12 ms·

Scientists who signed Lancet letter about origins of Covid-19, have 2nd thoughts

68 points by Flatcircle 5y ago

jjeaff 5y ago
A lot of people have tried to ascribe the reluctance of many scientists to admit the possibility of a lab leak to some conspiracy from the top or even political leanings. But it seems more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk. Not to mention those that may not have funding at risk but believe that gain of function research is important regardless of the risk.
- passivate 5y ago
  >more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk. This would be easy to find out given that their names are public and so are the projects/papers/publications. What does the data indicate?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Actually, it's not that "easy to find out" because the CCP is involved with: 1) their Thousand Talents program, which pays scientists to copy foreign research back to China. There are various contractual terms including not criticizing the CCP, and patenting foreign-supported research in China. 2) Since GoF can be used in bioweapons, there is also money for weapons development. Note the WIV was built by the French, which the CCP kicked out the day the lab opened. 3) Both the US and Australia have been involved in a coverup for over a year. In the US, this was revealed with Fauci's emails, and in Australia, journalists have uncovered previously-denied (on the record) bat virus research and training of Wuhan's virology scientists in Australia. 4) And, as mentioned, you need a BSL lab to do virology research, and virologists can't afford to build their own without govt. funding, and aren't allowed to do GoF in the US. A similar situation was how the Nazis moved to Argentina after the fall of Berlin to continue a variety of weapons programs. That's what the "thank you for not saying it was a lab leak" email to Fauci was about. Yes, I'm intentionally comparing Fauci and Daszak to Nazis.
  - inter_netuser 5y ago
    im quite certain lots of information is not at all public. Seems it takes a high-ranking defector to suddenly get everyone sweating and carefully walking back written statements.
    - passivate 5y ago
      >im quite certain lots of information is not at all public. What information are you referring to that's not public? Most scientists' research areas, publications are public knowledge. Science relies on this to make progress. OP claimed people signing the letter had a conflict of interest and/or were somehow complicit. Rather than getting into an argument, why not put forth the data. I'd suggest OP to look up their names, papers, labs, funding sources, etc and put forth a real argument.
- tonfreed 5y ago
  I think it was just a dangerous cocktail of bad information pushed deliberately by a lot of different actors. A lot of people didn't like Trump, sure, but there were a lot of other people that were completely naive about Chinese propaganda.
mesozoic 5y ago
So they all signed a letter stating they were political actors and jokes of scientists and now have second thoughts. Too bad.
- somethingwhere 5y ago
  This is exactly how science is supposed to work. People learn some new things and they update their opinions based on that new data. That's a good thing. The idea that people aren't allowed 'second thoughts' is probably the worst thing to happen to general discourse.
  - peytn 5y ago
    What new things were learned here?
    - somethingwhere 5y ago
      Only they can answer that. The general point is that people should be able to change their mind; and the argument that 'you used to believe something different therefore you must be wrong/acting in bad faith' is nonsense. It's still possible that they are wrong/bad actors; but that can't be determined based simply on a single change of opinion.
      - prepend 5y ago
        There’s a difference between being wrong and being an asshole. An apology is needed, not a change of mind.
      - hnfong 5y ago
        Categorically dismissing an opposing view as false, and then reversing course, is not necessarily acting in bad faith, but I think any reasonable observer would question their trustworthiness. The fact that people still believe "scientists" after all those flip-flops is astounding. It's like those "scientists" believe their reputation (individual and as a group) is invincible and they can get away with making unsubstantiated claims without being called out -- and surprisingly that's exactly what happens, mostly. I'm not "anti-science" by any means and I don't believe in "conspiracy theories" but I can see why people are starting to view the scientific establishment with suspicion.
FuckButtons 5y ago
The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction. If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, they are distributed randomly across the genome. If you were to genetically engineer a virus, those mutations would not be random, there would be a discrete chunk of edited base pairs that had been spliced in from somewhere else but that isn’t present. It seems unlikely that in this day and age a virology lab would be doing gain of function experiments without crispr since it’s far easier than the alternative.
- tyleo 5y ago
  Genetic engineering is not the only way there could have been a lab leak. Did you read the whole post? It makes a different claim.
- wrycoder 5y ago
  They are not. They are predominately in the part of the sequence that codes for the spike proteins. There are other evolutionary mutations spread across the genome, but they are minor by comparison.
- passivate 5y ago
  > If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, How many distinct samples do we have of the wild-type variants from that region?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Nothing about the lab leak theory requires that what leaked was engineered. Just mis-handling a field sample so that somebody in the lab catches and passes it on can be (and, possibly, was) wholly as bad as an engineered sample leaking. Here, there are hints that the leak was of, explicitly, samples cultured from the 2013 clinical cases.
- dekhn 5y ago
  all of your claims are entirely speculative and not informed, biologically speaking.
- 5y ago
dzonga 5y ago
Once you've a few people in control of who can be heard, you're back to serfdom days. The internet was supposed to bring a voice to everyone, now there's massive gatekeepers at a scale never known to man. Anyone can be cancelled, only FB, Twitter n Google know what the 'truth' is. End of day it's the equivalent of CCP, which people in the west dread so much. Orwell, would be having nightmares right now.
foxes 5y ago
The amount of gaslighting, propaganda, changing narrative during this pandemic was honestly shocking. Trump was bad but it’s amazing to watch how suddenly things can be reversed. Which, is not an issue by itself, you adapt as you get more information, but claiming a position as absolute then changing after a month is. Not to mention all the political flaming and disinformation as propaganda for your “side”.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  In hindsight, this makes me wonder. What if similar Trump-related controversies had suffered a similar fate? Can we reliably say that would have looked very different to what we've actually experienced with our own eyes? And if not, is it reasonable to think that this mentality only started en-masse exactly with COVID, or could it possibly have been there for some time? (Just kidding. Orange man is obviously evil.)
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    Trump was correct on all policy decisions (corona airline stop, corona vaccine funding, the wall, anti-CCP policies.) Most of his tweets were casual, or in reply to others. He was not racist or evil - he was likely our best President since Roosevelt. If you think he's racist, link to a quote - there aren't any. Most of the major news stories against him have been retracted, while Biden/Harris issues have been suppressed (Hunter Biden graft from CCP and Ukraine, Joe Biden's senility, Harris' gross incompetence as a statesperson as seen in Latin America.) Both of the impeachments were staged, which is why they failed (#1 involved a paid foreign spy and Biden misusing the FISA court, #2 involving a falsified WaPo interview transcript with an election official.)
- 0xy 5y ago
  The media and many members of the scientific community, wrapped in their "Trump is evil" orthodoxy, denounced everything that came out of his mouth, including the occasional truth. Their reputation now irreparably damaged. Vox called COVID overblown and then stealth edited those articles, only marking them as edited after being called out for it. New York Times has called lab leak theory "racist", repeatedly, including by their chief COVID reporter as recently as two weeks ago(!!!). Dr Fauci knowingly lied about the efficacy of masks, then railed against border closures from COVID embattled China, then knowingly lied about US funding of gain-of-function research to Congress. WHO has spent the last 18 months running crisis management for the Chinese Government ("no sign of person-to-person transmission" in late January), which has spent the same amount of time destroying evidence and covering up as much as possible. Facebook and Google until months ago was censoring lab leak theory left and right. Public and news media institutions collectively have revealed their complacency, political bias and ineptitude.
dekhn 5y ago
I knew this was going to happen. Scientists, especially prominent ones, have huge egos and love to make strong statements ("proof", "smoking gun") even when they talk out of their ass. Combine that with the virulent anti-Trumpism and it's not hard to see how the media could report what they did.

68 points by Flatcircle 5y ago

A lot of people have tried to ascribe the reluctance of many scientists to admit the possibility of a lab leak to some conspiracy from the top or even political leanings. But it seems more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk. Not to mention those that may not have funding at risk but believe that gain of function research is important regardless of the risk.

passivate 5y ago
>more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk. This would be easy to find out given that their names are public and so are the projects/papers/publications. What does the data indicate?
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Actually, it's not that "easy to find out" because the CCP is involved with: 1) their Thousand Talents program, which pays scientists to copy foreign research back to China. There are various contractual terms including not criticizing the CCP, and patenting foreign-supported research in China. 2) Since GoF can be used in bioweapons, there is also money for weapons development. Note the WIV was built by the French, which the CCP kicked out the day the lab opened. 3) Both the US and Australia have been involved in a coverup for over a year. In the US, this was revealed with Fauci's emails, and in Australia, journalists have uncovered previously-denied (on the record) bat virus research and training of Wuhan's virology scientists in Australia. 4) And, as mentioned, you need a BSL lab to do virology research, and virologists can't afford to build their own without govt. funding, and aren't allowed to do GoF in the US. A similar situation was how the Nazis moved to Argentina after the fall of Berlin to continue a variety of weapons programs. That's what the "thank you for not saying it was a lab leak" email to Fauci was about. Yes, I'm intentionally comparing Fauci and Daszak to Nazis.
- inter_netuser 5y ago
  im quite certain lots of information is not at all public. Seems it takes a high-ranking defector to suddenly get everyone sweating and carefully walking back written statements.
  - passivate 5y ago
    >im quite certain lots of information is not at all public. What information are you referring to that's not public? Most scientists' research areas, publications are public knowledge. Science relies on this to make progress. OP claimed people signing the letter had a conflict of interest and/or were somehow complicit. Rather than getting into an argument, why not put forth the data. I'd suggest OP to look up their names, papers, labs, funding sources, etc and put forth a real argument.
tonfreed 5y ago
I think it was just a dangerous cocktail of bad information pushed deliberately by a lot of different actors. A lot of people didn't like Trump, sure, but there were a lot of other people that were completely naive about Chinese propaganda.

mesozoic 5y ago

So they all signed a letter stating they were political actors and jokes of scientists and now have second thoughts. Too bad.

somethingwhere 5y ago
This is exactly how science is supposed to work. People learn some new things and they update their opinions based on that new data. That's a good thing. The idea that people aren't allowed 'second thoughts' is probably the worst thing to happen to general discourse.
- peytn 5y ago
  What new things were learned here?
  - somethingwhere 5y ago
    Only they can answer that. The general point is that people should be able to change their mind; and the argument that 'you used to believe something different therefore you must be wrong/acting in bad faith' is nonsense. It's still possible that they are wrong/bad actors; but that can't be determined based simply on a single change of opinion.
    - prepend 5y ago
      There’s a difference between being wrong and being an asshole. An apology is needed, not a change of mind.
    - hnfong 5y ago
      Categorically dismissing an opposing view as false, and then reversing course, is not necessarily acting in bad faith, but I think any reasonable observer would question their trustworthiness. The fact that people still believe "scientists" after all those flip-flops is astounding. It's like those "scientists" believe their reputation (individual and as a group) is invincible and they can get away with making unsubstantiated claims without being called out -- and surprisingly that's exactly what happens, mostly. I'm not "anti-science" by any means and I don't believe in "conspiracy theories" but I can see why people are starting to view the scientific establishment with suspicion.

FuckButtons 5y ago

The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction. If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, they are distributed randomly across the genome. If you were to genetically engineer a virus, those mutations would not be random, there would be a discrete chunk of edited base pairs that had been spliced in from somewhere else but that isn’t present. It seems unlikely that in this day and age a virology lab would be doing gain of function experiments without crispr since it’s far easier than the alternative.

tyleo 5y ago
Genetic engineering is not the only way there could have been a lab leak. Did you read the whole post? It makes a different claim.
wrycoder 5y ago
They are not. They are predominately in the part of the sequence that codes for the spike proteins. There are other evolutionary mutations spread across the genome, but they are minor by comparison.
passivate 5y ago
> If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, How many distinct samples do we have of the wild-type variants from that region?
ncmncm 5y ago
Nothing about the lab leak theory requires that what leaked was engineered. Just mis-handling a field sample so that somebody in the lab catches and passes it on can be (and, possibly, was) wholly as bad as an engineered sample leaking. Here, there are hints that the leak was of, explicitly, samples cultured from the 2013 clinical cases.
dekhn 5y ago
all of your claims are entirely speculative and not informed, biologically speaking.
5y ago

dzonga 5y ago

Once you've a few people in control of who can be heard, you're back to serfdom days. The internet was supposed to bring a voice to everyone, now there's massive gatekeepers at a scale never known to man. Anyone can be cancelled, only FB, Twitter n Google know what the 'truth' is. End of day it's the equivalent of CCP, which people in the west dread so much. Orwell, would be having nightmares right now.

foxes 5y ago

The amount of gaslighting, propaganda, changing narrative during this pandemic was honestly shocking. Trump was bad but it’s amazing to watch how suddenly things can be reversed. Which, is not an issue by itself, you adapt as you get more information, but claiming a position as absolute then changing after a month is. Not to mention all the political flaming and disinformation as propaganda for your “side”.

tpoacher 5y ago
In hindsight, this makes me wonder. What if similar Trump-related controversies had suffered a similar fate? Can we reliably say that would have looked very different to what we've actually experienced with our own eyes? And if not, is it reasonable to think that this mentality only started en-masse exactly with COVID, or could it possibly have been there for some time? (Just kidding. Orange man is obviously evil.)
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  Trump was correct on all policy decisions (corona airline stop, corona vaccine funding, the wall, anti-CCP policies.) Most of his tweets were casual, or in reply to others. He was not racist or evil - he was likely our best President since Roosevelt. If you think he's racist, link to a quote - there aren't any. Most of the major news stories against him have been retracted, while Biden/Harris issues have been suppressed (Hunter Biden graft from CCP and Ukraine, Joe Biden's senility, Harris' gross incompetence as a statesperson as seen in Latin America.) Both of the impeachments were staged, which is why they failed (#1 involved a paid foreign spy and Biden misusing the FISA court, #2 involving a falsified WaPo interview transcript with an election official.)
0xy 5y ago
The media and many members of the scientific community, wrapped in their "Trump is evil" orthodoxy, denounced everything that came out of his mouth, including the occasional truth. Their reputation now irreparably damaged. Vox called COVID overblown and then stealth edited those articles, only marking them as edited after being called out for it. New York Times has called lab leak theory "racist", repeatedly, including by their chief COVID reporter as recently as two weeks ago(!!!). Dr Fauci knowingly lied about the efficacy of masks, then railed against border closures from COVID embattled China, then knowingly lied about US funding of gain-of-function research to Congress. WHO has spent the last 18 months running crisis management for the Chinese Government ("no sign of person-to-person transmission" in late January), which has spent the same amount of time destroying evidence and covering up as much as possible. Facebook and Google until months ago was censoring lab leak theory left and right. Public and news media institutions collectively have revealed their complacency, political bias and ineptitude.

dekhn 5y ago

I knew this was going to happen. Scientists, especially prominent ones, have huge egos and love to make strong statements ("proof", "smoking gun") even when they talk out of their ass. Combine that with the virulent anti-Trumpism and it's not hard to see how the media could report what they did.