34 ms·

The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

• dataflow 5y ago
  Please consider spending the ~hour or so it takes to read this. Yes, this is a repost, but I'm posting it because it hardly grabbed any attention the first couple of times people posted it. [1] [2] Yes, it's long, but it's very much worth the read. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27056327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27056327 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27062021
  • mromanuk 5y ago
    Sorry, I don’t read articles written by racists. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2834627 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2834627 https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-origin-of-white-power/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/on-the-...
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • bpodgursky 5y ago
      You could read articles by a guy who was the NYTimes science writer for 30 years though.
      • DSingularity 5y ago
        I won’t read articles by scientists who whitewash colonial European exploitation with pseudo-science which claims that Africans are poor because they have genes inferior to the rich white men of Europe. Yeah, the same men who colonized and brutally exploited Africa and India and China and the Middle East. Yeah, those that robbed the world like common bandits while pretending they had a burden to civilize the “savage”. Europeans should leave Africa alone — because they still are exploiting them — and then pay them reparations.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • mpfundstein 5y ago
          feel free to stay dumb then. probably the majority of great scientists before WWII was 'racist' one way or another. but hey. at least you are virtue signaling
    • FpUser 5y ago
      And if the article tells the truth? Why would author's racial preferences matter? You might be surprised how much of modern tech was developed by racists and other bad apples. If you are from the US try reading how your rocket / space industry had been developed for example.
      • brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        I mean, it's directly relevant: the man regurgitates tired, bad science to justify a racist worldview. His trustworthiness in this domain is compromised.
        • FpUser 5y ago
          I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research. I could not care less about author's worldview and whether he eats babies for breakfast.
          • Barrin92 5y ago
            >I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists. If you can't actually understand the science, which is perfectly reasonable given that most of us are laymen, you can read scientific journalists, but then you need to acknowledge that you operate on trust, which would mean you need to take the authors biases into account, and don't pretend you 'only care about the science'. Wade has been widely criticized on mistakes in scientific accuracy have been pointed out concerning his last books on genetics and race, and he appeared to have some sort of ideological axe to grind. The same may very well be the case here. It's trivial to misrepresent science in subtle ways to tilt a discussion one way or the other on controversial issues such as this, so author credibility matters.
            • rramadass 5y ago
              Thank you for putting it so clearly! It is disingenuous to claim to care about Science while willfully ignoring the biases inherent in the narrative of presentation.
    • fooker 5y ago
      Do you realize that is literally prejudice?
    • thu2111 5y ago
      You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing. And at any rate, the attempted smearing of anyone who points to problems in establishment thinking as a racist is trivial, completely expected of a certain segment of society and of no importance relative to the topic at hand. Wade's article not only builds an extremely strong case for the "engineered in a lab" theory, but just as importantly, shows that virology as field needs to be shut down. Virologists have been caught engaging in two conspiracies around this topic now - the conspiracy of silence by Chinese state and researchers, and the second was the deception around the letters claiming a lab leak was an absurd conspiracy theory and which boldly claimed there were no conflicts of interest even though they had the biggest conflicts imaginable. That's before we even get to the stupidity of GOF research. It's a small field with a bad culture, and as the article points out, has in the end contributed nothing to actually fighting COVID. The case for defunding it looks strong and the case for continuing it looks weak. Those things are all far more important than your allergic reaction to a man who worked for decades at the NYT of all places
      • chipotle_coyote 5y ago
        > You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing. I'm not sure you read past the first sentence of that article, since the second sentence makes it clear that Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science." It's pretty clear the reviewer -- in Scientific American, which I believe does have some bona fides -- is laying out the case that, in fact, it's prejudice, not science, and lays it out in a pretty convincing manner. The book being reviewed, as I understand it, has been pretty widely criticized not only by reviewers, but by scientists arguing that Wade misrepresented their research. Does that have any bearing on Wade's case for SARS-CoV-2 being a lab-created virus? Certainly not directly; maybe not at all. I read the whole article, and it certainly makes a plausible and compelling case! But like it or not, a lot of the conversation around "the lab creation theory" for SARS-CoV-2 has had a decidedly racial tinge. Having it turn out that this plausible and compelling case has been made by a science writer who had a recent, major work widely criticized for, ah, a decidedly racial tinge is, well... let's say "interesting." As a final note, gain-of-function research certainly sounds fraught with peril even under the best of circumstances, and these do not sound like they were the best of circumstances. I question whether that means "virology as a field needs to be shut down."
• Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  We don't want to know. That may sound a bit glib but I think it's true. What would be the reaction if we could determine the outbreak was due to an unintentional leak? China cannot reimburse the world for the economic damage covid has caused. It cannot be held accountable for all the lives that have been lost. It cannot compensate the world for the diminished quality of life we've all suffered. But there will be plenty of calls for China to do all of that. If covid is the result of Chinese negligence, the reaction and conflict across the planet over what to do about it is going to be absolutely terrible. And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release.
  • stormbrew 5y ago
    Also, even if it was an accidental release by china the situation the world finds itself in is at least as much the US' (and much of the rest of its sphere of influence's) fault for the extremely poorly coordinated response to the situation last year. China at least did something about its domestic spread. The US is a major global center of trade and travel, and in the end, much of the spread around the world is because there was basically no attempt to stop it from spreading through there. All roads lead to Rome.
  • Judgmentality 5y ago
    > And let's not even begin to think what will happen if there were to be evidence that this was an intentional release. But don't you think it's important to know this?
    • Mountain_Skies 5y ago
      It's important to know and it's important not to know. Both paths have mostly negative outcomes. The best path is for it to have been natural, second best is accidental. Intentional is unfathomable and has unlimited downside. We should all hope that's not the case here.
      • wbsun 5y ago
        +1, the truth is not important at all. The most scary path would be intentional. I can't think of any other aftermath except for WWIII.
• luxuryballs 5y ago
  > By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true. Not to get all political but this totally reminds me of Mitt Romney on Jan 6th evening when he said something to the tune of: “an (election) audit won’t satisfy, them only telling them the truth will”… how he or anyone at a news studio knew the truth when nobody else did was baffling to me
  • dang 5y ago
    "Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• thepasswordis 5y ago
  Something which hasn't been able to be answered for me on this yet: Where are all the bats infected with this virus? It it came from a bat, it would have had to be circulating in the bat population a LOT to mutate enough to jump to humans, right? So...why not go find a bad, identify the parent virus, and close this whole thing out?
  • roca 5y ago
    That is one of the points in the article in favour of a lab leak hypothesis. People have been searching for an animal host (not necessarily a bat, could be an intermediate host) for over a year now and haven't found anything. The animal host for SARS1 was found in four months.
  • bigpumpkin 5y ago
    For SARS (2003) It took 3 years to find the intermediate host (civets). And 14 years (2017) to find the bat parent of the virus[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Origin_and_animal_vectors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... Guess who found the bat host? Shi Zhengli of the very WIV in question.
    • guesst 5y ago
      That's a bit confusing because the OP makes an opposite point: "The intermediary host species of SARS1 was identified within four months of the epidemic’s outbreak, and the host of MERS within nine months."
      • zuminator 5y ago
        In 2003 it was merely suspected that covers were the intermediate. It wasn't confirmed until 2006. Read further down: "In late 2006, scientists from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention of Hong Kong University and the Guangzhou Centre for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, bearing out claims that the disease had jumped across species.[62]" It goes on to state that the bat link was confirmed in 2017.
• rramadass 5y ago
  PSA: As user "mromanuk" points out below (and links to relevant articles), the author of this article "Nicholas Wade" is a racist. So exercise caution while reading this article. Don't accept his narrative but do your own research from any "actual scientific data" leads in the article.
• amadvance 5y ago
  For such disruptive events the most logical reaction would be to shutdown all the possible causes. But wet markets and virus laboratories are still on...
  • herbst 5y ago
    As were most events for months, plenty of political rallies and other bullshit that should not have been happening and heavily contributed to the spread.
• deleted 5y ago
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• seymore_12 5y ago
  If we apply Occam's razor [1] decision between "Wuhan, however, is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world center for research on coronaviruses" and "Wuhan, there is a wet market where under certain conditions virus can jump from bat to monkey to person" is relatively straightforward But then, we should probably also apply Hanlon's razor [2] "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
  • tgv 5y ago
    Nobody has spoken of malice. It could have been a simple case of one lab worker getting infected. That would count towards stupidity. Rhetorically speaking, Hanlon's razor doesn't quite have the same weight as Occam's, if only because people tend to view behavior they don't understand as stupid. But I'll add another "razor": don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to self-interested.
    • anoncake 5y ago
      Malice is a form of self-interest.
      • koonsolo 5y ago
        I don't know why you are getting downvoted, because your statement is 100% correct.
        • anoncake 5y ago
          I wonder what people who disagree think malice actually is. Randomly harming others without even enjoying it?
          • darkerside 5y ago
            It's called masochism
• novaRom 5y ago
  There is an interesting peer reviewed paper published last month with analysis of existing facts about the origin of covid-19. A part from their conclusion: More than a year after the initial documented cases in Wuhan, the source of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be identified, and the search for a direct or intermediate host in nature has been so far unsuccessful. The low binding affinity of SARS-CoV-2 to bat ACE2 studied to date does not support Chiroptera as a direct zoonotic agent. Furthermore, the reliance on pangolin coronavirus receptor binding domain (RBD) similarity to SARS-CoV-2 as evidence for natural zoonotic spillover is flawed, as pangolins are unlikely to play a role in SARS-CoV-2′s origin and recombination is not supported by recent analysis. At the same time, genomic analyses pointed out that SARS-CoV-2 exhibits multiple peculiar characteristics not found in other Sarbecoviruses. A novel multibasic furin cleavage site (FCS) confers numerous pathogenetically advantageous capabilities, the existence of which is difficult to explain though natural evolution... source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10311-021-01211-0
  • torgian 5y ago
    I don’t pretend to understand everything here, but it sounds like the paper is saying it is very unlikely to have originated from animals?
  • ximeng 5y ago
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... Here is a paper that states that the furin cleavage site appears naturally in a number of viruses. I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose. It’s a bit beyond me as a non-biologist but my feeling based on the literature was that the lab origin was unlikely. However it is pushed in certain circles partly for ideological reasons, based on evidence that is plausible at first glance but with a lot more digging not entirely convincing evidence. However, there didn’t really seem to be much neutral expert analysis of the evidence.
• BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Note that there was an interview with a virologist last October that raised most of the same points as this article : https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-being-seriously-questioned https://news.cnrs.fr/articles/the-origin-of-sars-cov-2-is-be...
  • guesst 5y ago
    https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/an-interview-with-richard-ebright-anthony-fauci-francis-collins-systematically-thwarted/ https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/an-inter... is also an interesting and relevant interview.
  • isolli 5y ago
    Key quote: "as long as no intermediate host has been identified, the scientific community cannot rule out the possibility of an accidental leak"
• dehrmann 5y ago
  Side question: what was the reason the WHO had a team inspect the lab in Wuhan a year after the outbreak happened? What would they even look for?
  • nairboon 5y ago
    Because they weren't allowed to inspect earlier. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52420536 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52420536
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  Nice layout of the dominating conspiracy theory that is constantly being repeated on various alt-right media. Basically COVID-19 is the result of evil and illegal experiments setup by Anthony Fauci (US researcher and long time civil servant) at the Wuhan virology lab and covered up by WHO scientists. It is as idiotic as it sounds.
  • throwaway4good 5y ago
    For an alternative perspective on this - the official WHO report covers the lab hypothesis: https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the... Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus And unlike the author here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees. For more from one of the WHO people: https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-the-whos-covid-19-mission-to-china-heres-what-we-found-about-the-origins-of-the-coronavirus-155554 https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t... I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
    • roca 5y ago
      Unfortunately the doctor's report amounts to "we asked them if the virus escaped from their lab and they said no".
• throwaway4good 5y ago
  For an alternative perspective on this - the official WHO report covers the lab hypothesis: https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the-virus https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the... Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus And unlike the arrticle here, this report is based upon interviews with employees at the lab and various form of documentation provided by the lab. Including health records of the employees. For more from one of the WHO people: https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-the-whos-covid-19-mission-to-china-heres-what-we-found-about-the-origins-of-the-coronavirus-155554 https://theconversation.com/i-was-the-australian-doctor-on-t... I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus
  • harry8 5y ago
    Heavy on "we looked at and we found x." Light on reasoning on why the conclusions are drawn and from what evidence.
  • Clewza313 5y ago
    So I've been pretty skeptical of the lab theory to date, but: > We visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is an impressive research facility, and looks to be run well, with due regard to staff health. We spoke to the scientists there. We heard that scientists’ blood samples, which are routinely taken and stored, were tested for signs they had been infected. No evidence of antibodies to the coronavirus was found. We looked at their biosecurity audits. No evidence. So this is what they were told, but did they actually test the samples, and confirm that they belonged to the right people and originated from the given date? Apparently no. > We looked at the closest virus to SARS-CoV-2 they were working on — the virus RaTG13 — which had been detected in caves in southern China where some miners had died seven years previously. But all the scientists had was a genetic sequence for this virus. They hadn’t managed to grow it in culture. This is probably the most convincing argument: if they actually had worked on viruses similar enough to plausible be modified into SARS-CoV-2, this would have left evidence in scientific papers etc. > While viruses certainly do escape from laboratories, this is rare. So, we concluded it was extremely unlikely this had happened in Wuhan. This is incredibly weak: "lab escapes are rare, so it's extremely unlikely" is not much of an argument.
• ransElectronics 5y ago
  The question isn't whether or not it escaped from a lab. The question is whether or not China released it from their lab deliberately.
  • Hitton 5y ago
    Why would they do that? It would be trivial to release it somewhere else so it couldn't be linked back to them.
• BillyTheKing 5y ago
  the fact that this theory is still around after more than a year and not completely debunked is quite telling by itself. I thought this was a complete conspiracy theory last year, but the longer it sticks around the more likely it does become.
  • hmry 5y ago
    People still think the moon landings were fake 50 years later, and that Bush did 9/11 20 years later. I guess most conspiracy theories must be true if we go by "still around after a year" as our metric.
    • open0 5y ago
      Bush's friends "did" 9/11, as in orchestrated it, suppressed investigations into it, and even directly funded it in the form of $130,000 USD transferred to two of the attackers days before the attacks. Didn't you know that?
  • altacc 5y ago
    Debunking a theory doesn't make it disappear. Sometime it can do the opposite and reinforce the theory. In this case there is no smoking gun either way and a natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin. That lack of absolute certainty, which science is often comfortable working with, leaves room for alternative theories to circulate and attach to those who like the sound of them for various reasons. It is a common human flaw that being aware that an event could hypothetically occur can be mistaken for proof that event actually occurred.
    • darkerside 5y ago
      It can be rational to behave as if the event did occur if you don't know that it didn't. Even if we're 50/50 on the source of the virus, maybe we should still ban or regulate GoF research, and consider banning or regulating some types of wet markets.
      • 5y ago
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  I don't really think it matters a whole lot whether it jumped species or was created in a lab. I think the issue is that there are nearly 8 billion people on the planet and that fact has somehow fundamentally changed how disease spreads and mutates. We need to be figuring out how to deal with that. Wondering where it came from is mostly neither here nor there. We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab. If we can determine for certain that this jumped species, welp, it isn't the first time and it won't be the last.
  • darkerside 5y ago
    > We aren't going to magically stop doing lab experiments if we can know for certain that it started in a lab. No magic required, we can just stop. Or better yet and more realistic, update and enforce regulations on this type of research. Personally, I don't care whether it was a lab or not. The fact we haven't disproven it means it's not all that unlikely, and I think we should reform research practices now. We don't need to prove it did happen if we already know it could happen.
  • strogonoff 5y ago
    The issue with COVID is the precedent of attempts of trying to identify the origin of this new disease being sabotaged for seemingly political reasons (and with no obvious repercussions). It seems intuitive that knowing the origin of the virus (sample escaping a lab or pure nature) could help prevent similar cases in the future or deal with them more efficiently. Is my intuition wrong here?
    • astrange 5y ago
      Even if it's a natural sample that escaped a lab, cleaning up the lab doesn't necessarily help anything because it's not the actual reservoir of the virus.
      • adriancr 5y ago
        it helps avoid the issue in the future... It would mean countries that have labs would either be forced to allow constant audits and reasonable regulations (such as don't have labs in cities) or face isolation. It would also mean quite a heavy political response towards china if it indeed escaped a lab (which is why they're sabotaging everything even if it didn't...)
• ankitg12 5y ago
  Quite detailed and well-referenced look at the origin of virus. These questions were raised earlier too - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoUYq_QGJ0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoUYq_QGJ0w Can't help feeling sad, and bewildered in capacity of humans to cause damage at this level - the havoc this (human-made) virus is inflicting on people - close and faraway.
• antoineiomena 5y ago
  Long time lurker. Some questions for people that know more about this. How many Institutes of Virology exist around the world? Is there a way to know how and by who are they funded? Is there a way to know which ones were/had been working with coronavirus/sars?
  • nairboon 5y ago
    Here is a list of the labs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_facilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...
• CraigJPerry 5y ago
  Whatever the case turns out to be, i can’t help think of click and clack’s electric trailer brakes situation as i read the comment threads. https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-letter https://www.cartalk.com/radio/letter/andy-letter Original section of the episode: https://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/bestmoments/201929.mp3 https://www.cartalk.com/sites/default/files/bestmoments/2019...
• _trampeltier 5y ago
  For me it felt allways a bit strange how fast china acted. The virus was very fresh, nothing was known, just a few cases and china totaly locked down millions if people. Two, three months later, when we already had high numbers if cases in the west, lockdowns started in the west also. But everybody said, "we know nothing about this new virus". For me it allways like, china knew much more about the virus early on.
  • tomp 5y ago
    This is easily explained by a combination of past experience (SARS), Chinese dictatorship (Western countries can’t realistically solder people into their homes), hubris (“our medical system is so good that we could easily handle a pandemic”), wokeism (locking borders is evil) and scientific failures in medicine (if it’s not proven by randomised controlled trials, it doesn’t exist). Add a bit of political infighting in the mix (which presumably doesn’t exist in China) and ...
    • dataflow 5y ago
      That's a mix of some 5-6 factors... what does "easily" mean here?
      • usui 5y ago
        Parent comment was highlighting that a healthy variety of plausible factors contributed to each respective country's outcome, and not all of them would have to be true to produce such an outcome Not "easily" in the sense that it's easy to pinpoint the exact recipe, but "easily" in that the opposite outcomes would have been far more unlikely
      • tomp 5y ago
        Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.
• deleted 5y ago
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• pizza234 5y ago
  I'm very confused by the article. There has been an extensive analysis by a virologist on Reddit[¹], who claimed that, very simply, SARS-COV2 is a so-called "mosaic" virus, while man-made viruses are inevitably "chimera" ones. The article does not seem to make this distinction. The virologist also chimed on HN (besides, calling BS on people who were, out of ignorance, spreading false beliefs), but it seems he's not participating to this post. It'd be best to have the opinion of a specialized scientist, in order to to have scientific clarity before starting the political arguments. [¹]=https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did_not_come_from_the_wuhan_institute_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...
  • ethor 5y ago
    I think you should be wary of your semantics, there is seemingly a consensus that the virus is not man-made - the question is if the virus "escaped" from a laboratory in Wuhan (originating from nature, however studied in a controlled environment). The link you provided does discuss the probability of the virus accidentally leaking from a laboratory, however the reasons provided does not really provide much facts, seemingly more speculation (except for facts regarding who we think is patient zero): "The WIV, and Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi’s lab group, are extremely well-respected in the virology community. As well respected as many US scientists. ● All the WIV’s sampling of bats and the genomes that they find in bats are publicly available information. Why isn’t SARS-CoV-2 on any of those lists? We would know. ● This doesn’t look anything like any laboratory accident that we’ve seen before. ● The evidence we have points to Patient Zero being nowhere near the City of Wuhan." (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9jI9WX7/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kAHSEx9-eIyVIahczH8itHaUm9j...)
  • darkerside 5y ago
    It's a false dichotomy between natural and manmade. What about a virus that naturally occurred in a bat cave, was studied in a lab, and escaped from the lab later? What if that virus mutated unintentionally while in the lab? And what if its mutation was encouraged by researchers in the lab? Occam's Razor, to me, suggests that it's more likely the virus came from the nearby infectious disease lab than from the wet market that operated probably for centuries.
• williesleg 5y ago
  China. Watch the bots here.
• blaydator 5y ago
  There’s is a French book just released about this : « Sars-CoV-2, aux origines du mal » by Brice Perrier and an interview also in French https://youtu.be/1wul4z8pmzU https://youtu.be/1wul4z8pmzU
• tomkwok 5y ago
  Previous submission (3 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27026039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27026039
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  Years from now people will look back and say: "Hmmmm. On one hand, Wuhan Institute of Virology is located where the outbreak started. On the other hand, they did have some markets where people sold animals. Tough call." Then they'll laugh and joke about how badly people were manipulated.
• uvesten 5y ago
  I think most people are confused because of CCP’s successful disinformation campaign, and also out of fear of being seen as prejudiced. The fact is that an epidemic with a corona virus (never before or since seen in the wild) with a peculiarly efficient ability to infect humans started in the _only city in the world with a lab where gain-of-function experiments on corona viruses_ is located. Just apply occam’s razor, and then you are done. Every other theory requires involving many more unsupported hypotheses. This would be obvious to the majority of the HN population in most cases, but the disinformation in this case is apparently quite effective.
  • Consultant32452 5y ago
    I would like to add another factor in your favor for this hypothesis. Naturally occurring viruses/bacteria tend to evolve to spread most effectively in conditions similar to how animals live: outside. COVID-19, conversely, seems to fair poorly outside and spreads most rapidly in indoor conditions not unlike one would expect in a human run laboratory environment.
    • risaacs99 5y ago
      A virus with a novel mutation favoring humans would be successful infecting humans, period. I can't imagine any respiratory virus that wouldn't spread more effectively indoors. This "factor" is not particularly compelling (to me).
    • dont__panic 5y ago
      Just to play devil's advocate, wouldn't COVID-19 also spread particularly efficiently in, say, a cave? Where bats live?
      • celticninja 5y ago
        Wouldn't they have located the cave by now, and a load of bats infected with the virus.
        • 5y ago
• batushka3 5y ago
  There is Brazilian strain, South African strain, UK strain in the media everywhere. But there is no China or Wuhan virus in the media! Chinese comunist party did really well hiding origin of the virus, up to the language level.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  “ It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”” This is news to me. Wtf?
  • throwaway8581 5y ago
    Trump said it was China’s fault, and orange man is bad, so any alternative discussion was basically prohibited until after Biden took office.
  • AzzieElbab 5y ago
    I read Josh Rogin earlier articles on the subject. He also recently implicated Fauchi for covertly funding gain of function research, and he is pushing for congressional oversight/investigation https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/congress-is-finally-investigating-the-lab-accident-covid-19-origin-theory/2021/05/06/d7bfb0e4-aeaf-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...
    • newacct583 5y ago
      > He also recently implicated Fauchi for covertly funding gain of function research I'm sorry, that essay (which is an opinion piece, not a work of investigative journalism) says absolutely nothing of the sort. What's your source on that? That's a pretty ridiculous accusation if you don't have evidence.
      • AzzieElbab 5y ago
        Rogin covers this in his book “Chaos under heaven” and his earlier articles. Here is Rogan/Rogin snippet https://youtu.be/IqhKlkkc2Eo https://youtu.be/IqhKlkkc2Eo
• stelcodes 5y ago
  People are quite literally part of nature
• followtheplot 5y ago
  "... proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence." "The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities." This is a fantastic article, but amazingly almost all of it is year-old news. Most of this was known in March 2020, and nearly all of it by the end of 2020. How does it take so long for the truth to win? I published a meta-analysis covering much of the same ground in November 2020 and this was only after waiting and expecting for several months that someone with a better platform would do so first. The article above covers the most important points but the story does go deeper: https://followtheplot.org/covid19 https://followtheplot.org/covid19
  • shoto_io 5y ago
    Well, I can relate to that. Most of 2020 we were focused on fighting the aftermath of the crisis. Now that things slowly are getting back to normal, at least in some Western countries, our focus shifts to the origins. I was also very skeptical in the beginning about the escape theory tbh. But after reading a couple of pieces I’m opening up to the possibility.
    • unanswered 5y ago
      And how does this justify moral superiority to those of us who understood from the beginning that the lab hypothesis was the most likely? Or was that not true until you decided it was true?
      • roenxi 5y ago
        People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future. A body wandering around saying "I was right" is likely to get ignored, because people assume they were unreasonable and lucky, and therefore unlikely to be a good source of information in the future. Besides, it doesn't really matter. Lab accidents were going to happen and are going to happen regardless of where COVID came from. China as a nation isn't exactly responsible and whatever people do next will be more about geopolitics than about details like the virus' genesis. And a natural origin can't be ruled out either.
• Bayesian_bro 5y ago
  The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/11427_2017_Article_9189.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
  • zby 5y ago
    I thought you misrepresented the linked paper - as it was clearly about checking some cross-immunity and not recombining genes - but then I found out deeper in the abstract: """ Since SHC014 could not be success fully isolated, a recombinant virus (rWIV1-SHC014S) was constructed based on the WIV1 backbone with the replacement of SHC014S gene, as described previously (Zengetal.,2016). The S sequence of SHC014 was amplified with primer pair (F-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-AGTGGTCTCAACGAA-CATGAAATTGTTAGTTTTAGTTTTTGCTAC-3′ and R-SHC014-Bsa I, 5′-TCAGGTCTCAGTTCGTTTATGTG-TAATGTAATTTGACACCCTTG-3′), digested with BsaI, and inserted into an artificial bacterial chromosome along with the other viral cDNA fragments."""
    • xjlin0 5y ago
      Recombination virus is commonly made everywhere, including US or China. Researchers made it mostly for getting genes for later use, antibody/antigen analysis in this case. Using virus/BAC is a very common lab technique and is very different from "intentionally making virus as a weapon to kill human". You can reconfirm with any of your wet-lab biotech majored friends. Please run an sequence analysis between rWIV1-SHC014S and the current COVID-19 virus before drawing misleading conclusion. One analogy for developers: Bad persons are using git to develop ransomware, and company X is also using git, therefore company X is developing ransomware.
• hermitsings 5y ago
  https://nutritionfacts.org/video/where-did-the-covid-19-coronavirus-come-from/ https://nutritionfacts.org/video/where-did-the-covid-19-coro...
• fidesomnes 5y ago
  "More than a year after the initial documented cases in Wuhan, the source of SARS-CoV-2 has yet to be identified, and the search for a direct or intermediate host in nature has been so far unsuccessful." I believe it is know and is classified as Top Secret which is why there is a total blackout in Western news agency's investigations into this issue. It will not be revealed until 2024 after the election and it is my speculative belief that Trump hinted what they already knew in 2020.
• okprod 5y ago
  I have colleagues in relevant sectors in China and they were telling me about lab origins when this first started last year. I didn't believe them but I'm not qualified to really have an opinion on the matter.
  • thepasswordis 5y ago
    Even amateur OSINT people in the US were making the (imo obvious) connection between WIV and what at that time was called the wuhan flu. What is the likelihood that a novel SARS virus happens to emerge in the same major metropolitan area that also happens to host a BSL4 lab, which happens to be in a couple try with a long history of labs leaking SARS viruses?
    • throwaway210222 5y ago
      > What is the likelihood that a novel SARS virus happens to emerge in the same major metropolitan area that also happens to host a BSL4 lab, You have the causality the wrong way around. The lab is there [Wuhan] because that is where the coronaviruses reservoirs are.
      • gdubs 5y ago
        Except it’s not, and the fact that it arose in Wuhan made the director of the lab herself incredibly concerned: “Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.”” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
      • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
        Lots of Yunnanese bats in Hubei. Who doesn't know the famous caves of downtown Wuhan where they congregate every evening.
• TheGigaChad 5y ago
  The Pandora's box is the Lockdown, not covid-19.
• Workaccount2 5y ago
  If it did escape from the lab, I cannot help but think about how fateful of an event lead up to it... A tech accidently knocking over a beaker? A tiny rip in a bio-suite thrown in a trash, missed the can, and picked up and put back on the shelf by another worker? A leaking containment vessel, known to need replacing, but still worked "good enough"? An animal infected with the virus, handled by someone who wasn't aware of what it had? Endless possibilities, but likely something so small and seemingly insignificant.
  • Too 5y ago
    Bio-suite? According to article the lab was BSL-2 - "the biosafety level of a standard US dentist’s office"
• caseysoftware 5y ago
  I think the media successfully conflated four separate questions: a) Did it form in nature or in a lab? b) Did it become more communicable via nature or via the lab? c) Did it make it to humans through nature (or wet market) or via the lab? d) If it came from the lab was it on purpose or an accident? as simply "OMG IT CAME FROM A LAB" and then claimed it's all a conspiracy theory. The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one and we'll all be worse off for it.
  • teachingassist 5y ago
    I also think 'wet market' is still a conflation here - the first or earliest location that a cluster of the virus was identified, and the site of a significant evolutionary event, are not and were never likely to be the same. We only are led to think that because the media repeated it so often. Human-to-human transmission started (almost certainly) with one human, not one animal transmitting to multiple humans.
  • thomascgalvin 5y ago
    > The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one and we'll all be worse off for it. Science reporters don't generally understand science, and nuanced takes don't generate clicks. The "media" is the absolute worst place for this discussion to take place.
  • maybelsyrup 5y ago
    > The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one I don't have any evidence of this, but I don't think it was as accidental as shooting yourself in the foot. Media people know what they're doing.
  • tnzm 5y ago
    It's less "shot themselves in the foot" and more "broke our legs". Mass media's entire function has been reduced to hobbling public discourse.
  • pbourke 5y ago
    The article refers to two letters from leading researchers arguing against the lab escape hypothesis, one published in a Nature journal. It’s not like the media were spinning this story out of whole cloth. The whole thing was unfortunately hyper politicized from the start.
• amriksohata 5y ago
  The origin of Covid is our greed and lust for wealth. China never ate or consumed Bat of wild animal meat until the last few centuries. Lets ask the Whys? Why did they start consuming it? Because of the lack of food. Why was there a lack of food? Because of poverty Why was there poverty? Multiple years of bad rule. Why was there so much bad rule? Multiple years of invasions which hooked the population on poppy drugs. Why were they hooked on these drugs and made poor? So another country could get rich. Thats the reason we have Covid today. Its called Karma.
• briandear 5y ago
  > From early on, public and media perceptions were shaped in favor of the natural emergence scenario by strong statements from two scientific groups. These statements were not at first examined as critically as they should have been. The propaganda from the CCP played a major part of that “shaping.” It’s critical that the influence of the CCP on the head of the WHO not be ignored. Reporters seem to ignore the potential conflict of interest given that the WHO head was the former foreign minister of Ethiopia and oversaw billions in Chinese investment in that country. It’s not inconceivable that he was personally enriched with Chinese money during his days overseeing the Chinese “investment.”
• sradman 5y ago
  Nicholas has Waded (pun intended) into the waters of irrational horror over gain-of-function research that seems to gain viral traction following every spill-over event. The only argument presented in the article that leans towards the lab-leak hypothesis is the human-preffered double CGG codon that appears in the furin cleavage site; this is nothing like a smoking gun, IMO. Yesterday's TWiV 751 covered a paper The furin cleavage site in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is required for transmission in ferrets [1] which has the following abstract: > To investigate the importance of the spike polybasic CS of SARS-CoV-2 (PRRAR), a number of spike mutants predicted to modulate the efficiency of furin cleavage were generated (Fig. 1a), including: substituting two upstream arginines to produce a monobasic CS similar to SARS-CoV spike (monoCS), replacing the tribasic CS with the furin CS of a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza haemagglutinin containing seven basic amino acids (H5CS) and two naturally occurring deletions seen following passage in Vero E6 cells and/or in clinical isolates21,26. The first deletion removes eight amino acids including all three arginines of the PRRAR site (ΔCS), while the other removes five flanking amino acids but retains the tribasic CS (Δflank). The mutations were engineered into a spike expression plasmid to enable cell surface expression and generation of coronavirus lentiviral PVs. In addition, to study the importance of the PRRAR motif in the context of live virus, we used a naturally occurring Vero-cell-adapted mutant SARS-CoV-2, ΔCS26. This variant and the wild-type (WT) virus from which it was derived were cloned by limiting dilution to enable studies using individual genotypes. This is the horror of in vitro and in vivo viral lab research and the result is a magnificent advancement of our understanding of SARS-CoV-2, the furin cleavage site, and its role in TMPRSS2 assisted membrane entry. This research follows the equally eye-opening paper covered in TWiV 715 that explained why hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) failed; Vero E6 cells lack TMPRRS2 so HCQ fully blocks entry via endocytosis. It should be noted that this study includes MERS-CoV which also has a furin cleavage site; falsifying one of the claims of Wade's article. Regardless, lab experiments begin with one or more viral isolates and molecular clock techniques should show that the original Wuhan variant has almost identical non-coding genome segments compared to existing lab isolates. The RaTG13 sequence is a very distant relative using this measure. Also, RaTG13 is not an isolate, only an RNA sample collected in wild bat anal swabs. Conflating viral isolates with RNA samples seems to be a common error; an entry in a genetic database does not imply that a viable viral line exists in a lab. A RaTG13 lab isolate would have been an important achievement to further our scientific understanding. I'm confused by the dismissals of the natural origins hypothesis. The horseshoe bat roosts, that are studied, are mostly found in or near Kunming, Yunnan. This lush wild area is part of the Lancang/Mekong River watershed/ecosystem shared by nocturnal bats and nocturnal arboreal mammals like palm civets, pangolins, and raccoon dogs. The nearby villages contain people engaged in guano collection, the wildlife trade, and domestic livestock farming. The average incubation time of COVID-19 is 4.5 days. Armed with Google maps and a basic understanding of planes, trains, and automobiles we can gauge travel time from Kunming Airport to either Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (2 hr 5 min) or Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport (2 hrs). In 2003, SARS-1 emerged in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) and the now demonized Dr. Zheng-li Shi and her team traced the origins to palm civets (the intermediate host). Why is this so hard? Why do we not ridicule the assumption that travel between major Chinese transportation hubs must leave a wake of infections along the path? Finally, Wade's article mentions a U.S. State Department claim [2]: > The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses. If true, this is an important early super-spreader event but the remainder of the release consists of a facile analysis performed by people more knowledgeable in geopolitics than science. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-021-00908-w [2] https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan-institute-of-virology/index.html https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
• arisAlexis 5y ago
  As a layman I found the odds of this happening near the only bsl4 lab dealing with coronaviruses so improbable I didn't even need to wait for great articles like these to make up my mind. The politics of it are extremely complicated. What do we do if indeed this happened? Can we drive ourselves to bigger catastrophes in form of war?
• guilhas 5y ago
  Created in a US lab, released in China, as part of covert biological warfare
• bloak 5y ago
  Part of this discussion has got me thinking. If I were setting up a laboratory that does research on infective diseases I would definitely set it up as a small separate company, which would then apply for a research grant from the government, rather than as a wholly-owned part of some government department/ministry. Just in case, you know, some stupid employee slipped up and caused USD 10^N damages worldwide and there were to be a legal claim against the employer. I wonder how the Wuhan laboratory was set up, legally. I wonder how other similar laboratories around the world are set up. Another thought: I have so many times seen people write that if COVID was the result of an accident in a laboratory then "China" would be to blame. Would people blaim "Germany" for an accident in a German laboratory? I don't think so, at least not to the same extent. People seem to subconsciously think that China is the borg, or something.
  • tbiteteitb 5y ago
    I would in fact blame whatever country if they decided to rug vital informed under the carpet and let the disease spread in and out of their borders.
• justnotworthit 5y ago
  I've seen the politico article and now this one. Is there an article like these from a source without political goals (https://thebulletin.org/about-us/ https://thebulletin.org/about-us/), perhaps written by a scientist, or in a journal, etc? I'd like to be able to share an article from a website that doesn't also write about Trump and facebook.
• ngcc_hk 5y ago
  “Angus ... Reply to Michael McElfresh The question of SARS-CoV-2’s origin has little bearing on the trajectory of the current pandemic. But it’s hugely important when it comes to preventing future pandemics. If the research that supposedly protects us from zoonotic spillovers is in fact increasing the net pandemic risk (due to human error, accident, etc), then that research needs to be halted. At the very least, it should be limited and done only under tightly controlled conditions. This would require international agreement, and perhaps an auditing regime with actual teeth. One thing is for sure though: we will never sort this out if we leave it to the WHO, and to certain researchers who have a personal/financial stake in preserving the status quo.“ The institution like china, lancet, the virologist community ... is what worry me more. Accident happened. But if this is nuclear accident ... but it seems we can let Soviet Union covered up the investigation to the nuclear plant accident because it is funded by America. Without fixing the institution all is lost. And it seemed instead of fixing it the America would let the technology that grounded the other “dangerous” way of making vaccines to everyone without ip protection. Commerical interest whilst is not the best way to protect is still an alternative to this scientific community that seems not able to. At least sine did not. Government, public institutions, medical, scientific, commercial, social, media ... what is left. Good luck humanity.
• pyrotactics 5y ago
  Thought this was a hackers platform for hacking news and vulnerabilities?
• smsm42 5y ago
  Are we back at the stage where considering any options but the bat/pangolin/wet market/etc. theory of COVID origin, endorsed by WHO, doesn't get you banned from major social media and proclaimed conspiracy theorist? Good if so.
• MilnerRoute 5y ago
  For what it's worth, Peter Daszak responded to this article - but only obliquely. He retweeted a tweet that pointed out Nicholas Wade has been accused in the past of grossly misrepresenting research. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/geneticists-decry-book-race-and-evolution https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/geneticists-decry-bo...
• davenquinn 5y ago
  It's interesting to think about the interference between the politics and the science of looking too deeply at this last year. Essentially, the Trump administration came out strongly for the lab theory early on and linked it to their "China virus" narrative. This was a rhetorical bludgeon (like so much from that administration) to avoid dealing with the problem, with the likely added effect of fomenting reprisals towards Asians. So the science and media had to (or chose to) avoid the issue for fear of the baggage entailed. Now it's becoming safe to question scientists again without looking like you're on the side of the crazies. So we are elevating these voices now. There are many things to take away from this, but institutional rot and bad incentives from the top start shading everybody's actions.
• CodeNamedTIGER 5y ago
  The GoI is now stepping up for giving vaccination to almost the entire working population between 18 to 45 years of age. REad more: https://www.genxsentinel.news/govt-of-india-has-so-far-provided-more-than-17-35-crore-vaccine-doses-to-states-uts-free-of-cost/ https://www.genxsentinel.news/govt-of-india-has-so-far-provi...
• t0rst 5y ago
  FWIW, one virologist's thoughts on Nicholas Wade: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1390638585922035712 https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13906385859220357...
• watertom 5y ago
  China knew they had a problem in late 2019, when there were very few cases. The COVID presents as the flu, the symptoms are the same, so that means without a test there needs to be some other way to identify that a new virus is spreading. The way to identify if a new virus is spreading is basically 3 ways: Dramatic increase in cases: In the U.S. for the last 20 years there has been a low of 9.3M cases and a high of 45M cases. China has had similar numbers, so in order to get someone's attention we'd need a ridiculous spike in cases in a very short time, and in October, November, and early December China did not have that ridiculous spike in cases. So they would not have known a new virus was circulating based on cases. Different symptoms: Covid presents as the flu, so there was no way to know that a new virus was circulating based on symptoms Increased deaths: In the U.S. for the last 20 years we've seen a range of 12,000 to 65,0000 deaths, a pretty wide range. China has seen similar numbers, so in order to get someone's attention we'd need to see a huge spike in deaths before it would get someone's attention, and again in October, November and early December China did not have a huge spike in deaths. Basically the 3 ways to know something different is happening, didn't take place. Which leads me to he most important question no one is asking, "How did China know they had a problem when there wasn't any data that would tell them something different was happening?" This for me is the real question. IMHO the only way China was able to discover they had something different going on is because they had prior knowledge or information. I don't think this was malicious, I think they were studying the virus in the lab, and a Jr. member of the team did something dumb or had an accident, and wanting to avoid getting into trouble the Jr. member of the team covered up what happened. Then that Jr. member of the team got sick, and some other people they knew got sick, probably other members of the lab team and it was at his point Lab management knew they had a problem. This is how China knew they had a problem when only a handful of people are sick.