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The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

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Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#931

Post by Rapzid »

dqv wrote: post #878
Rapzid wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

I can't believe you're putting me in a position to have to even slightly defend Trump. You are giving Trump supporting whack jobs credibility when you give deference to this sort of revisionism. The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical ( i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we k…

Fuller video of what lead of to those questions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3BRQ7scbqc . Trump was already starting to spread the FUD about the virus situation being China's "fault" and strongly insinuating it was somehow malicious.

Also, in that CNN article video he is asked a question not asked in the above video. A very direct question and NOT leading:

> What gives you I high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

> I can't tell you that. I'm not allowed to tell you that.

Seriously though, I was alive and not under a rock in 2020. I was paying attention to all of this while it was happening.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#933

Post by myfavoritedog »

daughart wrote: post #888
myfavoritedog wrote: post #737

When Trump himself floated the lab-leak hypothesis last April, his divisiveness and lack of credibility made things more, not less, challenging for those seeking the truth. Right, it's Trump's fault that the media and political opposition acted like children in opposing every word that came out of his mouth. Apply that logic to your favorite left-leaning politician: "The fact that Obama was always a natural born citi…

And the villagers were the ones to blame in "the boy who cried wolf".

There was a need to rely on the boy who cried wolf at first, since he was the only one out in the fields.

There was never a need to rely on Trump. This was a pandemic. Basic journalistic curiosity and integrity should have meant that our "free" press should have been all over figuring out how COVID-19 came to be. Instead, they played politics with information that they could have easily looked into.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#934

Post by lamontcg »

Husafan wrote: post #813
Jarwain wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read a few articles, skimmed a few papers and sent them to friends. The counterargument is that there still aren't enough similarities. The mutations on covid 19 are Really Different compared to the known and studied viruses. If it was a lab leak of an engineered chimera, you'd be able to see that A proteins came from virus X and B proteins came from virus Y and Z, but that hasn't been shown to be the case. From…

My understanding is that this is what gain of function research is all about. Accelerated evolution within a lab towards infecting a specific species. It doesn't have to be crispr introducing reach mutation.

RaTG13 is decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2, all over its genome.

You don't get there by splicing an ACE2 spike onto an RaTG13 backbone and passing it through a dozen mice. That gives you something that still looks similar to RaTG13 and infects mice.

The ACE2 spike also looks most similar to a previously unknown ACE2-binding spike protein found in malaysian pangolins.

So WIV would have had to have discovered that pangolin spike-protein, kept it secret, spliced it into an RaTG13 backbone, then not used mice but passed it through a species like that had a human-like ACE2 for a decade and millions of animals.

An alternative hypothesis is that Charles Darwin did that experiment.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#935

Post by lamontcg »

eutropia wrote: post #786
lamontcg wrote: post #185

> Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. > Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the…

The “smoking gun” was the “human” (arginine as CGG) way the AA seq was coded for at the furin cleavage site: Only 5 percent of SARS2’s arginine codons are CGG, and the double codon CGG-CGG has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.

> has not been found in any other beta-coronavirus.

That does not mean it doesn't exist, just that we haven't found it.

We didn't know of any other sarbecoviruses that had furin cleavage sites, then we found them in bats in Thailand, then the goalposts moved to how this paricular furin cleavage site is weird.

Once a decade passes and we find animals with beta-coronviruses which have the same kinds of furin cleavage sites, I'm sure the goalposts will move again.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#936

Post by qez »

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

I was a bit shocked by this sentence

> On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants.

As far as I can tell, it makes two logical errors, 1) that absence of evidence is reason to not take an idea seriously, in a space of known unknowns, & 2) that a possibility can be discredited because dishonest people are pushing it.

On the former point: "evidence = likely" does not necessarily imply "no evidence = unlikely" as you seem to believe (if by evidence you mean like courtroom evidence; we use probabilistic reasoning in the absence of such "evidence" for any one explanation.) we have gathered 0 evidence for many (probably most) true things.

Finally, there's a lack of understanding of how power works in the US. If you could get censored for saying something that the US government knew for months, then yes, you were being silenced, the absence of literal NKVD notwithstanding.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#937

Post by lamontcg »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #347
Jarwain wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are so many "shocking" articles, but here's something I don't get: The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutation…

but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutations, unless they were blasting these viruses with radiation Or explicitly creating chimeric coronaviruses, which has been the state of the are for some time. Here's https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/265520…

The spike protein is the biggest difference between RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2. To produce SARS-CoV-2 from it that would imply that WIV had unpublished sequences from the Pangolin-CoV spike protein that they used to combine with an RaTG13 backbone. You then do not get SARS-CoV-2 out of passing that through mice, you get a mouse virus. You'd need to pass it serially through something with a human-like ACE2 like minks. Then you need to do that enough to accumulate a thousand mutations which takes decades in nature and would take millions of animals.

That likely did happen, but Charles Darwin was the geneticist that executed the gain of function experiment via serial passage through that many animals.

> Have you read the fine article? It cites more than a few papers.

Yes, i read it. The ability to construct bibliographic references is also a fairly widely-held and unimpressive skill.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#938

Post by weaksauce »

bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

> Edit: here's another amazement for the list: "Shi Zhengli herself had publicly acknowledged that, until the pandemic, all of her team’s coronavirus research — some involving live SARS-like viruses — had been conducted in less secure BSL-3 and even BSL-2 laboratories." And the article says "BSL-2 [is] roughly as secure as an American dentist’s office."

"SARS-like" could mean quite a few things and without defining what they mean by that it strikes me as fear baiting or being intentionally misleading to further their thesis.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#939

Post by sbagel »

skylabmelody wrote: post #634
sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

You don't get to rewrite history after the facts and invent another smearing label to wave off the reality. Social medias implemented CCP-style censorship on their platform on anything related to the lab leak theory for more than a year. Posts and comments were systematically deleted, users accounts were suspended. At some point you couldn't even share a link in a private message as it was blocked. You are the one re…

Citation needed. Please direct me to any user or accounts banned or suspended for discussing the lab leak theory. You're the one rewriting history here.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#940

Post by divbzero »

bartart wrote: post #2

This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life. I'd ask everyone to please read it because it is incredible. One thing I did not realize is that US researchers who conducted gain of function research tried to downplay and discredit the possibility of the virus originating from the wuhan lab. There was an anti-lab theory Lancet statement signed by scientists, and "Daszak had not only signed but organize…

Potential mistakes across different countries should put to rest the idea that investigating COVID origins is a nationalistic endeavor. The motivation should be as straightforward and objective as investigating airplane crashes.
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