4 ms·

You don't need to believe this is a bio-weapon .. although that certainly is now the end results. I'm not implying causation, but what you are saying about the

You don't need to believe this is a bio-weapon .. although that certainly is now the end results. I'm not implying causation, but what you are saying about them not developing viruses is not true. In fact, they were working on specifically this. Here is an article from January talking about the virus orgins: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/mining-coronavirus-genomes-clues-outbreak-s-origins https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/mining-coronavirus-g... How does Shi Zheng-Li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology know so much about this topic? Because he's been working on exactly this for almost a decade. Here's an early paper. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711 Years later he ends up working with a team from the US on a man-made coronavirus paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 The US government pulled funding for all programs like this, but this one was allowed to continue because they had secured funding before the ban. Discussion here: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavi... Whether they accurately predicted the future, or made a huge lab error is up for debate in my book, and is something that should at least be investigated. Lab mistakes happen all of the time, and we're talking about something that has a subsantial ability to spread itself. Here is an expert's unbiased analysis of whether this could be man made: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1221990534643929089.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1221990534643929089.html Given all of this, I don't think it's wholly unreasonable to consider whether or not human error played a role in all of this.

toxik 7y ago
Occam says no
- peteradio 7y ago
  Occam is wrong often, not sure why he gets quoted so religiously.
svara 7y ago
What you are saying is theoretically possible, but the sibling comment that's getting downvoted right now invoking Occam is, I think, spot on. Why hypothesize a detour through a biomedical lab if we know that people can get these diseases from animals, it's happened countless times before and it's exactly the scenario epidemiologists have been warning about for a long time? Beside, there's another point that makes it implausible in this particular case: BSL4 labs are absurdly annoying to work in, with personnel wearing overpressure suits. Coronaviruses are BSL3 pathogens [0], you wouldn't choose to arbitrarily work with them at a higher safety level lab. [0] That's even explicitly true for the novel one, SARS-CoV-2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/lab-biosafety-guidelines.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/lab-biosafety-...
- kjaftaedi 7y ago
  Of course it makes sense for scientists to worry about and prepare for that scenario, but in this particular case scientists have already rejected that this is a recombination event. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.920249v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.920249v1 If you look at the last link I posted, the Harvard epidemiologist points out that the mutation rate suggests the 2019-nCoV came from just one recent source in single jump (as opposed to several mutation sources) Combine this with the fact that: the new coronavirus provides a new lineage for almost half of its genome, with no close genetic relationships to other viruses within the subgenus of sarbecovirus It paints a picture that this did not come from nature. To me occam's razor is leaning the opposite direction, as a scenario to create something like this in the wild doesn't seem plausible. I would love for this to be proven false, and encourage any counterpoints addressing why human error should be ruled out.
  - svara 7y ago
    The preprint you have quoted shows that the novel virus genome is very similar to a different Coronavirus (RaTG13) in some parts, and less similar in others. We have only a small sample of all the Coronavirus genomes that are out there in animals, so that's not particularly surprising. From there to jump to a conclusion involving human involvement does not follow. What exactly are you suggesting? That scientist have a bank of unpublished viruses collected from the wild that they play with and accidentally release? That makes little sense, particularly since it implies that people would be collecting viruses in the wild, at which point they would come into contact with animals and could get infected directly. But we already know that people collect bats for food, so that explanation only adds unnecessary complexity. Alternatively, are you suggesting that scientist worked on specifically modifying an existing virus, e.g RaTG13? If that is what you're saying I suspect you are not familiar with how hard it is to engineer proteins for specific functions. It's a herculean basic science task, not something that is commonly done in biomedical labs. Even in the Twitter thread that you linked, the only thing that Eric Feigl-Ding actually states is that the origin of the virus isn't well understood.

toxik 7y ago

Occam says no

peteradio 7y ago
Occam is wrong often, not sure why he gets quoted so religiously.

svara 7y ago

What you are saying is theoretically possible, but the sibling comment that's getting downvoted right now invoking Occam is, I think, spot on. Why hypothesize a detour through a biomedical lab if we know that people can get these diseases from animals, it's happened countless times before and it's exactly the scenario epidemiologists have been warning about for a long time? Beside, there's another point that makes it implausible in this particular case: BSL4 labs are absurdly annoying to work in, with personnel wearing overpressure suits. Coronaviruses are BSL3 pathogens [0], you wouldn't choose to arbitrarily work with them at a higher safety level lab. [0] That's even explicitly true for the novel one, SARS-CoV-2: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/lab-biosafety-guidelines.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/lab/lab-biosafety-...

kjaftaedi 7y ago
Of course it makes sense for scientists to worry about and prepare for that scenario, but in this particular case scientists have already rejected that this is a recombination event. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.920249v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.26.920249v1 If you look at the last link I posted, the Harvard epidemiologist points out that the mutation rate suggests the 2019-nCoV came from just one recent source in single jump (as opposed to several mutation sources) Combine this with the fact that: the new coronavirus provides a new lineage for almost half of its genome, with no close genetic relationships to other viruses within the subgenus of sarbecovirus It paints a picture that this did not come from nature. To me occam's razor is leaning the opposite direction, as a scenario to create something like this in the wild doesn't seem plausible. I would love for this to be proven false, and encourage any counterpoints addressing why human error should be ruled out.
- svara 7y ago
  The preprint you have quoted shows that the novel virus genome is very similar to a different Coronavirus (RaTG13) in some parts, and less similar in others. We have only a small sample of all the Coronavirus genomes that are out there in animals, so that's not particularly surprising. From there to jump to a conclusion involving human involvement does not follow. What exactly are you suggesting? That scientist have a bank of unpublished viruses collected from the wild that they play with and accidentally release? That makes little sense, particularly since it implies that people would be collecting viruses in the wild, at which point they would come into contact with animals and could get infected directly. But we already know that people collect bats for food, so that explanation only adds unnecessary complexity. Alternatively, are you suggesting that scientist worked on specifically modifying an existing virus, e.g RaTG13? If that is what you're saying I suspect you are not familiar with how hard it is to engineer proteins for specific functions. It's a herculean basic science task, not something that is commonly done in biomedical labs. Even in the Twitter thread that you linked, the only thing that Eric Feigl-Ding actually states is that the origin of the virus isn't well understood.