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Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

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Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#741

Post by cameldrv »

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #739
SkyMarshal wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".

Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as con…

Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#742

Post by hetspookjee »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #196
hetspookjee wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain? Perhaps I am too short sighted but I cannot believe that this is ever the right compromise to take. I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help th…

> I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain? You reason about WHO as an institution, while disregarding the principal-agent problem. The leaders of WHO are very strongly influenced by China, and as a result the institution is working to please China, rather than working to fulfill its nominal mission. Its leaders will see ample rewards for corrupting the inst…

I was not aware of the name for the principal-agent problem, thank you for that. I do wonder though if it's just ample rewards. I believe the most efficient mode to let others do your biddings is by threatening harsh backlash on refusals to cooperate, and providing ample rewards on cooperation, this to make the incentive even bigger. So perhaps you can also add to it that WHO leaders will face strong backlash by _not_ corrupting the institution.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#743

Post by Izkata »

thewileyone wrote: post #704
gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

July 2019 - USAMRIID Fort Detrick shuts down due to a virus leak. August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US. October 2019 - World Military Games in Wuhan, 300 US military men and women attend. November 2019 - SAR-COV2 appears in Wuhan. Let's not discount this sequence of events as well.

> August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.

Wasn't this discovered to be due to contaminated vape fluid, not anything contagious?

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#744

Post by cameldrv »

ajross wrote: post #598
gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year. And that, more than anyth…

It's not just that the closest known virus is a bat virus. The closest known virus, RaTG13 was discovered in a cave in Yunnan, and brought to Wuhan by WIV researchers where it was sequenced, and probably other experiments done on it. WIV has also changed its story twice about the history of RaTG13, first, the date of first sequencing (They initially claimed 2020, and then changed their story to 2018), and second, they did not disclose for months that it was in fact the same virus as BtCoV/4991, which they had previously published a partial sequence of.

Transportation by lab personnel is the only way that RaTG13 is known to have come to Wuhan. Any animal transport is possible but only speculative. This entirely flips what should be the assumed scenario vis a vis Occam's razor.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#745

Post by mardifoufs »

kube-system wrote: post #647
mardifoufs wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any source on that? Genuinely curious as I seem to have completely forgotten about the early videos from china until now and what they pictured was very at odds with what we now know the virus can do. Wouldn't everything you described happen gradually? as in people wouldn't be able to walk normally before reaching the point where they drop dead from oxygen levels low enough to be immediately lethal? From my own exper…

I haven't seen any videos, but you wouldn't necessarily have to have people "walking" in the streets to have people dying in the streets. Major cities often have plenty of people who are sitting or standing in the street all day long.

Yeah I'll need to check again but I seem to remember a video where elderly people were literally dropping dead "casually"? Weird how I seem to have memory holed myself lol.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#746

Post by cutemonster »

Izkata wrote: post #717
andrewflnr wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that "lab escape" was conflated with "deliberate release" by conspiracy types early on, and once that took hold it became impossible to talk rationally about the accidental escape hypothesis.

What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".

Maybe people in general don't know about any "good" reasons to keep viruses in labs (eg research for new vaccines), and would reinterpret anything they heard as "intentionally released" or "bioweapon".

So I wonder if, even if trying to be clear about any virus escape probably having been an accident, maybe somewhat many people still would have interpreted it differently (as if it was intentional), and that type of "news" gets more attention, spreads faster, right.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#747

Post by Zenst »

kmeisthax wrote: post #320
Zenst wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done security audits and related consulting work upon research labs in my past and the biggest issue they had was - extremist animal activists. Now I was aware of some reports (nothing official or confirmed) that the Wuham lab was broken into in the summer of 2019. Interestingly enough their was a lot of political tension at that time involving Hong Kong. I'm also mindful how China has been rather good at sweepi…

Molecular dating studies place a hard limit on index cases at October 2019. Anything earlier and the virus should have mutated more than it has. Someone who broke into a Wuhan coronavirus research lab in summer 2019 and broke containment of our hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 precursor virus samples would have been infected too early for our timeline.

Might find that October 2019 hard limit may change.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#748

Post by themacguffinman »

m0llusk wrote: post #483
watertom wrote: post #452

A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths. Covid presents like the flu, so much so you…

You should look up some of the leaked videos on the Internet. There was in fact a huge spike in cases early on and people were dropping dead in the street. That was the freak out that led to the Communist Party not being able to keep a lid on the whole mess. It wasn't just sick people showing up in hospitals in huge numbers, it was dead bodies lying in the streets. The thing is that whether this came from a lab or no…

> The thing is that whether this came from a lab or not is of limited relevance.

It has plenty of relevance. If lab leaks are the source of the virus, any serious solution will need to include improvements to lab containment and practices. Knowing what happened in a hypothetical lab leak could also help identify the original animal to study. Understanding how viruses hop & adapt from animal hosts to humans begins by studying specific cases of it.

For example, past US lab virus leaks including SARS have led the Obama administration to temporarily suspend and investigate the risks of Gain of Function research in 2014. At least one of the Wuhan labs were conducting Gain of Function research at the time of the outbreak.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#749

Post by esja »

samatman wrote: post #561
esja wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general labs are not both a) bad at safety, and also b) doing gain of function research to make dangerous viruses more infectious to humans. The latter has been banned a few times due to the risk (see below). Both A and B were happening in Wuhan. "In 2014, after a series of accidents involving mishandled pathogens at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced that it would stop funding ga…

You don't even have to be bad at safety, just less than completely perfect. There is also the matter of biosafety levels. Something like smallpox is studied at biosafety level 4, which is very intrusive and difficult. The alleged gain of function research would have been BSL 3 or even 2, meaning a lot fewer precautions are taken, and a leak is correspondingly more likely.

I agree. In this context “bad at safety” basically means less than perfect.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#750

Post by dang »

ikiris wrote: post #723
dang wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment is a noticeable step into nationalistic flamewar. Please don't do that in HN comments. That way lies hell, and we're trying for a different sort of discussion here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Dang, this entire site has slid in the past 2 years. This is hardly an isolated incident. I barely even open it now as a result.

It was just the same two years ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219091

I try not to lose sleep over properties of HN that are true of the world at large. We can't expect to be immune from macro trends.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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