressed because of the potential for embarrassment and retaliation. They might even have sought to destroy as much evidence as possible rather than trying to uncover the truth internally: if nobody knows the truth, the truth can never leak out.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#719

Post by peteradio »

dekhn wrote: post #698
peteradio wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 science…

Unfortunately I must resort to novice assertions to get any understanding. I'm not really sure I understand how causation in biology is fundamentally different. Apart from that you can certainly encapsulate biological events into some sort of locality and apply normal causative analysis to rule out specific scenarios, really that is what I am talking about here. I think we can agree that there are infectious molecules tumbling through space and time and work from there or is that not how molecular biology works?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#720

Post by kaitaincps »

jiggawatts wrote: post #573
SkittyDog wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane. If we wait until the next pandemic hits, we will be months or years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop treatments. Millions more people will die because we'll have been caught on our back foot. Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistic…

This kind of logic seems sane until you stop and think about it for a while. First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it . But that's not the insane bit. The truly insane bit is that over 20 million people died for this little "experiment" of t…

Precisely so.
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