Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

unherd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 792 posts

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#761

Post by dpbriggs »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #744
dpbriggs wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that a justification for heavy-handed censorship of a topic? Do you think that's right?

Well, let's see. First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait. Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unpre…

That isn't justification for the censorship. Reporters do report on things they don't understand all the time. The point was to make it possible for qualified people to investigate, but that wasn't politically popular at the time.

Should the scientific community rally to the opposition of the current unpopular president? That doesn't seem like a good idea.

And this last point is a fascinating common non sequitor. That's not even what happened; we had the media clamoring that it came from that market and any talk of the lab is racist and/or xenophobic. Do you think any investigation of the lab would have jeopardized the public? Worse than the visceral eating bats (i.e. selling bats for consumption)?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#762

Post by scotty79 »

tripletao wrote: post #743
scotty79 wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have various definition what they found plausible. Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence. As you said, Wuhan was only the first major population centre. First human patient or even first hundred patients could be from a small village that don't even have hospital nearby to have a hospitalisation and one or two elderly village dwellers dying b…

> Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence. Are you thinking of SARS-1 here? There's reasonably strong evidence that SARS-1 entered humans from bats via civet cats, since infected civet cats were found in the markets. For MERS we have very strong evidence of zoonosis, since many infected camels have been found and the phylogenetic tree shows evidence o…

You are right I mixed up exotic species. I meant pangolins.

And as you say the path for this particular coronavirus is still debated:

https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/717941/fpubh-09-7...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#763

Post by inquirerGeneral »

PhilippMarkolin wrote: post #732
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 chambe…

Thank you for showing how you started with zero genuine curiosity or scientific inquiry, instead opting for a total dismissal and refusal to actually consider the possibility.

It is not that you had any reason to believe she was wrong. There is far more evidence for it than what Alina has shown.

Have you read the WSJ's constant updates on this story? They have singlehandedly pressured China and the WHO into re-looking into the situation--the only reason nothing has come of it (yet) is they are stalling for any final answers (again).

The "lableak cannot be real" proponets are the least scientific people around. I almost put you in the same group as a Flat Earther, a Young Earth Creationist, and a Scientologist. You're a little better, maybe.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#764

Post by Xorakios »

ellopoppit wrote: post #728
Xorakios wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an excellent article and, as the authors say in the first paragraph, lengthy and informative. The combination of Chinese secrecy and Trump demanding that they pay reparations have poisoned a lot of discussions. But come on, a novel bat virus exploding from the world's main research facility about bat viruses that was first reported by a doctor from a hospital in the same city with symptoms from the wife of a…

>symptoms from the wife of a researcher at the Wuhan facility I'm interested to confirm this, do you know what their name is/was or where I could find more information on this?

https://nypost.com/2021/05/27/state-dept-investigator-ridicu...

And not Shi Zhengli, that is not the wet market worker, but people are blaming her for just questioning official narrative.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#765

Post by tripletao »

scotty79 wrote: post #762
tripletao wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence. Are you thinking of SARS-1 here? There's reasonably strong evidence that SARS-1 entered humans from bats via civet cats, since infected civet cats were found in the markets. For MERS we have very strong evidence of zoonosis, since many infected camels have been found and the phylogenetic tree shows evidence o…

You are right I mixed up exotic species. I meant pangolins. And as you say the path for this particular coronavirus is still debated: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/717941/fpubh-09-7...

Pangolins were proposed very early in the pandemic, but have been pretty much abandoned. It eventually came to light that all the pangolin papers were based on the same one batch of smuggled pangolins. This makes it more likely that those pangolins were infected by a smuggler (in the same way that housecats or mink have been infected by people), and not the other way around:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

Nature eventually published an extensive correction to their pangolin paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x#change-his...

Lately I've seen proposals that raccoon dogs were the intermediate host, or that bats directly infected humans. All of these are speculative, since no infected animal (except animals probably infected by humans) has been found. The absence of infected animals isn't proof of unnatural origin, but it's different from SARS-1 and MERS, despite a much greater effort to search.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#766

Post by mikeyouse »

rory wrote: post #731
mikeyouse wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not especially convincing to me because the closest relatives we’ve found aren’t actually very close relatives. Ratg13 is decades removed from the SC2 lineage, so knowing that it was found closer to Laos is a very weak signal in my opinion about the origins of SC2.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#767

Post by mikeyouse »

kaitaincps wrote: post #610
mikeyouse wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Option two assumes that the lab had only one lineage of the virus - but it collected samples out in the wild and could easily have collected both together, mixed and stored them, and leaked them together. So the wonderfully detailed analysis rests on this assumption. They were two lineages of the same virus, commonly seen in repeated spillover transmission. Explain specifically how you think they would "leak" both…

No it doesn't. There is a single leak, which mutates into a second strain through community transmission over a period of a few months. That's it.

The two lineages were both present in some of the first infections at the Market in early December 2019 and in environmental samples taken at the market in mid December.

They couldn't have circulated for “a few months” because in that time, literally tens of thousands of cases would have been reported.

So you’d have to have a two SNP mutation from one of the first infected people in the world that would go on to infect basically everyone else in the world since Lineage B was reported first but soon died out. It’s not impossible (nothing really is) but would be extremely unlikely.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#768

Post by tripletao »

mikeyouse wrote: post #766
rory wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s not especially convincing to me because the closest relatives we’ve found aren’t actually very close relatives. Ratg13 is decades removed from the SC2 lineage, so knowing that it was found closer to Laos is a very weak signal in my opinion about the origins of SC2.

As one of the parent comments has already noted, RaTG13 is no longer the closest known bat virus. BANAL-20-52's spike is only 16 AA substitutions away from SARS-CoV-2, and that was found in Laos.

https://twitter.com/jbloom_lab/status/1440309655087902720?la...

No one expected spillover in Wuhan, including Dr. Shi, per the quote from her that I've replied with elsewhere. Even those very confident in natural zoonotic origin are typically proposing something like SARS-1's wildlife trafficking conduit, not spillover in Wuhan.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#769

Post by MisterBastahrd »

dpbriggs wrote: post #761
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's see. First, reporters are incapable of discovering this information on their own. They just don't have the tools. Investigatory bodies do, and reporters would have to wait. Secondly, there were multiple plausible ideas about what could have happened. The drum was beaten on only one of them. Trump got caught with his pants down because as with everything else he's ever been a part of, he was woefully unpre…

That isn't justification for the censorship. Reporters do report on things they don't understand all the time. The point was to make it possible for qualified people to investigate, but that wasn't politically popular at the time. Should the scientific community rally to the opposition of the current unpopular president? That doesn't seem like a good idea. And this last point is a fascinating common non sequitor. Tha…

Reporters aren't going to report on what ifs for years. That's what talking heads do. How often are they reporting on the wet market hypothesis again? Oh right, they aren't. They got the information that they could find, reported on it, and there's nothing else to report. That isn't censorship, that's due diligence. Maybe you could learn the difference.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#770

Post by fortuna86 »

generj wrote: post #471
initplus wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less outlandish lab leak for months. Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon. The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor a…

Unfortunately amongst the general public the outlandish fringe theory is more common than reasonable theories. Source: my extended family

Thank you, apparently raising this simple distinction is enough to get downvoted out of circulation. The problem wasn't that people questioned the status quo, it's that people went too far in ascribing cartoonish-like evil to actors that simply were trying to cover up something embarrassing.
Post reply on HN