8 ms·

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself tha

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins. The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state above. As far as I can tell, the only biological evidence is the furin cleavage site, which is not uncommon in related viruses. Also, this has been known since the beginning, when the Chinese CDC released the first genome of the virus. This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence.

ramraj07 5y ago
So you’re saying because there’s no new evidence the new furor is not worth it? It was clear for some of us from the beginning that the evidence is damning enough from the beginning. If you’re going to demand incontrovertible evidence that might never come up. But considering the scenario, viz. a cabal of careless scientists accidentally unleashed a plague that is killing millions , even the slightest hint of a cover up needs to be taken seriously. Having worked with enough scientists I don’t for a moment doubt this hypothesis either. Ego and arrogance is what drives most of them, they’d rather choose self-perseverance over accidentally killing millions and go home to have lasagna as if it was just another Thursday without a sweat.
TheBigSalad 5y ago
What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.
- seventytwo 5y ago
  Well, we know for a fact that a >96% similar virus was found to infect the miners naturally in 2006… how hard is it to imagine a few more tweaks since then? We’ve already had many mutations of COVID occur in the past year. Is it crazy to think virus which infected the miners couldn’t have mutated into what we know as COVID?
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    No, there is no public evidence that the miners were infected by the virus. The common story is the WIV sent people there to check if it was a virus. From there it diverges to the WIV saying "turns out it was a fungus" and then an obscure masters thesis about the cases that just assumes it was a virus.
- ridaj 5y ago
  The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice. Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place. The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.
  - 40four 5y ago
    Guys, a bit of a tangent if I may? This is not normally my lane, but I really wish we could get over this term ‘wet market’. From a western point of view if you really think about it, it’s derogatory, and likely based in racial paranoia. We’ve all heard this term time and time again in the media. But after looking into it more, it’s not really accurate. Just call it a market. Or a farmers market as we call them in America. There is nothing special or weird about the market in Wuhan that deserves the ‘wet’ moniker. You wouldn’t call your local farmers market a ‘wet’ market. It’s just something we all heard one time in the news and kept repeating it without much thought.
    - foobiekr 5y ago
      What kind of farmer’s markets have you been to with live animals in poor health being slaughtered in place?
      - croes 5y ago
rebuilder 5y ago
Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now. So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.
- rebuilder 5y ago
  And when I say "find the truth", I'm not taking a stance on what that is. I personally don't rate the lab leak theory very highly, but then I don't know enough to say one way or the other.
estaseuropano 5y ago
Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked. I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario and it is crazy how people try to dismiss it without any actual evidence either way - and China's approach to handling the investigation and information flow definitely should cause anyone to be suspicious. I guess at this stage thr only way we cam find out is if in 10-20 years there's a whistleblower from the lab.
- bglazer 5y ago
  There are two possibilities for lab leak: 1. The Wuhan institute for virology collected a naturally occurring virus then did gain of function research which subsequently resulted in infected lab workers. There's not a known virus with close enough genome sequence similarity to SARS-Cov19 for this to be plausible. It would be a monumental undertaking to induce >1k mutations in the closest known relative virus. If someone pokes around WIV or a cave in the area and finds a virus with much, much higher but not identical sequence similarity, then that's very strong evidence for gain of function research followed by a leak. In the meantime it seems unlikely that WIV would start doing gain of function research without first publishing about their newly discovered virus. 2. SARS-Cov19 in more or less its current state was naturally occurring in a location that WIV researchers sampled. The virus then escaped while WIV researchers were characterizing it. This requires one to believe that WIV workers, in a biosafety lab, were the first humans to encounter and contract and spread this virus. This is in contrast to the alternate hypothesis that unprotected workers shoveling guano, or maybe a wet market vendor got the virus. I know which possibility I would bet money on. The point is that we don't have to prove a negative, just weigh the evidence.
  - Pyramus 5y ago
    Re 2. The wet market was likely the first superspreader event but the patient zero (from what we know today) had no connection to it.
thebigman433 5y ago
> This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence. I think this is the main thing driving these comments. Instead of being totally against the idea, these articles are providing a shred of hope (despite not having any new proof as far as I can tell) for the people who are locked in on the lab leak theory. Definitely people getting overexcited about it and trying to claim they were right the whole time and were being "censored".
- isolli 5y ago
  There was censorship in the form of calling the hypothesis of a lab leak (distinct from the hypothesis of an engineered virus) a debunked conspiracy theory. The fact that the theory is considered acceptable again is what people are claiming vindication for, and rightly so.
  - SiempreViernes 5y ago
    Someone telling you that your theory is wrong isn't censorship dude.
    - isolli 5y ago
      Saying that a theory is wrong is different from saying it's a conspiracy theory. In the second case, you’re smearing proponents of the theory. That’s a form of censorship. Doing it for a theory that was not in any way proven wrong (then or now) is professional misconduct.
- concordDance 5y ago
  People can be censored but wrong, however, that doesn't mean the censorship policy was good. Censorship distorts your information market and makes getting to the truth harder. Sure, only the general public might be being censored but that makes said public (and the news media) associate taking the censored hypothesis seriously with craziness and evil. Which makes it substantially harder for university scientists (and to an extent, government ones) to research (this can take the form of cancellations, like Steve Hsu, lack of funding or just reputational damage)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
txru 5y ago
The furor about the lab leak theory isn't solely due to the 3 hospitalized workers, but also due to a well-sourced article [0] written by a editor of the Science section of the New York Times (as well as for Science and Nature), Nicholas Wade. Those two broke on the same day. Papers hadn't been covering the theory in depth since last summer. In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS. [0] 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...
- philjohn 5y ago
  But isn't it true that furin cleavage adaptation is also found naturally in other betacoronaviruses? It would seem to me that shows it's not the "smoking gun" many people believe it to be.
isolli 5y ago
You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed. This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/1397185918365224967 https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496...
- armada651 5y ago
  The fact checkers were definitely too eager to mark this as debunked, but it still lacks real evidence. No fact checker would mark this theory as true even now. So let's not make the same mistake by eagerly jumping to conclusions that it was engineered in a lab based on assurances from a different set of scientists.
  - ddxxdd 5y ago
    So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses? During a season when bats hibernate to areas thousands of miles away? If you look at the circumstances behind this pandemic's origins, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope math, the lab-leak hypothesis is close to a certainty.
    - Mordisquitos 5y ago
      > So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses? No, of course we are not "to believe" that. What we are to do is to consider it is a possibility. Or are we to believe that SARS-CoV-2 could only have emerged as a lab leak? Both the natural and the lab-leak hypotheses are feasible, but treating either of them with near certainty or as impossible is not justifiable with the current evidence. Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?
lucian1900 5y ago
It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative. If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.
Udik 5y ago
> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years. This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back. In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.
eutropia 5y ago
Which other Coronaviruses have a furin cleavage site using arginine? Which other coronaviruses even have arginine in their proteome?
- shellfishgene 5y ago
  Why would coronaviruses not have arginine?
  - eutropia 5y ago
    Sorry, I was being hasty (replying in too many locations to produce a good and thoughtful response -- instead I produced a factually incorrect one) Damns my credibility a bit, doesn't it? Well, I should have more accurately mentioned that the FCS insertion (CT CCT CGG CGG G (PRRA)) Is rather unusual by betacoronavirus standards in that arginine is not typically coded as CGG (~5% of the time), and that RR coded for as CGG-CGG has not been seen in any betacoronavirus to date. I have more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27393013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27393013 But my quality quotient on this thread has been all over the place. Probably too invested in getting people to consider the possibility of the lab leak as most probable until we see an animal population to prove the natural hypothesis.
Rapzid 5y ago
It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619004/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
- jaywalk 5y ago
  Oh please. Your one article doesn't change the fact that even mentioning the lab leak theory got you labeled a right-wing conspiracy nut and in some cases banned from social media.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - myko 5y ago
    No, folks who claimed the virus was bio-engineered were thought to be nuts. Those who claimed it came from the lab were asked to provide evidence.
- bryanwb 5y ago
  You didn't read the article. Any medical professional who seriously considered the lab leak was ostracized.
- dqv 5y ago
  I can't believe you're putting me in a position to have to even slightly defend Trump. You are giving Trump supporting whack jobs credibility when you give deference to this sort of revisionism. The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical (i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we know he was there to spread propaganda. Now here's a CNN article, posted May 1, 2020. Let's lightly analyze it: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-community-china-coronavirus-origins/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-c... My favorite part about this article is that, coming back to it today it's so easy to plausibly deny the associations they were making, but in the context of the time the conclusion from the article is that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy that the intelligence community is pushing back against. >President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence" POP QUIZ! 1. Did Trump say he had a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab? 2. Why would CNN need to misrepresent something Trump said when he says enough BS the way it is? Answer key: (1) No, watch the video (it was the interviewer who projected that statement onto Trump). (2) I don't know, but it doesn't seem like they have any good reason to do so. The reporter drives the sentiment. The reporter is who the viewership listen to on how to feel about a particular statement. And what has the reporter done in this article? They have first suggested that Trump claims to have strong evidence the virus was leaked from the lab. Then they move on to suggest the intelligence community disagrees with this claim: >In acknowledgment of that effort, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued an unprecedented public statement Thursday prior to Trump's comments making clear the intelligence community is currently exploring two possibilities but cannot yet assess if the outbreak "was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan" or began "through contact with infected animals." Then they create an association with conspiracy theories: >While the statement suggests the intelligence community has not yet developed a clear assessment as to how the outbreak started, it does say that officials have ruled out the possibility that the virus was "man-made or genetically modified," agreeing with a near consensus among scientists and refuting conspiracy theories. The article says both theories are plausible! you might think, but the reporting brings us back to this central claim: >But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments. (emphasis on possibility is mine) So when you say >It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak I have to disagree. The mass media artfully manufactured the consensus that the possibility of the lab leak theory was unfounded. They did so while producing factual information that suggested we didn't have much evidence backing either theory, but used skillful narration to direct all attention to denying the possibility of the lab leak.

ramraj07 5y ago

So you’re saying because there’s no new evidence the new furor is not worth it? It was clear for some of us from the beginning that the evidence is damning enough from the beginning. If you’re going to demand incontrovertible evidence that might never come up. But considering the scenario, viz. a cabal of careless scientists accidentally unleashed a plague that is killing millions , even the slightest hint of a cover up needs to be taken seriously. Having worked with enough scientists I don’t for a moment doubt this hypothesis either. Ego and arrogance is what drives most of them, they’d rather choose self-perseverance over accidentally killing millions and go home to have lasagna as if it was just another Thursday without a sweat.

TheBigSalad 5y ago

What makes you think it's less probable than natural origins? The wet market has probably been there for 1,000 years and this hasn't happened. Compared to the virus appearing in one of 3 labs in the world that would be studying it.

seventytwo 5y ago
Well, we know for a fact that a >96% similar virus was found to infect the miners naturally in 2006… how hard is it to imagine a few more tweaks since then? We’ve already had many mutations of COVID occur in the past year. Is it crazy to think virus which infected the miners couldn’t have mutated into what we know as COVID?
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  No, there is no public evidence that the miners were infected by the virus. The common story is the WIV sent people there to check if it was a virus. From there it diverges to the WIV saying "turns out it was a fungus" and then an obscure masters thesis about the cases that just assumes it was a virus.
ridaj 5y ago
The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice. Consider for example what happened in the US, in Washington state at the beginning of the pandemic. The first local community transmissions were detected weeks after they had already started happening, even though there was already a relatively high degree of alertness. Without testing, it wouldn't have been detected at all until a similar superspreading event finally took place. The very fact that miners got sick a few years ago makes it also sound likely, based on Wuhan's history and based on the virus's characteristics, that bat-to-human transmission took place in similar circumstances as the miners' a few weeks or months before the Wuhan wet market event, had some low-key human-to-human transmission simmering in the community which people wrote off as the flu (at worse), until that one superspreading event.
- 40four 5y ago
  Guys, a bit of a tangent if I may? This is not normally my lane, but I really wish we could get over this term ‘wet market’. From a western point of view if you really think about it, it’s derogatory, and likely based in racial paranoia. We’ve all heard this term time and time again in the media. But after looking into it more, it’s not really accurate. Just call it a market. Or a farmers market as we call them in America. There is nothing special or weird about the market in Wuhan that deserves the ‘wet’ moniker. You wouldn’t call your local farmers market a ‘wet’ market. It’s just something we all heard one time in the news and kept repeating it without much thought.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    What kind of farmer’s markets have you been to with live animals in poor health being slaughtered in place?
    - croes 5y ago

rebuilder 5y ago

Maybe the Biden administration has concluded that it's possible there may have been a lab leak. It would be damaging to them if they did nothing and ended up unable to conclusively prove there was no lab leak, because Trump has been banging on that drum for a long time now. So, they don't really have much choice in this. They have to convincingly look like they're pushing to find the truth, or they'd be handing ammunition to the Trumpists.

rebuilder 5y ago
And when I say "find the truth", I'm not taking a stance on what that is. I personally don't rate the lab leak theory very highly, but then I don't know enough to say one way or the other.

estaseuropano 5y ago

Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked. I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario and it is crazy how people try to dismiss it without any actual evidence either way - and China's approach to handling the investigation and information flow definitely should cause anyone to be suspicious. I guess at this stage thr only way we cam find out is if in 10-20 years there's a whistleblower from the lab.

bglazer 5y ago
There are two possibilities for lab leak: 1. The Wuhan institute for virology collected a naturally occurring virus then did gain of function research which subsequently resulted in infected lab workers. There's not a known virus with close enough genome sequence similarity to SARS-Cov19 for this to be plausible. It would be a monumental undertaking to induce >1k mutations in the closest known relative virus. If someone pokes around WIV or a cave in the area and finds a virus with much, much higher but not identical sequence similarity, then that's very strong evidence for gain of function research followed by a leak. In the meantime it seems unlikely that WIV would start doing gain of function research without first publishing about their newly discovered virus. 2. SARS-Cov19 in more or less its current state was naturally occurring in a location that WIV researchers sampled. The virus then escaped while WIV researchers were characterizing it. This requires one to believe that WIV workers, in a biosafety lab, were the first humans to encounter and contract and spread this virus. This is in contrast to the alternate hypothesis that unprotected workers shoveling guano, or maybe a wet market vendor got the virus. I know which possibility I would bet money on. The point is that we don't have to prove a negative, just weigh the evidence.
- Pyramus 5y ago
  Re 2. The wet market was likely the first superspreader event but the patient zero (from what we know today) had no connection to it.

thebigman433 5y ago

> This seems more like people declaring victory because they're finally getting a hint of public support for their suspicions, rather than some truly damning evidence. I think this is the main thing driving these comments. Instead of being totally against the idea, these articles are providing a shred of hope (despite not having any new proof as far as I can tell) for the people who are locked in on the lab leak theory. Definitely people getting overexcited about it and trying to claim they were right the whole time and were being "censored".

isolli 5y ago
There was censorship in the form of calling the hypothesis of a lab leak (distinct from the hypothesis of an engineered virus) a debunked conspiracy theory. The fact that the theory is considered acceptable again is what people are claiming vindication for, and rightly so.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  Someone telling you that your theory is wrong isn't censorship dude.
  - isolli 5y ago
    Saying that a theory is wrong is different from saying it's a conspiracy theory. In the second case, you’re smearing proponents of the theory. That’s a form of censorship. Doing it for a theory that was not in any way proven wrong (then or now) is professional misconduct.
concordDance 5y ago
People can be censored but wrong, however, that doesn't mean the censorship policy was good. Censorship distorts your information market and makes getting to the truth harder. Sure, only the general public might be being censored but that makes said public (and the news media) associate taking the censored hypothesis seriously with craziness and evil. Which makes it substantially harder for university scientists (and to an extent, government ones) to research (this can take the form of cancellations, like Steve Hsu, lack of funding or just reputational damage)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

txru 5y ago

The furor about the lab leak theory isn't solely due to the 3 hospitalized workers, but also due to a well-sourced article [0] written by a editor of the Science section of the New York Times (as well as for Science and Nature), Nicholas Wade. Those two broke on the same day. Papers hadn't been covering the theory in depth since last summer. In my opinion the most damning part of the article is the section about the human-adapted furin cleavage, I recommend reading that part. The working assumption is that we should find people with precursors to covid without that furin cleavage adaptation, and we don't. If China wants to prove it wasn't a lab leak, they'll need to find instances of the virus that predated that adaptation- as was the case with SARS. [0] 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...

philjohn 5y ago
But isn't it true that furin cleavage adaptation is also found naturally in other betacoronaviruses? It would seem to me that shows it's not the "smoking gun" many people believe it to be.

isolli 5y ago

You're misreading the context. The furor comes from the fact that the lab leak hypothesis (distinct from the engineered virus hypothesis) was dismissed by fact checkers as a debunked conspiracy theory for a year based on nothing but assurances from the few scientists they interviewed. This is just one example I could find quickly, but there are many more... https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/1397185918365224967 https://twitter.com/JoePCunningham/status/139718591836522496...

armada651 5y ago
The fact checkers were definitely too eager to mark this as debunked, but it still lacks real evidence. No fact checker would mark this theory as true even now. So let's not make the same mistake by eagerly jumping to conclusions that it was engineered in a lab based on assurances from a different set of scientists.
- ddxxdd 5y ago
  So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses? During a season when bats hibernate to areas thousands of miles away? If you look at the circumstances behind this pandemic's origins, and do some basic back-of-the-envelope math, the lab-leak hypothesis is close to a certainty.
  - Mordisquitos 5y ago
    > So are we to believe that, out of 200 million square miles on this planet, this novel bat-related coronavirus just naturally emerged within 8 miles of a facility that specializes in novel bat related coronaviruses? No, of course we are not "to believe" that. What we are to do is to consider it is a possibility. Or are we to believe that SARS-CoV-2 could only have emerged as a lab leak? Both the natural and the lab-leak hypotheses are feasible, but treating either of them with near certainty or as impossible is not justifiable with the current evidence. Imagine an alternate universe where all events played out the same as in our own, with the exception that the Wuhan laboratory's existence was a perfectly kept secret by the PRC. In that case, would the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan lead to the certainty that there must be a secret facility nearby that specializes in novel bat-related coronaviruses?

lucian1900 5y ago

It’s how imperialist propaganda works. When material interests shift, suddenly and with one voice all “independent” western media pushes the same unsourced narrative. If you remember the lead-up to the Iraq was, it was the same surreal experience.

Udik 5y ago

> I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse I've witnessed the same exact pattern multiple times in the last few years- often in relation to China. It's as if suddenly everyone not only shifts opinion, but exhibits the same amount of faith in it as if that opinion had been the most accepted for years. This speaks volumes about 1) the ability of media (and possibly of powerful, interested parties) to sway the public opinion; 2) the easiness with which people align themselves to a (perceived) majority without ever looking back. In particular, what has happened here is probably that the presence of Trump prevented half of the US from aligning to a narrative that would have been otherwise quite successful, given the political times. Trump gone, that half of the country suddenly was free to align itself with that narrative.

eutropia 5y ago

Which other Coronaviruses have a furin cleavage site using arginine? Which other coronaviruses even have arginine in their proteome?

shellfishgene 5y ago
Why would coronaviruses not have arginine?
- eutropia 5y ago
  Sorry, I was being hasty (replying in too many locations to produce a good and thoughtful response -- instead I produced a factually incorrect one) Damns my credibility a bit, doesn't it? Well, I should have more accurately mentioned that the FCS insertion (CT CCT CGG CGG G (PRRA)) Is rather unusual by betacoronavirus standards in that arginine is not typically coded as CGG (~5% of the time), and that RR coded for as CGG-CGG has not been seen in any betacoronavirus to date. I have more in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27393013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27393013 But my quality quotient on this thread has been all over the place. Probably too invested in getting people to consider the possibility of the lab leak as most probable until we see an animal population to prove the natural hypothesis.

Rapzid 5y ago

It's like everyone has forgotten or never even knew the context of the original strong pushback. It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak, it was against the rhetoric (lies) coming out of our own Whitehouse trying shift blame to China. Lies that were dangerously feeding anti-asian sentiment in the USA. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619004/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

jaywalk 5y ago
Oh please. Your one article doesn't change the fact that even mentioning the lab leak theory got you labeled a right-wing conspiracy nut and in some cases banned from social media.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- myko 5y ago
  No, folks who claimed the virus was bio-engineered were thought to be nuts. Those who claimed it came from the lab were asked to provide evidence.
bryanwb 5y ago
You didn't read the article. Any medical professional who seriously considered the lab leak was ostracized.
dqv 5y ago
I can't believe you're putting me in a position to have to even slightly defend Trump. You are giving Trump supporting whack jobs credibility when you give deference to this sort of revisionism. The news articles that require the most analysis are the ones of which we are least critical (i.e. those which are prima facie the most factual), yet here you are with a lazy article about Rush Limbaugh. I mean come on, we know he was there to spread propaganda. Now here's a CNN article, posted May 1, 2020. Let's lightly analyze it: https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-community-china-coronavirus-origins/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/politics/trump-intelligence-c... My favorite part about this article is that, coming back to it today it's so easy to plausibly deny the associations they were making, but in the context of the time the conclusion from the article is that the lab leak theory is a conspiracy that the intelligence community is pushing back against. >President Donald Trump contradicted a rare on-the-record statement from his own intelligence community by claiming Thursday that he has seen evidence that gives him a "high degree of confidence" POP QUIZ! 1. Did Trump say he had a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab? 2. Why would CNN need to misrepresent something Trump said when he says enough BS the way it is? Answer key: (1) No, watch the video (it was the interviewer who projected that statement onto Trump). (2) I don't know, but it doesn't seem like they have any good reason to do so. The reporter drives the sentiment. The reporter is who the viewership listen to on how to feel about a particular statement. And what has the reporter done in this article? They have first suggested that Trump claims to have strong evidence the virus was leaked from the lab. Then they move on to suggest the intelligence community disagrees with this claim: >In acknowledgment of that effort, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued an unprecedented public statement Thursday prior to Trump's comments making clear the intelligence community is currently exploring two possibilities but cannot yet assess if the outbreak "was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan" or began "through contact with infected animals." Then they create an association with conspiracy theories: >While the statement suggests the intelligence community has not yet developed a clear assessment as to how the outbreak started, it does say that officials have ruled out the possibility that the virus was "man-made or genetically modified," agreeing with a near consensus among scientists and refuting conspiracy theories. The article says both theories are plausible! you might think, but the reporting brings us back to this central claim: >But the lack of evidence to back up claims that the outbreak began in a Chinese lab has not stopped top administration officials, including Pompeo, and some Republican allies of the President from raising the possibility in public comments. (emphasis on possibility is mine) So when you say >It wasn't against the possibility of a lab leak I have to disagree. The mass media artfully manufactured the consensus that the possibility of the lab leak theory was unfounded. They did so while producing factual information that suggested we didn't have much evidence backing either theory, but used skillful narration to direct all attention to denying the possibility of the lab leak.