30 ms·

The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

• etangent 6y ago
  That evidence looks weak IMO, but it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
  • belltaco 6y ago
    It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show. Take the 5G conspiracy for example, 100+ cell phone towers attacked, and workers setting up attacked as well. Lots of testable assertions made, none backed up with any kind of evidence.
    • emsy 6y ago
      But this could very well be a result of priming people for a consensus (or its opposition) I’m too young to judge but it wasn’t always like this or was it?
      • chrismcb 6y ago
        Galileo says, no it wasn't always like this.
      • johnny22 6y ago
        depends on what you mean by always, but looking back at how this was handled re: tobacco, leaded gasoline, and climate change (pre 2000) should give you some idea. As far as I personally can see, it's been like this for a large portion of the 1900s at least.
      • auslegung 6y ago
        Yes, things have always been this way and if you really want to see just how long, look at speeches and other “news” from Ancient Greece. The significant difference today is how quickly and widely falsehoods can be distributed and redistributed, and how many different sources this can happen to. Pre Internet, if I started telling my friends about this thing called QAnon, how far and how quickly could it really spread? Not far and not quickly. Today however it can spread across the world in a day and be picked up by every major news outlet. It’s disturbing, and we should all be very concerned.
        • jakeogh 6y ago
          Curious people can read the posts directly at qmap dot pub.
    • droopyEyelids 6y ago
      I agree normal people aren't well equipped. But when you phrase it that way, you make it sounds like the professionals are well equipped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI
      • autokad 6y ago
        I remember when I saw a headline that said gene researchers say there is no way the virus was made in a lab. I'm like oh this should be interesting, they must have done some sort of dating on the mutations. maybe there are markings biologists can look at that are telling signs of natural vs man-made. or compared genomes to ... And there 100% undeniable argument: the virus effects bats and people researching bio weapons would -only- look at virus that effects humans. I'm like really? are you really that narrow minded and completely devoid of imagination? you think labs are only for making bio-weapons? you think someone making a bio-weapon would limit themselves to just virus that effects humans? that's your full proof thinking? I'm like wow. wow.
        • voldacar 6y ago
          >you really that narrow minded and completely devoid of imagination? you think labs are only for making bio-weapons? It wouldn't even have to be bio-weapon related. It could just be a genetically altered virus (routine in gain of function research) that escaped a lab due to an accident or carelessness, and was later covered up with the whole wet market story. People who disdain the idea that the virus could be man made are almost always attacking the hypothesis of a deliberate bio-weapon release, which is such a straw man.
          • droopyEyelids 6y ago
            It's the whole "don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" thing... but I always like to add, "and don't attribute to stupidity what can be explained by the fundamental complexity of life"
    • mtgp1000 6y ago
      >It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show I'm pretty sure this is the exact attitude that the poster was describing. You're just blanket dismissing out of mainstream science with accusations of bad faith.
    • akimball 6y ago
      You argument appears to be that I should focus on a strawman instead of evaluating the evidence.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • etangent 6y ago
      I believe this is "bbut what if baad people cite my article?" defense for what is essentially a form of authoritarian groupthink.
  • logjammin 6y ago
    "You better agree with consensus" has always been the current culture in science. It's nothing to do with science itself -- just human emotionality. We don't change unless we have to, unless there's overwhelming evidence that we need to.
    • robbiep 6y ago
      That is antithetical to the principles of science, but it depends on what area of science you operate in. To take the spectrum of shades of grey: - white would be math - first hint of grey with physics - greyer all they way down to biology where every different field has their own bar graphs You're a lunatic if you say 2+2=5, to return to the cases in point, it's been done, it's been dusted (mostly), and there's going to be a lot more work to do in the future to clear it up but people will always want to see the 'missing link' or proof that there was no leakage (deliberate or otherwise) from the lab. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
  • newacct583 6y ago
    > "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right." Isn't that the whole point of science? Big claims require big proof. What standard are you proposing be used instead? Or are you leaning on the "better" in that sentence in the sense of coercion? As in, you're saying that arguments without overwhelming evidence that contradict established consensus are being suppressed? If so, how? This garbage is being circulated endlessly. There's not a virologist in the world who isn't aware of it. It's not suppressed. It's just wrong.
    • autokad 6y ago
      the papers make a lot of specific arguments. if you have evidence against those arguments, you can say this point is wrong, here is the evidence against it, therefore that claim is likely wrong. Thats science. Your method comes off as: thats not the consensus, thus you are wrong.
      • newacct583 6y ago
        You're missing the point of "consensus". The value of having a scientific consensus of trusted sources is precisely that we don't have to all individually read random conspiracy nonsense and come up with counterarguments on our own. We can trust the experts. So if you come by with a theory that isn't supported by those experts, the burden is on YOU to convince people, not me. Now I know you're going to come right back and tell me why, this time, after the last thousand tries, the consensus really is wrong and the conspiracy nuts are actually believing in a REAL conspiracy this time. And again I'll rely on my general sense of statistics to tell me who to trust.
        • ryandrake 6y ago
          > The value of having a scientific consensus of trusted sources is precisely that we don't have to all individually read random conspiracy nonsense and come up with counterarguments on our own. We can trust the experts. This sounds like a priesthood. Don’t consider evidence from rando papers. Instead, simply trust the consensus view of these certain, special people who have been blessed as truth-knowers and wear the right robes and hats.
  • jonahbenton 6y ago
    Read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Always how it has been, since beginning of the thing we call "science."
    • chrisco255 6y ago
      Yeah but maybe the fact that science and politics and media have become so interwoven and in some cases march to the same drum, it does feel like something is quantitatively different about science in 2020.
      • jonahbenton 6y ago
        Agree both that 2020 is completely effed and that important issues from political perspective right now are unusually science driven. Having to go through the process Kuhn describes but where both the brains involved in paradigm transition are not trained in evidence, and, the accumulating evidence is...people dying from COVID...is just so grim.
  • lord_braleigh 6y ago
    You're free to present crazy-sounding arguments in day-to-day conversation, but a journal isn't the place to present crazy arguments. Journals are where you present overwhelming evidence or replicate/falsify existing results.
    • ddxxdd 6y ago
      Journals are where scientists present any sort of evidence that is backed by sound reasoning, meta-studies are where overwhelming evidence tends to be presented. If it were any other way, then where would scientists publish underwhelming evidence that is crucial for accumulation in order for overwhelming evidence to appear?
  • lemmsjid 6y ago
    I think there's a two way problem. The current state of public discourse on science in the U.S. is very skewed from scientific consensus. For example a YouGov poll found that 49% of Americans think that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. This kind of skew between public perception and scientific consensus can create a siege mentality, because it's easy to find someone who has been convinced by some media subculture that something is self-evidently true in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary. As in the vaccination-autism connection situation, all it can take is one scientific study, subsequently debunked, to give an entire movement the validation they need to completely ignore an enormous consensus with plenty of data to back it up. BTW (need to add this disclaimer on the internets, I often forget) I'm not disagreeing with you, just riffing off your comment with some more thoughts.
    • gridlockd 6y ago
      What are the “reams of evidence” that the virus did not come from a lab?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • lemmsjid 6y ago
        True, that was a poor argument on my part. I should say, lack of evidence that it did. Which weakens my argument, so thanks for pointing it out.
    • unishark 6y ago
      Anti-vaxxers is a pretty small movement according to polls, compared to the attention they've been getting (ten percentish). And it's certainly not just a US thing. More people probably believe in astrology. I'm not a virologist (nor a conspiracy theorist, by the way), but every time I read articles about the origin of covid being settled, I feel like the writer is trying to push an agenda. Yes they give perfectly sound logical reasoning, sure, but that's all it is. The counter view obviously will continue to be driven by the location of the origin. Edit: and by the way, the autism-caused-by-vaccines theory is not solely the result of a bad study getting too much attention. It is similarly the result of people making conclusions from big coincidences. In this case the onset of autism (at least the age when symptoms get bad) is commonly around the same age that children get vaccinated. The study didn't just make that idea up, they were trying to validate a belief that was already held relatively widely.
  • bamboozled 6y ago
    How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally accepted as the truth? Sometimes ideas initially can seem crazy because they're unfamiliar I guess. I suppose in this case, I oppose this idea because it sounds kind of scary.
    • nemo 6y ago
      How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally rejected as false?
    • akimball 6y ago
      Almost always. Have you met reviewer number 2? I suppose he's right most of the time, and feels vindicated as a result. I'm just troubled by the the modulus, the work of merit, rare and precious as it is, that suffers from the statistically justified bias for false negatives. I can certainly understand opposing an idea for diverse reasons, valid or invalid, but I can't understand how it is that some people seem to feel that opposing ideas on the basis of the balance of their features, rather than digging into the conditional structure and examining their merits and demerits, is something to be proud of, rather than ashamed. I consider that many of that group may have been anti-maskers as well, and that eventually evolution will take care of it, but I probably won't see the benefit of that.
  • bshoemaker 6y ago
    That's because it's exhausting to debunk idiots & those operating in bad faith (often both); it takes several orders of magnitude more work to respond and debunk that unicorns don't exist than it does to post that they do.
    • akimball 6y ago
      It would be inappropriate to infer that the OP was advocating for unicorns.
    • theknocker 6y ago
      Consensus should be determined by science, not the other way around. Otherwise, what is the point of science? edit: "Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." t. redditadmin.txt
      • jmcgough 6y ago
        This isn't just about science. Conspiracy theorists and unethical people with agendas use documents like this to support their beliefs, and it becomes impossible to refute them. In the age of social media, misinformation and conspiracy theories can cause real damage.
        • nodamage 6y ago
          As a recent and somewhat topical example of this, there is an article circling around the internet right now that cites about a dozen studies proving that "masks don't work". If you actually read through the quoted studies you quickly realize that they don't actually support the author's conclusion at all. But that didn't stop the author from taking a bunch of out of context quotes to make an argument that sounded vaguely scientific - scientific enough for people with a particular agenda to parade it around as if the science was on their side. I started writing a rebuttal to this article, but as I was carefully reading through the details of the nth study to see if it actually matched what the author claimed, I realized I was just massively wasting my own time. The people spreading the article around don't actually care, they never read those studies and they never will. They just wanted something scientific-looking to cite that backs up their pre-existing opinions.
  • mekoka 6y ago
    > it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right." That current culture of science has gradually driven me toward skepticism. Unless I see converging evidence from various independent sources, a claim is just a big "maybe". How many of the claims have been peer reviewed, or replicated (when everyone is busy publishing their own papers, or competing to make the news, or signing book deals)? How much of what is repeated by those with a platform just a gambit, riding on the reputation of those claiming it first? How much is just unchecked assumptions (e.g. that others will have certainly verified the claims)? As you start looking closer, the level of imposture and bullshit is just too high. Scientists are as human as anyone, with everything it implies.
    • pdfernhout 6y ago
      Something I put together about 10 years ago: https://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-about-mainstream-science.html#Some_quotes_on_social_problems_in_science https://www.pdfernhout.net/to-james-randi-on-skepticism-abou... "Here are some related broad quotes on social problems in science, some of which relate to competition for funding. ..." See especially from Marcia Angell: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/drug-co... "The problems I've discussed are not limited to psychiatry, although they reach their most florid form there. Similar conflicts of interest and biases exist in virtually every field of medicine, particularly those that rely heavily on drugs or devices. It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine." And, from the 1990s, from David Goodstein, who was Vice Provost of Caltech then, here is part of why thing have gotten that way: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals. There are many reasons for this, not the least being the fact that the referees have an obvious conflict of interest, since they are themselves competitors for the same resources. This point seems to be another one of those relativistic anomalies, obvious to any outside observer, but invisible to those of us who are falling into the black hole. It would take impossibly high ethical standards for referees to avoid taking advantage of their privileged anonymity to advance their own interests, but as time goes on, more and more referees have their ethical standards eroded as a consequence of having themselves been victimized by unfair reviews when they were authors. Peer review is thus one among many examples of practices that were well suited to the time of exponential expansion, but will become increasingly dysfunctional in the difficult future we face."
  • groby_b 6y ago
    "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" If you make a claim that's wildly diverging from established consensus, yes, you're required to bring overwhelming evidence. Because the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the claim being wrong. There's no point in relitigating everything from first principles unless you can make it extremely clear it's worth the effort.
    • akimball 6y ago
      I would go a step further: The odds of any claim being wrong are overwhelming, regardless of whether it is endorsed by the consensus or not, whether it is ordinary or extraordinary. Brains are not truth-making machines. Anyhow, I'm not sure what is extraordinary about biowarfare labs making biowarfare agents. It's actually quite ordinary.
  • iskander 6y ago
    It's not just weak, it's incoherent and seemingly written by someone who misunderstood some wikipedia articles on virology. There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.
  • La1n 6y ago
    >current culture in science It's been that way for a long time, with Kuhn writing a whole book on it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...
• gowld 6y ago
  Impossible for non experts to interpret, but deserving of an equally careful and thorough response in any rebuttal claims. > Conclusion > We have deduced the internal logic of published research which resulted in the exact functionalities of SARS-CoV-2, > including the convergence of agreement from difference classes of source, > the timings of the stages of the research, > and the development of documented capabilities by named institutions and individuals. > These meet the criteria of means, timing, agent and place in this reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the account to reverse the burden of proof. > Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we have indicated, we note puzzling errors in their use of evidence. > In our companion article, in a similar forensic manner we will explore the primary evidence used to sustain the hypothesis of zoonotic transfer. > In neither this article nor the next do we speculate about motive.
  • Robotbeat 6y ago
    Just a side note, but this is uncharacteristically overwrought and overconfident language for scientific discourse. EDIT: It sounds less like a scientific/academic argument and more like the caricature of a legal argument.
    • bnjms 6y ago
      Not sure he has any options there. The normal approach would need to be overwhelming to be taken seriously without the protection of some political language. You’ll need to defend your reasoning just for people to hear you out once there are political implications. And that’s on top of the normal work. I can’t interpret this though so I cannot say myself.
      • Robotbeat 6y ago
        I don’t agree. Political, overconfident language is not scientifically appropriate, especially for a paper purporting to overturn the scientific consensus. Sounds like this is language that was in there before peer review but that was removed before publication. Makes sense that part didn’t pass peer review as it’s improper to make such overconfident conclusions and claims in a scientific paper.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• belltaco 6y ago
  Lets throw them a bone and say they're right, what do we do next? What actions do or can we take? Secure the labs? Shouldn't that be done regardless?
  • dagav 6y ago
    At least if it was someone's "fault" we could push for reparations
    • abeppu 6y ago
      At this point, who could actually pay reparations on a scale that would be even within an order of magnitude of the damage done?
      • RockIslandLine 6y ago
        For certain definitions of "pay", any nation with a fiat currency could certainly place a number into a spreadsheet. Making that number mean anything might take a while.But we could certainly write a permanent bond and put it onto the books.
      • adventured 6y ago
        $20-$30 trillion in damages for 2020-2022 is a reasonable estimate (taking into account hits to economic output, budgets, stock markets, some reasonable number for lives lost & human suffering). China could come up with $2-$3 trillion as reparations. $30t is likely a bit high (and $10t would be too low). The global economy is unlikely to shrink more than 5-7% this year (call it a $4 to $6 trillion contraction). I believe the IMF and Worldbank are both around 5% contraction as their guesses. It will likely resume growth in 2021. Most of the major stock markets are being propped up and haven't suffered horribly. The big damage has been in lives lost, suffering caused (in numerous ways), and the social financial cost in budgets (blown out budgets, debt, unemployment, etc.). There will be ongoing unemployment costs for years post vaccine, which I've assumed in the $20-$30 trillion figure. That 1/10th figure is not the problem. China could come up with $300b per year over ten years. The problem is they'll pay those reparations over their dead body, so to speak.
• i_cannot_hack 6y ago
  > A Norwegian virologist has made claims about the non-natural origins of the new coronavirus. These claims were, reportedly, in an earlier draft of the paper, and Dr Sørensen has since repeated them to Norwegian press. > The final version of the research paper, which has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was natural or man-made in its current form. > The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered. https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/ https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-cla...
  • kirse 6y ago
    The scientific community widely agrees One has to wonder how a "Fact Check" site can make an assertion like this without any provided list of references. What exactly does "widely agree" even mean? Was there some sort of statistical polling they did to establish that? Exactly what percentage of the scientific community constitutes "widely" anyways? In fact, this website appears to enjoy using the word "widely" within articles to make all sorts of broadly generic assertions without any numerical/statistical basis. https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Afullfact.org%20widely https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Afullfact.org%20... Obviously this has nothing to do with conclusion of the paper, but this "many scientists agree" lingo that shows up in various places (Wiki articles, fact-check sites, news, etc) can really be used to push a narrative without any sort of rigor. Personally I look forward to the day where I get to meet the "they" in "you know, they say..."
    • cooliosis 6y ago
      Putting "all scientists agree" in quotes when that isn't in the source material is highly misleading. Edit: op edited their post
      • theknocker 6y ago
        Thank you for helping OP articulate their extremely good point.
• maest 6y ago
  This is a really big claim, so some background checking: The paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics[0] (this accepted version is materially different from the original link posted here). Only thing I could find about Birger Sorensen's was his Linkedin page [1a] and the Immunor page where he's listed as the Chairman [1b]. Angus Dagleish looks legit, although it's notable that he did stand for Parliament in 2016 as a UKIP candidate, according to Wikipedia[2]. Can't find any primary sources for Andreas Susrud. [0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527/S2633289220000083a.pdf/biovacc19_a_candidate_vaccine_for_covid19_sarscov2_developed_from_analysis_of_its_general_method_of_action_for_infectivity.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c... [1a]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/birger-sorensen-174a20b/?originalSubdomain=no https://www.linkedin.com/in/birger-sorensen-174a20b/?origina... btw, if this is considered doxxing, let me know and I can remove the link. [1b]: https://immunor.com/about-immunor/board-of-directors/ https://immunor.com/about-immunor/board-of-directors/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    Why do the background checking? Why not just consider the arguments on their merits alone? That's what science is.
    • maest 6y ago
      I disagree. Or rather, I don't think this is about doing science. In many aspects of our lives we rely on the advice of experts. Personally, as I am not a trained biologist, I am unable to reliably decide if the arguments here are right or wrong. I also believe the vast majoriy of people are in a similar position. As a result, the only options are to look at: 1. The scientific consensus. 2. The legitimacy of the people making the claims. It's too early for 1, so 2 is what remains.
      • chrisco255 6y ago
        In many aspects we rely on multiple and competing opinions from various experts. It's not unheard of to go see half a dozen or more experts for treatment recommendations from various experts on a disease. Covid is a novel virus, so nobody has any more than 6 months or so of experience with this particular virus. So first of all, the rush to consensus is a mistake for a novel virus. Secondly, ascertaining the origin of a virus is not something that you garner from consensus. It takes serious investigative work that may take years. So, again, consensus is just a way to cast complex, nuanced topics as flat, solved for things. That's not the case in most scientific subjects. #2 is not what remains. You can engage with the arguments and the logic. Even as a layperson.
• solvorn 6y ago
  There’s evidence but not proof. People confuse these words all the time.
• bnjms 6y ago
  I’m open to this idea but I cannot imagine a goal for this line of research. It doesn’t appear to benefit anyone.
  • foogazi 6y ago
    How about to find out if it’s possible to artificially start a pandemic ?
  • hdjrkrmfkt 6y ago
    "Gain of function" is regularly done to make various viruses "better" so as to study then how to defend against that potential mutation happening naturally. See the big scandal from some years ago when the H5N1 virus was modified in a lab to be airborne, and the accusations that such research on such a dangerous virus is just reckless.
    • bnjms 6y ago
      That’s interesting but I still don’t understand the motivation. There are plenty of currently successful viruses for research that making one airborne seems like it should be taboo. But again I’m not part of that community so maybe it’s just natural for virologists you want to play with viruses.
  • threeseed 6y ago
    You don’t think it is important to understand the root cause of COVID-19 ? It is going to kill millions of people, potentially reduce the life expectancy of tens of millions more and severely impact everyone on this planet.
    • bnjms 6y ago
      No you have me backwards. I don’t understand for what cause CV19 May have been made purposefully. I don’t see who it would benefit.
      • jimmaswell 6y ago
• chaostheory 6y ago
  Can't be coincidence https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu... https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741 https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan...
  • kbaker 6y ago
    I really hope anyone with a genetics background, or the desire to go really in depth about what makes a virus 'Lab-made', read through the above posted first article. https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throu... It takes a long time but explains why the source is not very likely to be an evolved combined bat x pangolin virus, and has curious markers similarly used in other gain-of-function research, even similar techniques as used in past research by Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Natural origin not ruled out as being impossible, but not likely. Combining it with this possible explanation looking at the possibility of RaTG13 being entirely fabricated altogether by Dr. Shi in January 2020, and you can at least definitely see where the conspiracy arguments come from, and why the CCP has an overwhelming need to create and play up a 'natural origin' argument, along with passing on mountains of misinformation. https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html Very convincing articles, scary times if this is actually true.
• robbiep 6y ago
  This seems to me to be a dangerous paper. It's effectively an opinion piece, pre-published, requiring a high degree of domain expertise to even read, with a clear conclusion in the title that you can see being used to deflect attention from the massive job the world has at hand (not that we shouldn't ask hard questions) Why am I qualified to comment? Well, I’m a medical doctor (which frankly means jack shit for the ability to parse this paper) but got there through a major in biochemistry and molecular biology (which is a partial toolkit). Unlike their paper on Biovacc-19 (0) it has not been accepted or submitted for publication yet (not enough to rule it out immediately because there is an increasing trend to pre-publication with the rate of research publications in this space as well as problems with traditional publication methodologies) Without going too far the dissection, I would just point out that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 is natural in origin, this nature article describes this well (1). Worth specifically responding to is their claim that The co-receptor dependent phagocytic general method of action for infectivity and pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be specifically related to cumulative charge resulting from inserts placed on the surface of the Spike receptor binding domain, right next to the receptor binding motif. Inserts placed is a poor choice of descriptor in my opinion. The Fox Newsification of research findings. Well, you can see the 4 additional amino acids that give rise to the change in isoelectric point in the spike protein in the nature article, and much greater minds than mine have dissected this genetically and decided that such a mutation is possible through evolutionary methods alone. They specifically say they disagree with the findings of the nature paper so to go on any longer risks drawing my bow in this area further than I am comfortable, but I would sum it up by saying that in science it is always good to have dissenting voices (such as with climate science for all the good that that does), but with just how fraught the world stage is at the moment I don't believe this dissenting voice deserves much attenion [0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527/S2633289220000083a.pdf/biovacc19_a_candidate_vaccine_for_covid19_sarscov2_developed_from_analysis_of_its_general_method_of_action_for_infectivity.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c... [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
  • cameldrv 6y ago
    I'd say that the "Proximal Origins" paper makes a very weak case especially given what we now know. The essential argument is that it's more likely that the RBD came from a lineage that includes the Pangolin-CoV than that it was designed by a human. That does seem reasonable. They suggest that the virus was the result of a recombination event. However, that recombination could have occurred artificially at the WIV. The WIV and Shi Zhengli specifically have recently published papers about performing precisely this type of work on SARS like coronaviruses. Now the closest known viruses to SARS-CoV-2 are RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV. Pangolin-CoV is a very close match in the spike protein, and RaTG13 is a very close match on the rest of the virus. RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV were both discovered by WIV but their sequences sat unpublished until after the pandemic started. The grafting of the spike protein onto a "backbone" of another SARS like coronavirus is specifically something Shi Zhengli has been involved with and published with Ralph Baric in 2015. Furthermore, the spike of SARS-CoV-2 is better adapted to humans than to any other species, and it's better adapted to humans than any other published coronavirus. This doesn't make sense unless the virus spent some time evolving in humans or in human cells. Interestingly, passaging SARS like coronaviruses in human airway cell cultures is also something that has been done in recent years. Ralph Baric's lab specifically has published work on this. The only real other possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 somehow spent many months circulating in human populations undetected while it adapted to human ACE2. There has been no evidence published that this occurred. Finally, it is quite a coincidence that the lab where both Pangolin-CoV and RaTG13 were discovered is in the same city as where the outbreak started. Yes, both of those viruses were discovered in China, but Pangolin-CoV was discovered about 1000km from Wuhan, and RaTG13 was discovered about 1500km from Wuhan.
• cryptica 6y ago
  When Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier suggested that COVID-19 could be man-made, I started taking this view more seriously. Now seeing additional papers coming out supporting this, the case is getting stronger. I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to spreading between humans? Intuitively, that doesn't make sense. Also the fact that the WHO has kept changing its story about this virus from the beginning is not reassuring at all. At this stage, as crazy as it is, I'm inclined to believe the conspiracy theorists because the official version comes across as even crazier.
  • dragonwriter 6y ago
    > I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) Bats are mammals, and so far from “totally unrelated” to humans, but... > be so well adapted to spreading between humans? So, Spanish flu wasn't of avian (far less related to humans than bats) origin but was also a man-made bioweapon?
  • robbiep 6y ago
    By the same logic, was the H1N1 spanish flu designed to perfectly flourish and kill possibly 10% of hosts? You say it in your second paragraph. You're no biologist. But you find it strange. Very few biologists find it strange. They have in fact been warning of a ticking time bomb [0 for brevity, 1 for article]. May I respectfully suggest that you stick to your lane regarding the science? WHO ups and downs and political bickering to one side, science is a messy process of honing in on the right answer and lay-people have a hard time wrapping their heads around that when other answers fitting in more closely with their world view abound. It would be nice if scientists could come out on day 1 and tell everyone exactly what to expect but that isn't how science works. [0] https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warned-that-china-was-a-time-bomb-for-novel-coronavirus-outbreak-in-2007/ https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warned-that-china-was-a-... [1] https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/660.full.pdf https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/660.full.pdf
• jupenur 6y ago
  Better link with context https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgleish-birger-sorensen-coronavirus/the-fight-for-a-controversial-article/362519 https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgleish-birger-sorensen-c...
• sradman 6y ago
  This paper is not evidence, it is speculation based on an inability to see a path other than gain-of-function lab work. These coronaviruses are slow to evolve due to their proofreading capabilities but they recombine readily. The natural path, therefore, is a wild animal (likely pangolin, civet, raccoon dog, or even human) that is simultaneously co-infected by two viruses that recombine. The problem with genome data centric analysis is that no distinction is made between RNA samples and virus isolates. Key evidence for the gain-of-function hypothesis, is one or more lab isolates that match long segments of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, including non-coding segments.
• mrtweetyhack 6y ago
  I have no doubt China would weaponizing a virus even against their own citizens.
• jmcgough 6y ago
  The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been intentionally created. There's a reason we haven't seen a virus like this in a century - because it's so unlikely that a new virus will appear in any given year with both a high rate of transmission and a high fatality rate.
  • dnautics 6y ago
    This is bad logic. Suppose some state sponsored lab actually did create a hybrid virus (not terribly hard, as demonstrated by the controversial ccr5-binder/flu fusion which was generated in Australia iirc) what would be the evidentiary standard you would use to judge that this 1) could be or 2) was the case, of course, assuming you could not have access to the state's lab logs? Or would you throw up your hands and say "it's unprovable"?
  • akimball 6y ago
    Interestingly, the often repeated "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" comment is also a relative likelihood argument "like those supporting intelligent design". I'm pretty sure the proportion of people making such arguments who grasp both ergodicity and measure theory is small, since experts on those subjects are typically much more cautious about wielding such brushes. See: I just made a relative likelihood argument. May I have a Dunning-Krugerrand?
  • bitcurious 6y ago
    >The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been intentionally created. I think intelligent design would be a pretty plausible explanation for humanity, if we already knew there was a god.
    • hatsunearu 6y ago
      Intelligent design is kind of stupid because life is clearly not designed very intelligently. The "evidence" that sars-cov-2 is designed with a guided purpose is kind of there in the paper, though. And that we as a species (and the bois in WIV) clearly had the capacity to do so.
• mjirv 6y ago
  Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!! But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0] That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.” [0]https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21 https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21
  • m0zg 6y ago
    > But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! This will be misinterpreted by everyone who doesn't understand the Bayes rule (which is 99.999% of the population). What she's saying is just a fancy version of "this is the kind of a virus that would likely cause a pandemic", nothing more.
  • xster 6y ago
    > certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.” https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/6823589225980644623 https://www.iesdouyin.com/share/video/6823589225980644623 Dr Fauci said it better than I could, so I'll just quote him: "hahahaha"
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  • bmitc 6y ago
    > the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low I don't know if misleading is the right word, but this isn't the whole story and could in fact mislead people. What we should be taking from this breakout is that although potentially not that likely, they are becoming more and more likely. What's bothering me is all this focus on the wrong things. We need to already be preparing for the next spillover event for the next virus, but that isn't even close to being on the table, much less discussed or even mentioned. We shouldn't and can't be treating this as a singular event, but many are. I learned this from the below article: http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-pandemic-coming http://nautil.us/issue/83/intelligence/the-man-who-saw-the-p... >> Are spillover events more common now than 50 years ago? > Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production.
• Gatsky 6y ago
  This is very unlikely. The technology to design a virus reliably just isn't there. What is much more likely is that a lab was studying coronavirus isolates from animals, and had a failure of containment. This has happened multiple times before (eg. with small pox). But even then it is a moot point, because there is no way China, or any country for that matter, would admit they unleashed a global pandemic. Can you imagine the fall out?
  • jkhdigital 6y ago
    The paper literally walks you through the sequence of published research which demonstrates that scientists have successfully performed chimeric virus manipulation that could explain the observed genetic components present in SARS-CoV-2. The technology is hiding in plain sight.
    • Gatsky 6y ago
      Yeah but actually building the proteins is the non-trivial and most difficult step. It is not sufficient to merely say that it could be done.
      • jkhdigital 6y ago
        They didn’t “build” new proteins, they swapped them between viruses. And their published research doesn’t imply that these things could be done, it is transparent evidence that they did it already.
        • Gatsky 6y ago
          My understanding is that SARS-CoV-2 has novel amino acid sequences (eg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7114094/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7114094/). Shuffling genes from other viruses wouldn't achieve this. The original article doesn't seem to address this directly. But I'm not a virologist. Perhaps you know more about it than I do.
  • ReflectedImage 6y ago
• causality0 6y ago
  Do viruses closely related to SARS-Cov-2 do all the "unusual" things it does? Do they cause brain damage, reproductive damage, anosmia without congestion, strokes, and unusual clotting activity? If not, I would be reassured by someone explaining to me how a natural pathogen could pick up all these features at the same time.
  • nthj 6y ago
    If the natural pathogen causes blood clots, everything else you described naturally occurs as a side effect.
    • dustinmoris 6y ago
      Precisely this. I can't understand how so many people are so dumb that they can't add one plus one and understand that all the scare stories they hear is just normal consequences of a single issue. It's like saying that people who have a salmonella infection also have other issues likes diarrhoea, dehydration, headache, dizziness, tiredness, etc. Well of course, if you have a stomach bug which gives you diarrhoea then you shit water and you get dehydrated. When you dehydrate then you get headaches, can feel dizzy and your energy levels drop and you feel tired.
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• ggm 6y ago
  Evidence is a very bad word to use here. It's a hypothesis from (mis) interpretation of data. Virologists say it's not unnaturally evolved https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-origin-of-ncov2019/384 https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...
• ArkVark 6y ago
  Its likely that Viruses like COVID-19 have come and gone over time, and been completely unnoticed. The difference being now that we have much older and elderly populations, often with chronic health conditions and deficiencies, kept alive 'artificially' by modern healthcare. For example, approximately 50% of COVID deaths are to people in nursing homes. Without this population, the virus would be put down as regular influenza/pneumonia, albeit an unusually virulent strain.
  • DennisP 6y ago
    That same modern healthcare is making the covid death rate much lower than it would be otherwise. We've had plenty of people hospitalized who were not so sick and elderly that they depended on modern medicine to stay alive. Without modern hospital care, more of them would die.
• bwi4 6y ago
  So what would evidence, rather than speculation, look like in this case? A SARS-CoV 2 genome sequence dated before December 2019? Somehow identifying patient zero and corresponding records of their exposure at the lab? I’m skeptical that any hard evidence will be found. It seems to me the origin is likely to remain speculative indefinitely.
  • jupp0r 6y ago
    That's only true if the man made hypothesis was true. It is quite possible we'll find this exact virus in bats or other animals at some point.
  • casefields 6y ago
    NSA/CIA intelligence catching them red handed discussing how it happened. Of course, with the Iraq fiasco still in our collective memory, who knows if the public would believe it.
    • deleted 6y ago
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  • tim333 6y ago
    If it was the lab someone involved in the research may talk. If it's natural we may find the animal source. The Chinese have not been terribly cooperative with investigating things though so it may remain speculative.
• eunos 6y ago
  This forbes blog piece contains a compilation of refutations attempt for the said theory https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controver...
  • DominikPeters 6y ago
    This seemed mostly fluff and argument from authority to me, with the main substantial counterpoint this: > Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can be found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird flu"), HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)." Grødeland also says that Sørensen's paper offered no biological confirmation on the relevance of positively charged patches.
    • eunos 6y ago
      To be fair, this claim (the main paper) is released for a month. I even remember encountered a HN submission for it. However, the claim doesn't really attract much attention. A few UK media mention it, but focus mainly on the MI6 chief. Googling the researcher names also found mostly Norwegian sites. Since the traction of this claim is quite low, then not much further discussion by other scientists as well.
• jkhdigital 6y ago
  Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper: 1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans. 2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses. 3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research. 4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research. Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic. The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation. They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.
  • calf 6y ago
    I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.
    • jkhdigital 6y ago
      Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinct point of evidence.
• avs733 6y ago
  Even the title seems intentionally written in a misleading way...the OP correctly kept the original title but it is by design misleading with that use of which
• vzaliva 6y ago
  Has it been peer reviewed? Otherwise not being an epidemiologist it is hard for me to judge weather the scientific argument presented by this paper is sound.
  • murgindrag 6y ago
    Unfortunately, peer review is roughly as good as a die roll these days. I've submitted many scientific publications. I think only one was seriously read by reviewers. Others -- both accepted and rejected -- had comments which demonstrated the reviewers hadn't read it. One paper -- accepted -- it was clear reviewers didn't even give a cursory skim (ACM venue too). NIPS found peer review to be no better than chance, and my experience is the same.
• anikan_vader 6y ago
  It is interesting to think about the origins of Covid-19 with Bayesian statistics in mind. We believe that the virus originated in Wuhan, and the two competing "mainstream" theories are whether the virus came from a wet market or a bio lab. I don't know exactly how many wet markets exist in China, but I would guess that there are thousands spread across China. A wet market is simply a place where fresh produce/meat is sold (think farmer's market). "In Hong Kong, for example, there is a widespread network of wet markets where thousands of locals shop everyday for their meat and vegetables. There is one in almost every district and none of them trade in exotic or wild animals." [1] Of these $\Theta(1000)$ wet markets, probably a few are located in Wuhan. Notably, there is only one level 4 bio lab in China, and it happens to be located in Wuhan. [2] You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of probabilistic analysis, but this line of argument swayed me to seriously consider the possibility that the virus originated in the lab. And, of course, note that we do not have to assume any malicious intentions. It's easy to imagine a virus accidentally escaping the lab, regardless of whether it evolved naturally or with some human intervention to facilitate research. A State Department cable from 2018 wrote that the lab "has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” [3] [1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/china-wet-market-coronavirus-intl-hnk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/china-wet-market-coronav... [2] https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-levels-new-coronavirus.html https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-levels... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-department-releases-cable-that-launched-claims-that-coronavirus-escaped-from-chinese-lab/2020/07/17/63deae58-c861-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-depar... Footnote: Yes, I know that $\Theta(1000)$ just means "some constant" from a mathematical perspective. But I think the idea is clear, even if the mathematical statement taken at face value conveys no information.
  • refurb 6y ago
    That's an interesting argument. I guess one critical piece of data would be - is the probability of Covid-19 originating from wet markets the same across all of China? If every wet market had the same probability, then yeah, it's odd that the alleged wet market is one of thousands, but just happened to be next to the bio lab in Wuhan. But if the probability was unevenly distributed and such a virus originating was highly likely in only a few dozen wet markets, Wuhan included, then the probability of it being a coincidence is much higher.
• wolfspider 6y ago
  The evidence is pretty compelling and I’ve suspected something was up the whole time in fact I began social distancing November of last year after hearing reports of a mystery virus. At some point in my life I met a mechanical engineer while helping out a friend who lost his job. This guy happened to be his neighbor and was the only one who was willing to run an electrical cable to my friend’s unit for a small sum since his electric got cut off. This guy explains he was working in a lab that did continuous culture experiments and explained how it worked. He had the blueprints in his unit so I had no reason to doubt him and paperwork from the lab. Long story short he quit due to military influence on the project and was pushed out over his concerns which were ethical in nature. He opened my eyes to the fact a virus can be evolved rapidly and made extremely resistant without specific genetic modification. A little bit of googling and I could see the same company was involved in research going on in that Wuhan lab. The point here is how do we define “modified” as it is certainly possible through rapid continuous cultures and selective survival of strains any virus can be modified. This happened in the early aughts and so it’s been nearly two decades this research technique has been in play. If it wasn’t for that chance encounter I’d naturally be more skeptical about possible modifications of the virus but just so happens that I’m not as a result.
• haecceity 6y ago
  My first step in filtering crank papers is to ask is this written with Microsoft Word.
• vertbhrtn 6y ago
  Wait, didn't Chinese authorities said when this all started that there was a minor outbreak in the BSL4 lab, but it's under control? It's just when the "under control" didn't work, they started to cover things up.
• ak_25 6y ago
  I just showed this to a friend of mine who is a biochemist and he sent me this — https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/ https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-cla...
• yters 6y ago
  I ran a blast query against the cov2 glycoprotein that binds to human ACE2, and it just pops out of nowhere in 2020. There is a difference of like 30 amino acids from anything that came before, which is much too great to be explained by the coronavirus wild mutation rate of 1 nucleotide every thousand years. So, possibilities are it is a strain that has evaded researchers till now, some natural phenomenon vastly accelerated its mutation towards infecting humans, or it is genetically engineered.
  • sradman 6y ago
    > some natural phenomenon vastly accelerated its mutation Natural recombination [1] vs gain-of-function lab work. Some of the lab work leverages natural recombination by artificially co-infecting lab animals with multiple viruses and studying the resulting chimeras. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombinant_virus#Natural_recombination https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombinant_virus#Natural_re...
• yters 6y ago
  Also weird is Fauci both promoted this sort of research and oversaw the funding line that went to the Wuhan lab that funded a very similar research in 2019. My theory is this is an accidental lab outbreak, and Fauci is advising because he knows the cause and is trying to undo his mistake.
• chrisbrandow 6y ago
  Has this paper either been peer-reviewed or submitted for peer-review as a preprint? I have a PhD in chemistry and I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to judge the quality of the work or the track record of the authors, scientifically. I think this paper’s deserves a thorough airing and evaluation, but I don’t think Hacker news is a forum well equipped to produce a high signal to noise evaluation on such a highly charged claim, to say the least.
  • pldr2244 6y ago
    Most of HN is not qualified either to judge the quality of AI, ML, opsec, renewables or any of a whole host of topics that are actually deeply complex. But that does not mean it does not classify as potentially substantial news, that at least should be visible. Nobody is arguing that it shouldn’t be more properly vetted when published via normal scientific channels, as these things usually are.
    • quonn 6y ago
      > topics that are actually deeply complex The topics you mentioned are all part of a CS masters degree (and by far not the most complex ones there). Many people on HN have a CS background so they are surely qualified.
    • chrisbrandow 6y ago
      I’m not saying anyone’s arguing that. But I’m just trying to establish if it is being properly vetted anywhere. If so, it would be nice to amplify the vetting as much as the claim itself, given its seriousness.
• iskander 6y ago
  This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE)" (there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of amino acid content)
  • jakeogh 6y ago
    Regarding your fuel comment, that is what NIST found. They confirmed in their report that indeed, it cant and didnt. They rely on a weakening... where the fire was, which is a few floors of the top of the 2 buildings. The 3rd building is a different eh... reason. Here is an overview: http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/pretext.mov http://s3.amazonaws.com/nasathermalimages/public/video/prete...
    • MrRiddle 6y ago
      I’m not sure why you’re downvoted, I thought it’s widely known by now that there were helpers on the ground for 911. Building 7 being the easiest one to draw conclusions from.
  • mleonhard 6y ago
    Would you please explain more clearly?
    • iskander 6y ago
      Sure, what's your degree of bio background?
      • objektif 6y ago
        What do you think about this? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug Are these people also conspiracy theorists?
• jakeogh 6y ago
  A unrelated(?) repo of material about Covid-19's source, last update was May 2: https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://project-evidence.github.io/ Regardless of the source of this one, it is only getting _easier_ to engineer these extraordinarily valuable weapons. The 24x7 induced fear response is the real threat, not the virus. Excess deaths are the only real measure: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
• Feolkin 6y ago
  Look, when most virologists/epidemiogists look at this "evidence" and consider it too flimsy and flawed, then I wonder why people here are so eager to jump on it as "I'm not a biologist, covid19 is so unusual, it's obviously man-made". HN is embarrassing right now.
  • john4534243 6y ago
    Its not just non-biologists opinion. Its the opinion of nobel laurates https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23877141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23877141 . It is embarrassing for chinas ccp.
    • Barrin92 6y ago
      Luc Montagnier has gone completely nuts long ago. He's on several occassions proclaimed that DNA can teleport, that autism isn't real or caused by vaccines and joined anti-vaxxing movements and supported homeopathy, and the idea that water has memory, among other things.
  • JohnStrangeII 6y ago
    The same happened with HIV, these kind of conspiracy theories are inevitable. People always want to blame someone, even when there is overwhelming evidence that a natural catastrophe occurred. Remember the Italian seismologists who got sued because they didn't predict an earthquake? Fact is that if the virus escaped a lab, the incident could have occurred in any other lab, too. It likely evolved naturally, though, and another fact is that it could have occurred naturally in many places in the world - e.g. in the Middle East or in Africa -, and a more dangerous virus could evolve in many regions of the world at any time. Many people just don't want to accept this, especially those who reacted in the wrong way to the pandemic initially. It's always easier to blame someone else.
    • tim333 6y ago
      The HIV conspiracy theories were kind of silly though and they were able to trace the source to chimpanzees. Things seem different with covid.
• hirenj 6y ago
  Of the five salient points they make here, I would argue that they are a lot less strong than the authors believe them to be. Point 1 can also likely be made for the original Sars-CoV, and probably is irrelevant. If they show CoV-2 is more human like than the earlier, then they can begin to make the point. Point 2 is a gigantic leap of faith - I don’t understand how they connect amino acid inserts into the sequence to gain of function experiments. It makes no sense! Points 3 & 4 are related: The extra charge on the RBD. If you look at the previous virus, it has a much smaller positively charged patch, and this expands in CoV-2, which makes an evolutionary drift in this direction entirely reasonable. It’s not a wholesale integration of a brand new feature. This charged patch is actually important for binding to heparan sulfate, which gets involved with a bunch of viral entry events (eg AAV, Chinkunguya virus, some other coronaviruses I think). There’s a few recent preprints that discuss the HS relationship with Cov-2, and can go a long way to explain the tropism of the virus. The HS can overcome lower expression of ACE2, by possibly supporting the attachment. Finally, point 5 is where they throw out DC-SIGN as a receptor. While there are high mannose glycans on the virus particle, I don’t know of anyone proposing this as a receptor for the virus. There is no biochemical/experimental evidence that they show to support this idea.
  • DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    I will add a few points which I read on a github page and I am unable to verify, so I would be keen to have others review and sanity check: 1) The likely genetic source of SARS cov1 and cov2 is a species of bat in Yunnan province, thousands of miles away, two provinces away from Hubei (Wuhan). Ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/ 2) The outbreak allegedly started in December in Hubei province when the local bat population (which does not carry this SARS virus?) would be hibernating (?) 3) Only 66% of the initial 41 COVID patients had exposure to Huanan _seafood_ market. Ref: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30183-5/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... 4) A seafood market where you would have to have non-hibernating bats from Yunnan thousands of miles away from Wuhan(?) 5) The seafood market is 13Km away from Wuhan Institute of Virology where Yunnan bats were studied. And 1.4km away from Wuhan's Centre for Disease Prevention & Control (?) Are these points real or misinformation? If real, why is there no pressure for an independent investigation?
• ALittleLight 6y ago
  As an aside, if you look at that person's comment history, pretty much every comment they've made is about China and defending China. An odd focus for a hackernews account.
  • madriffsin 6y ago
    Can we stop with these posts where we dig through someone's post history and accuse them of shilling/being paid trolls if they hold a constant view that differs from our own? If you disagree with something you can debate it without having to resort to such nasty, underhanded tactics.
    • TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      If that constant view only ever promotes a single narrative and doesn't engage at all in HN comment streams about typical HN topics elsewhere - no, I don't think we should. Also, I think it's unhelpful to pretend that propaganda isn't a thing, or that HN isn't monitored by any number of state and corporate actors with a narrative to sell.
    • ALittleLight 6y ago
      I don't think looking at someone's post history qualifies as "nasty, underhanded tactics". That user's post history is a nearly uninterrupted string of defending China (occasionally interrupted to attack India or the US on matters related to China). If noticing unusual posting patterns is bad for some reason, perhaps you should explain why. I read your current post as an insult and think an explanation would be both more appropriate and more productive.
      • tomhoward 6y ago
        The HN guidelines specifically forbid these kinds of comments and explain the correct course of action if such conduct is suspected: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• AsyncAwait 6y ago
  I just wonder if the same questions would've been asked if the virus originated in the west. It seems Orientalism is still very much alive.
• biolurker1 6y ago
  What is important is that this needs to be investigated and the world needs to take measures to protect us from total future annihilation in a similar situation
• La1n 6y ago
  This version has not been peer reviewed, the peer reviewed version has many of these claims about it's man-made-ness removed https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/qrb-discovery/article/biovacc19-a-candidate-vaccine-for-covid19-sarscov2-developed-from-analysis-of-its-general-method-of-action-for-infectivity/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/qrb-discovery/articl... https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/ https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-cla...
• user_50123890 6y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ Just look at the prior chinese coronavirus-related studies, they did antibody tests in villages near bat caves for SARS-like coronaviruses, some of villagers had antibodies in 2015 despite no reported SARS infections ever near the area. Simplest conclusion: Zoonotic diseases sometimes jump from bats to humans in Chinese rural areas. The case clusters stay inside the isolated communities and stop naturally due to low population and lack of super-spreader events that can kickstart an epidemic. In 2019 it happened again, but this time a villager who was infected visited Wuhan => pandemic
• throwawaymanbot 6y ago
  how real is this article? lol...
• lazyjones 6y ago
  I wonder if this is a good point to be made against the paper's claims, given that viruses like MERS-CoV are not exactly proven to be natural in origin and even about HIV a lot of similar claims have been made over the years: Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can be found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird flu"), HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)." https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controver...
• wsc981 6y ago
  A while ago (18 June) former biology professor Bret Weinstein said the same in a Joe Rogan podcast [0], that there are several indications that seem to point out the virus is engineered. One of the most interesting point he brings up, at least from my perspective, was the following: - Bats are outdoor animals - As such a corona virus that mainly targets bats should have little trouble spreading outside - However if a virus has been studied in a lab, so perhaps the virus has mutated to spread more easily indoors and "forgot" how to spread outdoors - Hence this could be the reason why at the moment this corona virus seems to have trouble spreading outside - The virus originated very closely to a lab that is known to study virusus But Bret also brings up other points. Also, what I found very interesting about this podcast and related to the development of vaccines, is his statement on lab mice and the possibility that laboratoria currently use mice that might have been (perhaps unknowingly) conditioned to produce desirable results in tests [1]. --- [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=6770s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=6770s [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s
  • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    The "spreading indoors" argument that Bret Weinstein made was mind-numbingly stupid. I know he has a degree in biology, but this is just embarrassing. He's making an argument that this virus has been selected in a lab for a specific transmission mechanism. That means that the virus would have to have undergone many generations of animal-to-animal transmission in a lab. There's no reason why a virus would adapt to transmit well if it were being studied in cell culture - because there's no transmission involved. So Weinstein's theory requires a large-scale operation in which scientists keep large numbers of animals in the lab, and allow them to periodically come into contact in order to possibly infect one another. This has to go on for many generations, with the researchers constantly bringing in new animals to be exposed, until the virus "forgets" how to transmit outdoors. Where does Weinstein suppose this massive research operation occurred? The people he's alleging did this research are well known (and highly respected) scientists who publish their research in top international journals like Nature. Why did they keep silent about this massive research program, and how is it that none of their international colleagues had any idea about it? Meanwhile, there's an obvious reason why the virus might transmit better indoors than outdoors: many respiratory viruses do. That's one of the explanations for the existence of "flu season" - people spend more time indoors during the winter. Indoors, people are closer to one another and there isn't as much air circulation. You don't have to invent completely unsupported theories about scientists carrying out large-scale, secret animal infection experiments in order to explain why a respiratory virus might transmit better indoors than outdoors. But Bret Weinstein is doing that, because he likes attention. I was on his side in the whole Evergreen saga, but now that he's become a celebrity, it's gotten to his head and he's saying stupid things to get attention.
• jmull 6y ago
  This article is poorly argued. For example, in their point 1 they feel that since an aspect of the virus is well-adapted for humans it was not the result of evolution. However, viruses jumping between species happens naturally... because an aspect of the virus happens to be well-adapted for the new host species. In fact, in this argument they seem to misunderstand the fundamental mechanism of evolution: a random aspect of a replicating organism provides an advantage in an environment, allowing the organism to thrive. For any random aspect that provides an advantage there might be thousands, millions, or more that do not. The existence of a particular unlikely successful aspect is not an argument against natural evolution. We expect many successful aspects to be highly unlikely. Another example is in the conclusion: > Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong I think they rather significantly overstate how “parsimonious” their explanation is, but setting that aside, they scarcely address the alternative. In this article they address ways in which the virus might have been created by scientists, but do not address the ways in which the virus could have evolved naturally. You can’t conclude X is more likely than Y if you only consider the likelihood of X but not Y. So, e.g., they would need to survey the science around how viruses evolve and jump species naturally and show how it does not explain this virus. There are plenty of more flaws in this article. But I’ll stop here. It’s probably pointless to argue with reason anyway, since the people putting forward this kind of nonsense already don’t care about reason. Anyway, if this is the best case that the virus was artificially created, we can probably all rest assured it was not.
• andromeduck 6y ago
  Between this and the active surpression of research on the topic in China through intimidation and the ongoing denial and destruction of evidence, I see no reason why we ought to give China the benefit of the doubt.
• xbar 6y ago
  Very compelling.
• barbacoa 6y ago
  Found a blog a while back where they linked to all the research papers the Chinese lab in Wuhan was doing. Very interesting read. Basically they were studying animal to human virus transmission by bio engineering bat viruses to infect human cells. https://project-evidence.github.io/ https://project-evidence.github.io/
• heidegger 6y ago
  I am just astounded that anyone is taking this seriously. Epidemiologists have been warning us for decades about the increased likelihood of infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans with the exponential growth of the population and therefore, industrial-scale farming of animal. The intense proximity of animals and humans in these circumstances combined with the shortened lifespans of the animals involved means a virus that both spreads quickly and infects humans would thrive in such a situation. This speculation is as irresponsible as it is baseless. You know as well as I do it would mean World War III.
• tklenke 6y ago
  https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/ https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-cla... Not sure this is the final draft of this paper. Do we know that it is?
• tklenke 6y ago
  https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/ https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-cla... Do we know that this is the final version of the paper that was published?