6 ms·

Actually a lot of virologists are also critical of GOF. Just look at public health people, epidemiologists. Folks like Andrea Sant, Michael Osterholm, David To

Actually a lot of virologists are also critical of GOF. Just look at public health people, epidemiologists. Folks like Andrea Sant, Michael Osterholm, David Topham, etc. These folks criticize GOF all the time, and are a big part of the group that helps write regulations to make Virology research safe. But you know what these same virologists also don't believe? That SARS-COV-2 was cooked up in a lab. That should tell you something. Science is adversarial, and virology is no exception. That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one.

Banyonite 6y ago
> That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one. Respecting a consensus is reasonable. That having been said, I would be interested to hear what the virologists to whom you refer think about Ralph Baric's work. Ralph Baric is a very well-known virologist specializing in corona virology. His group synthesized quite a few SARS-CoV variants, a number of years before SARS-CoV-2 made its appearance. While there's no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, there are quite a few studies describing the synthesis of different SARS-CoV variants, some quite dangerous. From one of many papers on which he was a co-author (https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048.full https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048.full): "Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B)" EDIT: jeduehr, given your background in virology, I would be interested in any technical critique you may have regarding the Yuri Deigin article referenced in my post below.
- jeduehr 6y ago
  It's important to understand the distinction between chimeric and mosaic viruses. Baric makes Chimeras. CoV-2 in comparison to the other closely related viruses in nature, is a mosaic. Lots of little changes all over the genome, not big copy and pastes. See here for more detail on that distinction: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpbagf https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpbagf
- jeduehr 6y ago
  Hi, I made a response to the Deigin medium post in your original context. Sorry I don't have time to go more in depth, that thing is a beast. But he makes a few fundamental mistakes that tear at his core argument that I think are sufficient to show he doesn't really know what he's talking about in this arena.
- jeduehr 6y ago
  Wow I also describe elsewhere how his understanding of the CGGCGG codon usage is truly flawed. It looks like these codons weren't actually there in the earliest sequences of the pandemic, but evolved over time as the virus adapted to us as a host. Really not the smoking gun he thinks it is. If you wanna see what I mean, just search this page for "CGGCGG"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChemSpider 6y ago
> That SARS-COV-2 was cooked up in a lab This is a straw man argument. No one is seriously claiming that this is a "cooked up" (artificially created) virus. It could be a natural virus that escaped the lab.
- jeduehr 6y ago
  Hi, I actually wrote a direct response to this idea in my original post. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0nNzLc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0... (Footnote 1) Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that. As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of people with little knowledge of the subject matter. To draw a very clear distinction in the sand, I never said we can be 100% certain that this virus didn't originate in a lab. It's just really really unlikely. And there isn't any real evidence to support it. /Maybe/ some circumstantial evidence in the geographic proximity. But even that is probably irrelevant if the current epidemiological evidence is to be believed, which shows that the virus likely jumped into humans outside of Wuhan entirely. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/fqpcfs2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... In order of likelihood, based on all available evidence and expert consensus: zoonotic release >>> accidental lab release of a wildly collected virus >>>>>>> accidental lab release of a "cooked up" virus > intentional lab release of a "cooked up virus"
  - ricksunny 6y ago
    By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old. And here is fresh evidence that labs in Wuhan have worked on unpublished coronaviruses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources. This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute: https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/1379399005763960835?s=21 https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/137939900576396083... The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study particularly) claim that they knew what viruses WIV researchers were working on.
ricksunny 6y ago
@jeduehr No one established there was a consensus, nor should a consensus necessarily be respected out of hand even if there was one. (Recall that it was not long ago that there was ‘consensus’ that sc2 couldn’t pass human-to-human, or that non-healthcare workers shouldn’t wear masks to name a few examples). A lot of lab leak researchers _are_ scientists (microbiologists, genomics researchers & bioinformaticians). The profile you describe of an anti-GOF scientist is met by Marc Lipsitch of The Cambridge Working Group, and he is far from taking any position that states a wholly zoonotic origin for sc2: https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1373978645560229890?s=21 https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1373978645560229890?s=2...
- jeduehr 6y ago
  There was never a consensus that SARS-2 couldn't pass human-to-human. Just because WHO said it doesn't mean there was a consensus. There was also never a consensus about masks, the US government and a few US virologists just felt that way. Asia and a lot of Europe definitely did not feel that way. I would urge you to be as non-America-centric as possible because the consensus that the virus is very likely not a lab leak is also global in character. I actually know Dr. Lipsitch and have met him at a conference or two before, and he's not wrong in a lot of ways, it should be investigated to the fullest extent possible, I would absolutely agree with that and have never disagreed on that. China should allow in international investigators from unbiased third-party institutions with expertise in the relevant areas. The problem, of course, is that it will likely be impossible to prove it either way. The closest we could get is identifying an extremely close relative of SARS-2 in nature, in bats or w/e, in an area where we also find Human seropositivity (antibodies in the blood). On the other side, we could find a sample of SARS-2 frozen and old in a chinese lab that shows they had it before the outbreak. I detail which things I would want to see to at least reassess my position in this part of my original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/fqpci3n/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Presumably finding unbiased people is impossible. Trump latched on to calling it the "China virus" because he knew it would feed into nationalism/separatism and harm Chinese imports. All countries are involved in global trade; at this level of importance most people could be influenced. As far as finding frozen samples, you'd also need verifiable documentation, presumably, otherwise we wouldn't know if it were a zoonotic sample ... so we wouldn't know if it were a wild origin, or a lab-captured origin? If it were a lab-release, was it accidental or the actions of some other nation wanting to harm China. It seems to me that conclusion people want is quite possibly not out there.

Banyonite 6y ago

> That's why when consensus exists about something, you should respect it. There is quite a large consensus about this one. Respecting a consensus is reasonable. That having been said, I would be interested to hear what the virologists to whom you refer think about Ralph Baric's work. Ralph Baric is a very well-known virologist specializing in corona virology. His group synthesized quite a few SARS-CoV variants, a number of years before SARS-CoV-2 made its appearance. While there's no proof that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, there are quite a few studies describing the synthesis of different SARS-CoV variants, some quite dangerous. From one of many papers on which he was a co-author (https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048.full https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048.full): "Using the SARS-CoV infectious clone as a template (7), we designed and synthesized a full-length infectious clone of WIV1-CoV consisting of six plasmids that could be enzymatically cut, ligated together, and electroporated into cells to rescue replication competent progeny virions (Fig. S1A). In addition to the full-length clone, we also produced WIV1-CoV chimeric virus that replaced the SARS spike with the WIV1 spike within the mouse-adapted backbone (WIV1-MA15, Fig. S1B)" EDIT: jeduehr, given your background in virology, I would be interested in any technical critique you may have regarding the Yuri Deigin article referenced in my post below.

jeduehr 6y ago
It's important to understand the distinction between chimeric and mosaic viruses. Baric makes Chimeras. CoV-2 in comparison to the other closely related viruses in nature, is a mosaic. Lots of little changes all over the genome, not big copy and pastes. See here for more detail on that distinction: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpbagf https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/-/fqpbagf
jeduehr 6y ago
Hi, I made a response to the Deigin medium post in your original context. Sorry I don't have time to go more in depth, that thing is a beast. But he makes a few fundamental mistakes that tear at his core argument that I think are sufficient to show he doesn't really know what he's talking about in this arena.
jeduehr 6y ago
Wow I also describe elsewhere how his understanding of the CGGCGG codon usage is truly flawed. It looks like these codons weren't actually there in the earliest sequences of the pandemic, but evolved over time as the virus adapted to us as a host. Really not the smoking gun he thinks it is. If you wanna see what I mean, just search this page for "CGGCGG"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ChemSpider 6y ago

> That SARS-COV-2 was cooked up in a lab This is a straw man argument. No one is seriously claiming that this is a "cooked up" (artificially created) virus. It could be a natural virus that escaped the lab.

jeduehr 6y ago
Hi, I actually wrote a direct response to this idea in my original post. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0nNzLc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRbACWf90iBC35xNOwlI5bWcUq0... (Footnote 1) Also, you can literally look around on this exact post and find people who believe that this virus was cooked up in a lab. There were also a lot of people on my original post who believed that. As is often the case: never underestimate the intellectual overconfidence of people with little knowledge of the subject matter. To draw a very clear distinction in the sand, I never said we can be 100% certain that this virus didn't originate in a lab. It's just really really unlikely. And there isn't any real evidence to support it. /Maybe/ some circumstantial evidence in the geographic proximity. But even that is probably irrelevant if the current epidemiological evidence is to be believed, which shows that the virus likely jumped into humans outside of Wuhan entirely. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/fqpcfs2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did... In order of likelihood, based on all available evidence and expert consensus: zoonotic release >>> accidental lab release of a wildly collected virus >>>>>>> accidental lab release of a "cooked up" virus > intentional lab release of a "cooked up virus"
- ricksunny 6y ago
  By the way, welcome to HN commments, as I note your account is five hours old. And here is fresh evidence that labs in Wuhan have worked on unpublished coronaviruses: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533 The above findings are replicable by any bioinformatician operating on published sources. This preprint was reviewed by one of the authors of the Human Genome Project’s landmark 2001 paper having served as an HGP sequencing team leader at the Whitehead Institute: https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/1379399005763960835?s=21 https://twitter.com/kevin_mckernan/status/137939900576396083... The findings critically undermine Western zoonotic scientists’ (Daszak of the WHO-convened study particularly) claim that they knew what viruses WIV researchers were working on.

ricksunny 6y ago

@jeduehr No one established there was a consensus, nor should a consensus necessarily be respected out of hand even if there was one. (Recall that it was not long ago that there was ‘consensus’ that sc2 couldn’t pass human-to-human, or that non-healthcare workers shouldn’t wear masks to name a few examples). A lot of lab leak researchers _are_ scientists (microbiologists, genomics researchers & bioinformaticians). The profile you describe of an anti-GOF scientist is met by Marc Lipsitch of The Cambridge Working Group, and he is far from taking any position that states a wholly zoonotic origin for sc2: https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1373978645560229890?s=21 https://twitter.com/mlipsitch/status/1373978645560229890?s=2...

jeduehr 6y ago
There was never a consensus that SARS-2 couldn't pass human-to-human. Just because WHO said it doesn't mean there was a consensus. There was also never a consensus about masks, the US government and a few US virologists just felt that way. Asia and a lot of Europe definitely did not feel that way. I would urge you to be as non-America-centric as possible because the consensus that the virus is very likely not a lab leak is also global in character. I actually know Dr. Lipsitch and have met him at a conference or two before, and he's not wrong in a lot of ways, it should be investigated to the fullest extent possible, I would absolutely agree with that and have never disagreed on that. China should allow in international investigators from unbiased third-party institutions with expertise in the relevant areas. The problem, of course, is that it will likely be impossible to prove it either way. The closest we could get is identifying an extremely close relative of SARS-2 in nature, in bats or w/e, in an area where we also find Human seropositivity (antibodies in the blood). On the other side, we could find a sample of SARS-2 frozen and old in a chinese lab that shows they had it before the outbreak. I detail which things I would want to see to at least reassess my position in this part of my original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/fqpci3n/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Presumably finding unbiased people is impossible. Trump latched on to calling it the "China virus" because he knew it would feed into nationalism/separatism and harm Chinese imports. All countries are involved in global trade; at this level of importance most people could be influenced. As far as finding frozen samples, you'd also need verifiable documentation, presumably, otherwise we wouldn't know if it were a zoonotic sample ... so we wouldn't know if it were a wild origin, or a lab-captured origin? If it were a lab-release, was it accidental or the actions of some other nation wanting to harm China. It seems to me that conclusion people want is quite possibly not out there.