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

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#731

Post by rory » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 7:34 PM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #586

rory wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality comment. That person is confused about a couple things, but the main point that Wuhan is 1-2000km from the most likely places to find such a virus in the wild. It could have been brought to Wuhan in a human, in an animal to eat, in an animal to study, or in a culture. I don't see how newer evidence eliminates any of those possibilities.

It's also confused about that - there are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei Province including in caves 60 miles from Wuhan[1] and there are absolutely sars-like coronaviruses in the horseshoe bats in Hubei. RM1 and RF1 in this paper are sars-like bat coronaviruses isolated from horseshoe bats in Hubei: https://www.microbiologyresearch.org/docserver/fulltext/jgv/...

The horseshoe bat's range spans from Japan to Portugal. That doesn't change the fact that all the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 we've discovered have been found in the far south of China and Cambodia, 1-2k miles away, nor does the presence of more distantly related SARS-like coronaviruses.

If we find a closer relative near Wuhan, that will change the hypothesis. But we haven't.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#732

Post by PhilippMarkolin » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 7:54 PM UTC

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…

More and more, I find that lableak (which started with genuine scientific uncertainty) is not driven by genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, but by the strength of it's emotional narrative.

Lableakers like Alina Chan started as maybe genuine, maybe opportunistic scientific dissidents who got boosted into the spotlight by conspiratorial-thinking prone rightwing networks. They build and got caught up in echo chambers that for years now created their own self-sealing reality.

However, we know today that the scientific evidence turned out to be entirely one-sided for a natural spillover event and not a lableak, which is why the 'cover ups' have to get bigger and bigger, include independent scientists all over the world, and the establishment, and mainstream journalists etc. and the actual evidence is not much talked about anymore in lableak conspiracy land.

Their problem lies entirely with the evidence already available, and no amount of evidence that is 'missing' can remedy that fact. We can happily grant a 100% leak rate from the WIV, and it would not move the needle on zoonotic origin any more. We can grant perfect cover-ups and secret viruses, and it would not suddenly make the available evidence square with a lableak scenario.

That is the reality. And all lableak proponents have been doing is to distract from it.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#733

Post by qbasic_forever » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #724

tintedfireglass wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can eradicate viruses. Polio and small pox as an example

Ok, how do you plan to eradicate Covid? I mean, a polio vaccine is one shot and you're set for life, pretty much. It's incomparable.

China has eradicated omicron. Shanghai had _zero_ cases of omicron reported on June 24th. A couple months ago they were seeing 25k+ cases a day. This is a city of 25 million people, the third largest and most dense city in the world. And yet somehow with a collective attitude and government support they beat back the virus and have fully reopened and returned to normal.

Contrast this with the United States where we have so far had over _one million deaths_ from COVID-19. In the same timespan China has seen just a few thousand deaths.

If China can do it, why can't the US?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#734

Post by kgwgk » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:23 PM UTC

Izkata wrote: post #727

kgwgk wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get how that is related to the "The 241K number is total gibberish." statement that follows. Is it because they should have removed the "More detail on the analysis" link to a no-longer-updated analysis and not removing the link invalidates the latest results somehow? Or is there anything in that analysis of the results as of two years ago that discredits also everything that came later?

It's the source they're giving for the number, and there's nothing there that indicates it's valid. From every other source unrelated to that one, the UK's numbers have never been as high as they're claiming. Therefore, it's gibberish.

From every other source?

The "Official estimates of incidence of new PCR-positive cases" published by the Office for National Statistics in the latest release of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey [1] add up to 160k per day in the UK for the week from 28 May to 3 June.

The official estimate of people testing positive for COVID-19 has increased strongly since then - almost doubling from 900k for the week 27 May to 2 June to 1740k for the week 11 to 18 June.

A 50% increase in the number of daily new infections in three weeks doesn't seem so implausible and when the official estimate of daily new cases for this week gets published it may not be exactly 241k but it won't be much less. Definitely not an order of magnitude less!

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

Edit: by the way, the official estimate of incidence (daily new cases) from the ONS was over 650k for the week 13 to 19 March.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#735

Post by bayesian_horse » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:39 PM UTC

peteradio wrote: post #721

bayesian_horse wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to "dismiss the possibility" to say it's unlikely. There's really zero evidence this kind of research has been done a) at all in this lab b) on this Virus c) the virus leaked. Nor is it even clear the virus originated in Wuhan at all. "Lab leak hypothesis" sometimes includes the "gain of function" theme and sometimes it doesn't. I find neither very likely, neither has any evidence to back it up. I stil…

It does sound like you have a framework which may admit the possibility of lab-leak if specific evidence is found, in this case probably contemporaneous documentation of exactly that happening. I actually think we are largely in agreement then, I think though that it is very difficult to apply statistics here to gauge the likelihood of one or another event being true in the absence of much stronger evidence in certai…

From my perspective there is a large weight on the case that the "lab leak hypothesis" is not true. To present it as equally likely is very misleading.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#736

Post by ETH_start » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:53 PM UTC

est31 wrote: post #423

ethbr0 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.

If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public.

Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#737

Post by ETH_start » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 8:58 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #676

tripletao wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if we banned thalidomide, how much would that help pregnant women with morning sickness? The fact that you're trying to prevent one kind of harm (morning sickness, natural-origin pandemics) doesn't excuse causing unlimited amounts of a different kind of harm (birth defects, research-origin pandemics). The non-absurd version of this argument is that risky virological research will provide a public benefit offsetti…

I haven't said it excuses it: I've just said that I don't see blame as productive. Something can be morally wrong and also less important to pursue. The non-absurd version of this argument is that we can't police everything, everywhere, especially across national borders with sovereign, independent governments in power. So taking that into account, there's always going to be a fog over truth in certain places. We can…

>>The non-absurd version of this argument is that we can't police everything, everywhere, especially across national borders with sovereign, independent governments in power.

By that logic, why bother trying to stop human CO2 emissions, or nuclear profileration. Afterall, controlling them requires policing phenomena that occur across international borders under the jurisdiction of numerous independent governments.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#738

Post by einpoklum » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

> If we don’t investigate, what signal does that send to bioterrorists?

Have there actually been any bioterrorists?

I remember that after September 11th 2000, there was a scare regarding envelopes with supposed Anthrax in them, and that fizzled out as a false alarm (AFAICR).

Now, there's plenty of other kinds of terrorism - private and state-run; and there are chemical weapons of course. And in ancient times, I read that dead bodies would be catapulted into besieged cities.

But have there actually been groups of people over the past, say, 100 years who tried to release a malevolent virus into a civilian population anywhere?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#739

Post by tripletao » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 9:38 PM UTC

mikeyouse wrote: post #587

adeelk93 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not have those labs? That’s one solution. Is the study of virology worth all the loss and suffering caused by a pandemic?

That this specific pandemic may have came from a lab -- but every other one didn't should perhaps give a clue to the stakes of "the study of virology". It's not some high-minded philosophical pursuit -- we know that pandemics regularly kill substantial percentages of the world population, the study of virology is the study of reducing the impact of pandemics.

High-risk research of the type performed by the WIV (including both laboratory gain-of-function to enhance potential pandemic pathogen lethality or transmissibility, and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology. There is no evidence that it's ever provided any significant public benefit--without it, we'd still have our same basic knowledge, our same vaccines, our same small-molecule antiviral drugs, etc.

I think you're aware of that, too. So why the conflation? Perhaps you're afraid the backlash to strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a research accident would lead to unreasonably broad regulation; but the failure of specialists who understand these distinctions to seriously engage with the risk makes that more likely, not less.

You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms. I don't think this will end well for your discipline--a majority of Americans (including a majority of Democrats) already believe SARS-CoV-2 is probably of unnatural origin. If virologists are unable to draft reasonable regulations for themselves, then the public will step in to do it for them, probably on worse terms for all involved.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#740

Post by tripletao » Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

bell-cot wrote: post #713

martythemaniak wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!".

The WIV sent workers into remote caves that no other humans routinely entered; you can find many pictures and videos from their expeditions on the Internet. I think their baggage-hauling laborers were mostly grad students, but I agree that an infection of such a laborer is a quite plausible origin for this pandemic--a visit to a remote cave specifically chosen for its diversity of novel viruses is obviously a much higher risk than a cave chosen at random, though it's hard to quantify by how much.

In this scenario, if the WIV's worker had never entered the cave, then the virus would quite possibly never have left the cave. Even if it would have been released later by an infected non-scientist, I'd always rather die later than sooner. (I've seen people arguing sooner is better, because it encourages pandemic preparedness; I guess that's true, in the same sense that reckless drivers encouraged development of automotive airbags. I've never seen a driver make that argument to the judge, though.)

So given the above, do you still think the WIV should have sent the worker into the cave? We're not talking about the whole of virology here, just a tiny subset of high-risk research that so far has provided no significant public benefit.