4 ms·

> The Wuhan Institute hasn’t shared raw data, safety logs and lab records on its extensive work with coronaviruses in bats, which many consider the most likely

by aazaa 5y ago

> The Wuhan Institute hasn’t shared raw data, safety logs and lab records on its extensive work with coronaviruses in bats, which many consider the most likely source of the virus. Nevertheless, the gain of function research with coronaviruses has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature. The lack of new information from the Wuhan Institute, despite its longstanding research activities, is probably the most compelling evidence in support of the lab escape hypothesis. If the evidence pointed elsewhere, it would be released. The most likely explanation is that the Institute's fingerprints are all over this thing. The second most compelling evidence is that to date the reservoir species has not been found.

arbitrage 5y ago
> The lack of new information from the Wuhan Institute [...] is probably the most compelling evidence in support of the lab escape hypothesis. or it's just china being 100% opaque about an accident that has already damaged their international reputation, and they're controlling the narrative hard at this point. you know, like they do.
sudosysgen 5y ago
It took over five years to find the reservoir species for SARS, and decades for most viruses. It's not evidence at all because the facts match the expected result. I don't know exactly what information you would want. Every single paper about virology research from the institute was published with western authors. Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so. Instead they say that everything is normal. There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.
- kshacker 5y ago
  Just because something took 5 years last time does not mean it should take the same this time. - Our SOP should be better to analyze the information. - Given the magnitude of the problem, more eyes should be on it - tools and technologies should be better It may still take longer, but all things being equal, we should not justify anything based on the past track record. Your other point is valid though: if 3 people showed up in 1, 2 or 3 hospitals with severe flu, I would not think much of it, no one would.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The actual process of finding the viral reservoir is to go off into the wild and collect samples. It has not changed since SARS. SARS was a very big deal in China and the Chinese government allocated a lot of resources to research. As far as points one and two, that means no real improvement, as it was already in the diminishing return phase. Because of this I don't actually see why it would be any faster. SARS wasn't the first virus where finding a reservoir was tried, far from it, and the limiting factor in the search for the source is still the same. Because of this I don't expect it should be much easier this time than last time.
- encoderer 5y ago
  > Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so. Or, they thought then that the precautions were sufficient and the risks were acceptable, and they were wrong, and now would like to just look ahead and move on.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  >Had there been something wrong in the ... safety logs those authors would have said so. Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Collaborators from different institutions collaborate on research papers all the time while having no access to each others' 'safety logs'. Why would that be shared? >Instead they say that everything is normal. Which they obviously have no way of knowing, given that they are not on site, the research institute is in a secretive authoritarian country, and the implications for being 'responsible' for such a lab leak are monumental for such a regime. >There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season. The double standard is the exact opposite - flippantly dismissing the lab leak hypothesis without examination, on one side; a call to treat it on par with the purely zoonotic hypothesis and a recognition that neither hypothesis is close to being definitively proven, on the other.
- screye 5y ago
  > It took over five years to find the reservoir species for SARS You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months . (read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.) It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013) Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Identification_of_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome%E2%80%93related_coronavirus#Natural_reservoir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    > You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months . You might want to check THAT out. They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet. After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1 And specifically reference 4: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 "Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans." So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not. There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).
    - screye 5y ago
- suifbwish 5y ago
  You are ignoring the vast statistical improbability of the first outbreak occurring at the one wet market that happens to be within 10 miles of the ONLY two coronavirus research labs in mainland China out of THOUSANDS of other wet markets across the country. Correlation is not causation but I think it’s fairly obvious that the chances of that occurring coincidentally in the context are some pretty steep odds.
  - raarts 5y ago
    Great point.
tim333 5y ago
>the gain of function research with coronaviruses has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature The main peer reviewed gain of function research cited is https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 done in 2015 in the US with one of the researchers being Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab. I'm not sure there are any papers on gain of function research done in Wuhan?
justnotworthit 5y ago
Can we add?: Why aren't the people behind GoF in Wuhan (from grant funders, to scientists, to CCP) shouting from the rooftops that their research (1) was necessary all along and justified their fight to protect it (2) and can now quickly lead cures and vaccines, as promised? Instead, nothing. In their perfect moment of glory and justification, they prefer you didn't notice their work.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  There's still no evidence that WIV was doing GoF research in Wuhan. Nobody has ever come forward to say that was happening and there's no evidence that it ever happened. The simplest explanation of why nobody is defending the GoF research is that it never happened. Researchers from WIV collaborated with UNC Chapel Hill in 2015 to do that kind of research on SARS-1-related viruses, and that happened in the US. That gain of function experiment in mice was also to gain function in mice, it would reduce its ability to infect humans. And if you took RaTG13 and spliced in the surface protein of SARS-1 so it bound to ACE and then ran it through mice you'd still not wind up with SARS-CoV-2. The original virus is too far distant (only 96% homology) and running it through mice would produce a virus that was poorly adapted to humans. And the spike protein would look more like SARS-CoV-1.
  - halsom 5y ago
    “Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.” https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
    - lamontcg 5y ago
      That's at least more plausible, but the workers who farm bat guano probably have many thousands more times the human-bat contact than the WIV workers ever did. They're far from the only humans venturing into bat caves in China.
mr_woozy 5y ago
I don't know how you managed to mentally back flip around the idea that you're trying to prove something via lack of information but it's ludicrous that you feel it's compelling evidence for others. Leave the discussion to adults.
- skynet-9000 5y ago
  > Leave the discussion to adults. This is rude and condescending. Please restate your counter-argument to be more substantive.
- dang 5y ago
  We've banned this account because all it seems to be doing is posting flamewar/unsubstantive comments. Even though I hate to ban any account that's been around HN for as long as 9 years, we can't have that here—it's totally against the letter of the rules and spirit of the site. Btw, it's particularly bad to post like this if your position on the underlying topic is correct, because then you end up discrediting the truth as well, which harms everybody. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. But please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
- Engineering-MD 5y ago
  I think a notable absence of evidence that should be easily available and is not is perfectly reasonable. It points towards withholding of positive findings. Your statement is also needlessly inflammatory and doesn’t encourage discussion. Keep your ad hominem attacks to yourself.
ctchocula 5y ago
One thing I don't understand is the difference between SARS and COVID-19 in the official Chinese response and willingness for an investigation into zoonotic origin [1]. How can we explain the stark difference? As an uninformed reader, some possibilities I can come up with are the following: 1. Despite zoonotic origin, China feels its stature in the world is much greater than in 2002-2003, so it no longer feels obliged to allow international investigation into origins of the pandemic in spite of political pressure. For example, Wikipedia says: "After intense pressure, Chinese officials allowed international officials to investigate the situation there." 2. Despite zoonotic origin, COVID-19 has much higher death toll so CPC wants to save face by either hiding evidence or preventing investigations into a potential reservoir species. OTOH, SARS had lower death toll, so they didn't have reason to hide anything. 3. Despite zoonotic origin, Xi Jinping's regime is less transparent than that of Hu Jintao which was in power for SARS, so this time they want to either hide evidence or prevent investigations into a potential reservoir species. 4. Despite zoonotic origin and best efforts of Chinese scientists, a reservoir species has not been identified yet. Is it possible that it may take longer this time around? 5. Lab leak hypothesis: there is no natural, reservoir species to be found. Personally, I think Reasons 1, 2 and 3 are strongest, because CPC feels like it has to play to its domestic audience and letting international investigators in may feel like a loss of face. However, this doesn't add up, because they already let WHO investigator in, albeit with very stringent limits and not letting them access raw data. I'd be much obliged if a learned person in this topic could tell me what kind of prior they'd put on each of these possible explanations. [1] First human case of SARS was in Nov 2002, and scientists were able to isolate SARS in civets in late May 2003, so a reservoir species was identified in 6 months. It took 10 months to identify that for MERS (Sept 2012 -> August 2013).

by aazaa 5y ago

arbitrage 5y ago

> The lack of new information from the Wuhan Institute [...] is probably the most compelling evidence in support of the lab escape hypothesis. or it's just china being 100% opaque about an accident that has already damaged their international reputation, and they're controlling the narrative hard at this point. you know, like they do.

sudosysgen 5y ago

It took over five years to find the reservoir species for SARS, and decades for most viruses. It's not evidence at all because the facts match the expected result. I don't know exactly what information you would want. Every single paper about virology research from the institute was published with western authors. Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so. Instead they say that everything is normal. There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season.

kshacker 5y ago
Just because something took 5 years last time does not mean it should take the same this time. - Our SOP should be better to analyze the information. - Given the magnitude of the problem, more eyes should be on it - tools and technologies should be better It may still take longer, but all things being equal, we should not justify anything based on the past track record. Your other point is valid though: if 3 people showed up in 1, 2 or 3 hospitals with severe flu, I would not think much of it, no one would.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The actual process of finding the viral reservoir is to go off into the wild and collect samples. It has not changed since SARS. SARS was a very big deal in China and the Chinese government allocated a lot of resources to research. As far as points one and two, that means no real improvement, as it was already in the diminishing return phase. Because of this I don't actually see why it would be any faster. SARS wasn't the first virus where finding a reservoir was tried, far from it, and the limiting factor in the search for the source is still the same. Because of this I don't expect it should be much easier this time than last time.
encoderer 5y ago
> Had there been something wrong in the raw data or safety logs those authors would have said so. Or, they thought then that the precautions were sufficient and the risks were acceptable, and they were wrong, and now would like to just look ahead and move on.
kspacewalk2 5y ago
>Had there been something wrong in the ... safety logs those authors would have said so. Not sure how you reached that conclusion. Collaborators from different institutions collaborate on research papers all the time while having no access to each others' 'safety logs'. Why would that be shared? >Instead they say that everything is normal. Which they obviously have no way of knowing, given that they are not on site, the research institute is in a secretive authoritarian country, and the implications for being 'responsible' for such a lab leak are monumental for such a regime. >There is a weird double standard here of ignoring data that goes against this hypothesis and interpreting things that happened for every single other zoonosis in the world to be indicative of a lab escape. Such as, for example, three people out of six hundred presenting with symptoms of seasonal illnesses in the appropriate season. The double standard is the exact opposite - flippantly dismissing the lab leak hypothesis without examination, on one side; a call to treat it on par with the purely zoonotic hypothesis and a recognition that neither hypothesis is close to being definitively proven, on the other.
screye 5y ago
> It took over five years to find the reservoir species for SARS You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months . (read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.) It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013) Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Identification_of_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndrome%E2%80%93related_coronavirus#Natural_reservoir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...
- lamontcg 5y ago
  > You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months . You might want to check THAT out. They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet. After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1 And specifically reference 4: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048 "Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans." So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not. There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).
  - screye 5y ago
suifbwish 5y ago
You are ignoring the vast statistical improbability of the first outbreak occurring at the one wet market that happens to be within 10 miles of the ONLY two coronavirus research labs in mainland China out of THOUSANDS of other wet markets across the country. Correlation is not causation but I think it’s fairly obvious that the chances of that occurring coincidentally in the context are some pretty steep odds.
- raarts 5y ago
  Great point.

tim333 5y ago

>the gain of function research with coronaviruses has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature The main peer reviewed gain of function research cited is https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 done in 2015 in the US with one of the researchers being Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab. I'm not sure there are any papers on gain of function research done in Wuhan?

justnotworthit 5y ago

Can we add?: Why aren't the people behind GoF in Wuhan (from grant funders, to scientists, to CCP) shouting from the rooftops that their research (1) was necessary all along and justified their fight to protect it (2) and can now quickly lead cures and vaccines, as promised? Instead, nothing. In their perfect moment of glory and justification, they prefer you didn't notice their work.

lamontcg 5y ago
There's still no evidence that WIV was doing GoF research in Wuhan. Nobody has ever come forward to say that was happening and there's no evidence that it ever happened. The simplest explanation of why nobody is defending the GoF research is that it never happened. Researchers from WIV collaborated with UNC Chapel Hill in 2015 to do that kind of research on SARS-1-related viruses, and that happened in the US. That gain of function experiment in mice was also to gain function in mice, it would reduce its ability to infect humans. And if you took RaTG13 and spliced in the surface protein of SARS-1 so it bound to ACE and then ran it through mice you'd still not wind up with SARS-CoV-2. The original virus is too far distant (only 96% homology) and running it through mice would produce a virus that was poorly adapted to humans. And the spike protein would look more like SARS-CoV-1.
- halsom 5y ago
  “Researchers could have gotten infected during their collecting trips, or while working with the new viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The virus that escaped from the lab would have been a natural virus, not one cooked up by gain of function.” https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/ https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    That's at least more plausible, but the workers who farm bat guano probably have many thousands more times the human-bat contact than the WIV workers ever did. They're far from the only humans venturing into bat caves in China.

mr_woozy 5y ago

I don't know how you managed to mentally back flip around the idea that you're trying to prove something via lack of information but it's ludicrous that you feel it's compelling evidence for others. Leave the discussion to adults.

skynet-9000 5y ago
> Leave the discussion to adults. This is rude and condescending. Please restate your counter-argument to be more substantive.
dang 5y ago
We've banned this account because all it seems to be doing is posting flamewar/unsubstantive comments. Even though I hate to ban any account that's been around HN for as long as 9 years, we can't have that here—it's totally against the letter of the rules and spirit of the site. Btw, it's particularly bad to post like this if your position on the underlying topic is correct, because then you end up discrediting the truth as well, which harms everybody. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=truth%20discredit%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. But please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Engineering-MD 5y ago
I think a notable absence of evidence that should be easily available and is not is perfectly reasonable. It points towards withholding of positive findings. Your statement is also needlessly inflammatory and doesn’t encourage discussion. Keep your ad hominem attacks to yourself.

ctchocula 5y ago

One thing I don't understand is the difference between SARS and COVID-19 in the official Chinese response and willingness for an investigation into zoonotic origin [1]. How can we explain the stark difference? As an uninformed reader, some possibilities I can come up with are the following: 1. Despite zoonotic origin, China feels its stature in the world is much greater than in 2002-2003, so it no longer feels obliged to allow international investigation into origins of the pandemic in spite of political pressure. For example, Wikipedia says: "After intense pressure, Chinese officials allowed international officials to investigate the situation there." 2. Despite zoonotic origin, COVID-19 has much higher death toll so CPC wants to save face by either hiding evidence or preventing investigations into a potential reservoir species. OTOH, SARS had lower death toll, so they didn't have reason to hide anything. 3. Despite zoonotic origin, Xi Jinping's regime is less transparent than that of Hu Jintao which was in power for SARS, so this time they want to either hide evidence or prevent investigations into a potential reservoir species. 4. Despite zoonotic origin and best efforts of Chinese scientists, a reservoir species has not been identified yet. Is it possible that it may take longer this time around? 5. Lab leak hypothesis: there is no natural, reservoir species to be found. Personally, I think Reasons 1, 2 and 3 are strongest, because CPC feels like it has to play to its domestic audience and letting international investigators in may feel like a loss of face. However, this doesn't add up, because they already let WHO investigator in, albeit with very stringent limits and not letting them access raw data. I'd be much obliged if a learned person in this topic could tell me what kind of prior they'd put on each of these possible explanations. [1] First human case of SARS was in Nov 2002, and scientists were able to isolate SARS in civets in late May 2003, so a reservoir species was identified in 6 months. It took 10 months to identify that for MERS (Sept 2012 -> August 2013).