8 ms·

The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2

32 points by sohkamyung 7y ago

dboreham 7y ago
Not lab engineered, it says.
- Real_S 7y ago
  From the article: "Although genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here, and it is unclear whether future data will help resolve this issue. Identifying the immediate non-human animal source and obtaining virus sequences from it would be the most definitive way of revealing virus origins.
- mantap 7y ago
  I don't understand why people would believe that it is. It has all the wrong properties to be a bioweapon: it mainly kills the weak and elderly (unlike the 2009 "swine" flu which most severely afflicted the young), it isn't targeted, it's seemingly uncontrollable, and it isn't all that deadly.
  - dboreham 7y ago
    Probably for similar reasons that people were suspicious that two Russian ex-pat people came down with a mystery condition in Salsbury, considering the nearby location of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down
  - droithomme 7y ago
    > I don't understand why people would believe that it is. The reason to think it is possible is that China's top lab that does research into coronaviruses is in Wuhan and members there have collaborated with American researchers on genetic engineering and testing of augmented coronaviruses that are essentially potential biological weapons. Also at a separate lab in China they had four incidences where SARS samples escaped the lab and caused problems. That is why they build the level 4 biocontainment lab in Wuhan, to have that sort of research take place in a safer facility. It's quite possible this was a research sample, being used for completely legitimate purposes, that escaped the lab. > it isn't all that deadly For certain definitions of deadly no doubt.
  - echelon 7y ago
    Go for a stroll on /r/coronavirus or /r/China_flu to see how panicked and uninformed people are about this. They enjoy spreading fake news and misinformation and downvote any attempts to reason with data and logic. It's almost like they want this to be as dramatic and horrific as possible. These are the kind of people making and spreading these claims.
    - adnzzzzZ 7y ago
      I think you're being a bit too dramatic. For instance, read this https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 where a senator raises several possibilities (ascribing the most probability of being true to the most reasonable one) yet several articles were written about what he's saying as if he's one of those people spreading "fake news" and "misinformation" that you dislike. Many people are making simple statements that are reasonable and possible but being called conspiracy theorists just for bringing the possibility up at all. You don't get to the truth of a matter by rejecting anything that has a small possibility of being true and labeling it fake news and misinformation. If the claim is extremely unreasonable then it shouldn't be a problem, most people can tell it's unreasonable. If it's not that unreasonable then maybe people should be allowed to speak about it, given that it's not clear how or why it isn't unreasonable.
      - nneonneo 7y ago
        I don’t know where to start with your comment. > If the claim is extremely unreasonable ... most people can tell it’s unreasonable. Surely you must have far more faith in humanity than I do, or you would not make this statement. One only needs to look at the prevalence of vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, creationists, ... to know that unreasonable claims can garner significant support despite considerable scientific evidence to the contrary. > rejecting anything that has a small possibility of being true Actually, this is called not placing undue weight on fringe ideas. There’s arguably a small possibility of practically anything being true. That doesn’t mean we need to sink time and energy into them. Should our current, most probable line of reasoning display flaws that can’t be remedied, then the scientific method dictates that we explore alternatives. Until then, the most probable explanation reigns. > given that it’s not clear how or why it isn’t unreasonable Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are unlikely to understand the subtler parts of a scientific concept (or really anything they aren’t experts in, in general), and consequently can fail to grasp why something is clearly unreasonable to someone more well-trained. A conspiracy theorist is someone who brings up possibilities that are extremely unlikely to be true. That would fit your senator to a tee. He’s not backing any of this up with actual evidence, he’s just bringing up scary possibilities. We don’t need that kind of fearful reaction in a public health crisis.
  - badrabbit 7y ago
    The conspiracy is that it got out during experimentation. You're talking about a fully developed bioweapon, the conspiracy makes sense if you consider perhaps they were playing around with sars and tuning it when it escaped to the wuhan animal market next door.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    It doesn't have to be engineered as a bioweapon, to be artificial. Could be some kind of experiment that leaked out.
  - davedx 7y ago
    PrisonPlanet is working hard to spread this meme. He has 1.1 million followers on Twitter.
- ggm 7y ago
  Not just "say" -They provide a reasoned argument why: it did things which are not what best-in-field scientists would have predicted as a model, and tried to do in a lab. It does not have markers they would have expected, for it to be done in a lab, such as the passage through other specific organisms (ferrets) which are used to model transmission into humans from other animal origin diseases. It just doesn't show the signs of being deliberate or a function of Lab activity. Its more plausible (occams razor) that its natural selection.
- throwawaysea 7y ago
  Actually it specifically says that this is not knowable and may never be: “Although genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here, and it is unclear whether future data will help resolve this issue.”
aaron695 7y ago
"Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention(WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province The expert in collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT) Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick https://www.scribd.com/document/447056518/Originsof2019-NCoV-XiaoB-Res https://www.scribd.com/document/447056518/Originsof2019-NCoV... This was the paper that got taken down. The take down was perhaps fair enough, it's just speculation. But what is in it, is I believe true. The labs in Wuhan studied bats. Stop the lie we think it was engineered, no one credible is saying that, it's reasonable to think it was an accidental release from a lab.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  > Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention(WHCDC) If you look at the picture in the linked item from Scribd, the location is shown west of "Tianya Shengyan" and south of "Huanan Seafood Market". If I look at the very same location on Google Maps, west of "Tianya Shengyan" and south of "Huanan Seafood Market", there is no "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC)". If I search for "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC)" it shows several locations, but not that one. Hence it appears to me it either got censored on Google Maps (I did not verify other sources), or the linked item made it up. If you look at the linked item, it uses a different font for the text "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC)". Why?
- shas3 7y ago
  That sounds like a typical zookeeper or zoo vet. The difference between zookeepers and animal traders is that animal traders deal in constant streams of new specimens. Zoos and labs are more closed.
throwawaysea 7y ago
I think it is totally fair game to speculate about whether this was an accidental release from a government lab. Such a release has already happened before. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak. And of course everyone said it was not possible and that such claims were unsubstantiated, until the truth came out years later. Also, read the article blamed for spreading misinformation, from Zero Hedge: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir... As in, actually read it directly. Not an article or opinion about it, but the actual article linked above: This lab publicly (on the Internet) advertised jobs concerning bats and coronavirus research. The scientist they named was the listed head of the lab that the job is for. His contact information is publicly available. And yet everyone demonized Zero Hedge for doxxing. Often times, such research requires handling infected organisms, manipulations/modifications of the virus, and so on. Why would the release of a virus from a lab (accidental or otherwise, engineered or not) be out of the question? Why is it irresponsible to point at the possibility?
- RoyTyrell 7y ago
  Sure, it's entirely possible the virus was accidentally released from a lab. Maybe we're all living in a simulation. Maybe this virus is punishment from God for PHP. There are all sorts of conspiracies and things to speculate on in this world but very little evidence for most of it.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    Right, because human error is so rare in the world that it's unrealistic conspiracy to believe that this was caused by it.

32 points by sohkamyung 7y ago

dboreham 7y ago

Not lab engineered, it says.

Real_S 7y ago
From the article: "Although genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here, and it is unclear whether future data will help resolve this issue. Identifying the immediate non-human animal source and obtaining virus sequences from it would be the most definitive way of revealing virus origins.
mantap 7y ago
I don't understand why people would believe that it is. It has all the wrong properties to be a bioweapon: it mainly kills the weak and elderly (unlike the 2009 "swine" flu which most severely afflicted the young), it isn't targeted, it's seemingly uncontrollable, and it isn't all that deadly.
- dboreham 7y ago
  Probably for similar reasons that people were suspicious that two Russian ex-pat people came down with a mystery condition in Salsbury, considering the nearby location of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porton_Down
- droithomme 7y ago
  > I don't understand why people would believe that it is. The reason to think it is possible is that China's top lab that does research into coronaviruses is in Wuhan and members there have collaborated with American researchers on genetic engineering and testing of augmented coronaviruses that are essentially potential biological weapons. Also at a separate lab in China they had four incidences where SARS samples escaped the lab and caused problems. That is why they build the level 4 biocontainment lab in Wuhan, to have that sort of research take place in a safer facility. It's quite possible this was a research sample, being used for completely legitimate purposes, that escaped the lab. > it isn't all that deadly For certain definitions of deadly no doubt.
- echelon 7y ago
  Go for a stroll on /r/coronavirus or /r/China_flu to see how panicked and uninformed people are about this. They enjoy spreading fake news and misinformation and downvote any attempts to reason with data and logic. It's almost like they want this to be as dramatic and horrific as possible. These are the kind of people making and spreading these claims.
  - adnzzzzZ 7y ago
    I think you're being a bit too dramatic. For instance, read this https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 https://twitter.com/SenTomCotton/status/1229202134048133126 where a senator raises several possibilities (ascribing the most probability of being true to the most reasonable one) yet several articles were written about what he's saying as if he's one of those people spreading "fake news" and "misinformation" that you dislike. Many people are making simple statements that are reasonable and possible but being called conspiracy theorists just for bringing the possibility up at all. You don't get to the truth of a matter by rejecting anything that has a small possibility of being true and labeling it fake news and misinformation. If the claim is extremely unreasonable then it shouldn't be a problem, most people can tell it's unreasonable. If it's not that unreasonable then maybe people should be allowed to speak about it, given that it's not clear how or why it isn't unreasonable.
    - nneonneo 7y ago
      I don’t know where to start with your comment. > If the claim is extremely unreasonable ... most people can tell it’s unreasonable. Surely you must have far more faith in humanity than I do, or you would not make this statement. One only needs to look at the prevalence of vaccine skeptics, climate skeptics, creationists, ... to know that unreasonable claims can garner significant support despite considerable scientific evidence to the contrary. > rejecting anything that has a small possibility of being true Actually, this is called not placing undue weight on fringe ideas. There’s arguably a small possibility of practically anything being true. That doesn’t mean we need to sink time and energy into them. Should our current, most probable line of reasoning display flaws that can’t be remedied, then the scientific method dictates that we explore alternatives. Until then, the most probable explanation reigns. > given that it’s not clear how or why it isn’t unreasonable Unfortunately, the vast majority of people are unlikely to understand the subtler parts of a scientific concept (or really anything they aren’t experts in, in general), and consequently can fail to grasp why something is clearly unreasonable to someone more well-trained. A conspiracy theorist is someone who brings up possibilities that are extremely unlikely to be true. That would fit your senator to a tee. He’s not backing any of this up with actual evidence, he’s just bringing up scary possibilities. We don’t need that kind of fearful reaction in a public health crisis.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  The conspiracy is that it got out during experimentation. You're talking about a fully developed bioweapon, the conspiracy makes sense if you consider perhaps they were playing around with sars and tuning it when it escaped to the wuhan animal market next door.
- shmerl 7y ago
  It doesn't have to be engineered as a bioweapon, to be artificial. Could be some kind of experiment that leaked out.
- davedx 7y ago
  PrisonPlanet is working hard to spread this meme. He has 1.1 million followers on Twitter.
ggm 7y ago
Not just "say" -They provide a reasoned argument why: it did things which are not what best-in-field scientists would have predicted as a model, and tried to do in a lab. It does not have markers they would have expected, for it to be done in a lab, such as the passage through other specific organisms (ferrets) which are used to model transmission into humans from other animal origin diseases. It just doesn't show the signs of being deliberate or a function of Lab activity. Its more plausible (occams razor) that its natural selection.
throwawaysea 7y ago
Actually it specifically says that this is not knowable and may never be: “Although genomic evidence does not support the idea that SARS-CoV-2 is a laboratory construct, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here, and it is unclear whether future data will help resolve this issue.”

aaron695 7y ago

"Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention(WHCDC). WHCDC hosted animals in laboratories for research purpose, one of which was specialized in pathogens collection and identification. In one of their studies, 155 bats including Rhinolophus affinis were captured in Hubei province, and other 450 bats were captured in Zhejiang province The expert in collection was noted in the Author Contributions (JHT) Moreover, he was broadcasted for collecting viruses on nation-wide newspapers and websites in 2017 and 2019. He described that he was once by attacked by bats and the blood of a bat shot on his skin. He knew the extreme danger of the infection so he quarantined himself for 14 days. In another accident, he quarantined himself again because bats peed on him. He was once thrilled for capturing a bat carrying a live tick https://www.scribd.com/document/447056518/Originsof2019-NCoV-XiaoB-Res https://www.scribd.com/document/447056518/Originsof2019-NCoV... This was the paper that got taken down. The take down was perhaps fair enough, it's just speculation. But what is in it, is I believe true. The labs in Wuhan studied bats. Stop the lie we think it was engineered, no one credible is saying that, it's reasonable to think it was an accidental release from a lab.

Fnoord 7y ago
> Within ~280 meters from the market, there was the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention(WHCDC) If you look at the picture in the linked item from Scribd, the location is shown west of "Tianya Shengyan" and south of "Huanan Seafood Market". If I look at the very same location on Google Maps, west of "Tianya Shengyan" and south of "Huanan Seafood Market", there is no "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC)". If I search for "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC)" it shows several locations, but not that one. Hence it appears to me it either got censored on Google Maps (I did not verify other sources), or the linked item made it up. If you look at the linked item, it uses a different font for the text "Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC)". Why?
shas3 7y ago
That sounds like a typical zookeeper or zoo vet. The difference between zookeepers and animal traders is that animal traders deal in constant streams of new specimens. Zoos and labs are more closed.

throwawaysea 7y ago

I think it is totally fair game to speculate about whether this was an accidental release from a government lab. Such a release has already happened before. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak. And of course everyone said it was not possible and that such claims were unsubstantiated, until the truth came out years later. Also, read the article blamed for spreading misinformation, from Zero Hedge: https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavirus-pandemic https://www.zerohedge.com/health/man-behind-global-coronavir... As in, actually read it directly. Not an article or opinion about it, but the actual article linked above: This lab publicly (on the Internet) advertised jobs concerning bats and coronavirus research. The scientist they named was the listed head of the lab that the job is for. His contact information is publicly available. And yet everyone demonized Zero Hedge for doxxing. Often times, such research requires handling infected organisms, manipulations/modifications of the virus, and so on. Why would the release of a virus from a lab (accidental or otherwise, engineered or not) be out of the question? Why is it irresponsible to point at the possibility?

RoyTyrell 7y ago
Sure, it's entirely possible the virus was accidentally released from a lab. Maybe we're all living in a simulation. Maybe this virus is punishment from God for PHP. There are all sorts of conspiracies and things to speculate on in this world but very little evidence for most of it.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  Right, because human error is so rare in the world that it's unrealistic conspiracy to believe that this was caused by it.