8 ms·

1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been

1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses 4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites 5. Furin cleavage sites have independently evolved in multiple different branches of coronaviruses, probably a dozen times that we know of now. 6. The furin cleavage site is short and can easily happen through recombination with another virus due to coinfection. 7. This is very likely what happened due to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 ancestor and an HKU9-like virus. It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.

createdapril24 5y ago
These are all very compelling claims. I am wondering if you can provide at least one reference for each. E.g. "There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites" is a claim that can be referenced pretty easily with a link to papers reporting said sarbecoviruses.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1 https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeographic-mapping-of-newly-discovered-coronaviruses-pinpoints-direct-progenitor-of-sars-cov-2-as-originating-from-mojiang/ https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeo... https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.584717/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847... https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1
  - areyousure 5y ago
    From your first link: "SARS-CoV-2 is the only virus in subgenus Sarbecovirus having this feature" From your second link: "Finally, the poly-basic (furin) site present in SARS-CoV-2 is absent in both RshSTT182 and RshSTT200." Your third link doesn't discuss furin cleavage sites very much. Your fourth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin". Your fifth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin". Your sixth link at least partially supports your claim with a single mention of furin, saying "The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2", but the whole truth is that while they have insertions at the S1/S2 cleavage site in the spike protein, they do not contain the full furin cleavage site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02 From your seventh link: "None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site in the spike." (Protip: in this claim #4 of yours under discussion, you should change "sarbecoviruses" to "betacoronaviruses".)
    - createdapril24 5y ago
      I only reviewed the first link. What I took away from it is that furin cleave sites occur in the family of coronaviruses naturally, but have not been seen in those most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This note about not having closely related coronaviruses having such a feature is also true of SARS-CoV-1, which also leads evidence to its ability to occur naturally within a given subgenus (unless we posit also original SARS was lab-leak, but I do not think anyone has posited this.) I have not evaluated 2-7.
- willupowers 5y ago
  I believe the uniqueness has been established by the issue that the specifics of the 12-nt insertion is never found anywhere in a natural setting. Many papers have gone back and forth over this and there's no natural example.
  - createdapril24 5y ago
    Can you explain the importance of the 12-nt insertion, and also provide some references regarding it not being evolved naturally?
sayonaraman 5y ago
I doubt Wuhan GoF researchers will be publishing their findings anytime soon, until then it's all speculation.
- willupowers 5y ago
  Not really speculation any longer. Daszak made a bunch of statements that poured water on this potential concern, and so many other contradictor statements to this evidence. When there is a discrepancy or a number of discrepancies (in this case), there is a good chance of a valuable investigation.
harshreality 5y ago
There's nothing in that list that argues against SARS-CoV-2—and its spike protein and furin cleavage site in particular—being produced by serial passage through any of a variety of cell lines expressing human ACE-2. It does seem unlikely that the SARS-CoV-2 genome, or spike protein, or even just a small segment including the furin cleavage site, was synthesized. Although without knowing what protein folding modeling capabilities and synthesis capabilities the WIV had, who knows for sure?
- lamontcg 5y ago
  There's 1,000 nucleotide differences between the closest known progenitor and SARS-CoV-2. That is an evolutionary distance of 30-40 years in a coronavirus. You can't replicate that many years of evolution by serial passage in a lab. Serial passage isn't a magic wand. And the rest of it is that you're arguing in favor of a science fiction explanation for the capabilities of the WIV lab.
  - willupowers 5y ago
    30-40 years difference from SARS-CoV. However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development. These unpublished sequences may have been much closer to SARS-CoV-2. I think you should read the leaks.
    - jml7c5 5y ago
      >However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development. Could you give the page # for this?
  - createdapril24 5y ago
    This is a question I've encountered a few times. How quickly, versus natural evolution, can serial passage evolve a virus? Using this figure, we could have some parameters around how much time such a project must have taken and its latest start date (assuming its evolved from known or closely-related-to-known viruses). Using this figure, and a theoretical timetable, we can also specify how close a cousin virus we would need to have for such a process to develop SAR-CoV-2. This could give us a more specific understanding of the feasibility of such research. For example, RaTG13 is closest known virus was discovered in 2013. Does the rate of serial passage enable evolution from RaTG13 over ~7 years? If not, this provides a factual argument allowing us to determine even if gain-of-function research was imposed on RaTG13 the moment of its discovery, it could not have been developed into SARS-CoV-2. (I don't know how to evaluate the actual accuracy of this, but provided as a example of how knowing the serial passage rate would be helpful).
btilly 5y ago
The proposal that this article is about weakens your argument significantly. They were going to experiment with multiple backbones, experimenting with multiple variations of spikes, looking specifically to try novel types of furin cleavage sites. There was no public reporting of what happened with this research. We don't know what they have because WIV database was taken offline. They claimed to have searched it, but what they claimed was the closest match in the database was not, in fact, as close as a sequence they had published. Given that demonstrable lie, there is no way to verify any claim about what sequences were or were not known and possibly involved in this research. Furthermore the person who submitted the proposal was also the person who broke ethical standards to preemptively shut down all discussion of a human release. That isn't to take away from the possibility of a natural spillover. The facts that you say about that are facts. But accidental release is also possible. And the lack of transparency from those who are most likely to have made the mistake heightens suspicions, it does not lessen them.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  But at the end of the day you have zero evidence of any of that actually happened. The backbone doesn't exist, the spike doesn't exist, the effort necessary to culture that completely unknown virus in the lab isn't documented anywhere. And the grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2. And going from sequence to live culturable virus that you can work with is _difficult_. They aren't out collecting bats in the morning and whipping up live novel virus backbones in the evening. And if they actually carried out the research in this grant proposal you don't get from there to SARS-CoV-2, those are all SARS-1-like. It is research that "sounds like" what happened with the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover, but that isn't a strange coincidence. They were researching the thing they were worried about happening, and then it happened. Their research proposals naturally rhyme with what actually occurred because they had studied and understood the problem enough to guess more or less accurately what the process would be. There are still massive gaps in between this proposal and SARS-CoV-2 that you could fly a plane through.
  - willupowers 5y ago
darawk 5y ago
> 1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things. That may be true. But the people doing this work are the ones who would develop and then publish such knowledge, if it were indeed something they were working on. > It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened. It isn't. What is suspicious is the following: 1. It happened in the city that houses the lab where this research was proposed to take place. 2. The natural reservoir of these viruses is hundreds of miles from this city. 3. The outbreak occurred exactly 2 years after this research was originally proposed, in the city that it was proposed to take place in, in roughly the amount of time one might expect this research to take. 4. Peter Daszak, despite coming out forcefully against the lab leak theory, and purposely downplaying his involvement with the lab in so doing, and being inexplicably selected as a member of the WHO team to investigate the lab origin theory, completely neglected to mention having made this proposal a mere two years prior. If I were a major virus researcher, and my proposal to investigate the exact thing that just caused a massive global pandemic had been denied by DARPA two years prior, I would be shouting it from the rooftops as vindication. See, had you just let me investigate this, maybe we could have avoided this pandemic! But he didn't do that. He didn't mention it at all, despite its obvious relevance to all that has gone on. This is not the behavior of someone with nothing to hide. Whether or not this virus originated in this lab, it's pretty clear that Peter Daszak is up to something he'd rather the world not discover.
- Mizza 5y ago
  I have a little long bet going that in 10 years, Peter Daszak's name will be on the same lists as the world's worst mass killers. Imaging writing this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159294/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159294/ and then being forced to disclose this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8215723/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8215723/ 4.5 million dead so far. More than Pol Pot, less than Leopold II. There's still time.
ramraj07 5y ago
All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? Can you conclusively rule out that this virus wasn’t engineered (and then maliciously covered up) in a lab? The reason this approach is important is because the stakes here are higher. This means people who should have been careful weren’t, and are responsible for the death of millions and they’re happy continuing to cover up their part in it. The more important part here is an investigation on the origins of the virus is more about beurecracy than the actual science so unless you can conclusively prove that this virus could have never been engineered by a human you should stop bringing “improbability” of all of these processes as why we should trust these scientists.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  Natural occurrence is how almost every known virus exists. Given that prior, "can you disprove the lab" is the Russell's Teapot hypothesis. No, I can't. I also can't disprove it rode in on a meteorite or was beamed in by aliens. And I'm not about to start.
  - btmorex 5y ago
    We haven't had the technology to create novel viruses for very long so you statement is meaningless.
    - stablechaos 5y ago
      And the novel technology to create novel viruses was being actively developed in this lab. They've proudly and openly published results to this effect. Further, they were trying to get tens of millions in grant funding to develop the technology further.
- passivate 5y ago
  That is the wrong way to go about it. You have to approach it as you would in legal theory. Innocence is not something that is proven. The verdict is guilty or not guilty (which means evidence wasn't sufficient to convict, but that doesn't mean the defendant is innocent). In this case you have to prove that the virus was engineered by providing evidence. >All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? What you're proposing isn't science and it isn't what 'real scientists' do.
googlemaps 5y ago
There is a nearly identical RBD in the wild. But... without the furin cleavage site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649716 And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other
- uap 5y ago
  What if EcoHealth (originally Wildlife Preservation Trust International) was infiltrated by eco-terrorists who did the reasearch anyway then released a depopulation virus to punish humans and 'restore balance' to the ecosystem, in a sicko 'Army of the 12 Monkeys'-style act of terrorism? But either they weren't that successful (only 5 million deaths is not depopulation) or their goal was lockdowns and reduced air travel to give the environment a breather.
  - CyanBird 5y ago
    Please don't pollute HN with mindless, needless speculation
  - mikeblackson 5y ago
    I tend to think this was a malicious release. There was quite a bit of tension between the US and China when this virus emerged. I would not be surprised if the US released this virus in Wuhan during the War Games of 2019. If China was attempting to attack the planet, why would they release a virus in their own country when releasing it in any major city would've been just as easy?
  - DisjointedHunt 5y ago
    What if it was Aliens? /s One of the reasons i despise the Silicon Valley tone of conversation is how naive (read removed from the brutality that exists in the world outside the US' protected borders) the line is. Like, are you kidding me? - Research Lab near outbreak - Connected to person that proposed a similar GoF research for a grant in the US and was turned down - History of loose ethical standards and evidence of published works connecting the CCP to military usage of viruses - Absolutely no evidence of natural origin circumstantial or otherwise in spite of over 18 months of looking And we have people here closing their eyes, fingers in their ears going "la la la" with moronic arguments like : "Can you show me the evidence?" I mean, can you constructively participate in the discussion with an attempt to push it forward and call out the clear risks of weaponizing infectious vectors instead of saying "Nothing to see here, show me more" in the face of all we've seen. All that does is gives a pass to the people doing this in the dark. Accident or not, that work is ongoing and if a literal global mass casualty event doesn't help regulate it, what will ?
COGlory 5y ago
What is a viral backbone?
ImaCake 5y ago
A lot of comments against this, but I think this is a pretty good summary of why I think this is a zoonotic spillover event. To put it bluntly, evolution is much more creative than us and SARS-COV2 seems like a master stroke. Much of the arguments in favour of the lab escape hypothesis read like arguments made by people who are not virologists or related experts.

createdapril24 5y ago

These are all very compelling claims. I am wondering if you can provide at least one reference for each. E.g. "There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites" is a claim that can be referenced pretty easily with a link to papers reporting said sarbecoviruses.

lamontcg 5y ago
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1 https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeographic-mapping-of-newly-discovered-coronaviruses-pinpoints-direct-progenitor-of-sars-cov-2-as-originating-from-mojiang/ https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/phylogeo... https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.584717/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847... https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698 https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1
- areyousure 5y ago
  From your first link: "SARS-CoV-2 is the only virus in subgenus Sarbecovirus having this feature" From your second link: "Finally, the poly-basic (furin) site present in SARS-CoV-2 is absent in both RshSTT182 and RshSTT200." Your third link doesn't discuss furin cleavage sites very much. Your fourth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin". Your fifth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin". Your sixth link at least partially supports your claim with a single mention of furin, saying "The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2", but the whole truth is that while they have insertions at the S1/S2 cleavage site in the spike protein, they do not contain the full furin cleavage site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02 From your seventh link: "None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site in the spike." (Protip: in this claim #4 of yours under discussion, you should change "sarbecoviruses" to "betacoronaviruses".)
  - createdapril24 5y ago
    I only reviewed the first link. What I took away from it is that furin cleave sites occur in the family of coronaviruses naturally, but have not been seen in those most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This note about not having closely related coronaviruses having such a feature is also true of SARS-CoV-1, which also leads evidence to its ability to occur naturally within a given subgenus (unless we posit also original SARS was lab-leak, but I do not think anyone has posited this.) I have not evaluated 2-7.
willupowers 5y ago
I believe the uniqueness has been established by the issue that the specifics of the 12-nt insertion is never found anywhere in a natural setting. Many papers have gone back and forth over this and there's no natural example.
- createdapril24 5y ago
  Can you explain the importance of the 12-nt insertion, and also provide some references regarding it not being evolved naturally?

sayonaraman 5y ago

I doubt Wuhan GoF researchers will be publishing their findings anytime soon, until then it's all speculation.

willupowers 5y ago
Not really speculation any longer. Daszak made a bunch of statements that poured water on this potential concern, and so many other contradictor statements to this evidence. When there is a discrepancy or a number of discrepancies (in this case), there is a good chance of a valuable investigation.

harshreality 5y ago

There's nothing in that list that argues against SARS-CoV-2—and its spike protein and furin cleavage site in particular—being produced by serial passage through any of a variety of cell lines expressing human ACE-2. It does seem unlikely that the SARS-CoV-2 genome, or spike protein, or even just a small segment including the furin cleavage site, was synthesized. Although without knowing what protein folding modeling capabilities and synthesis capabilities the WIV had, who knows for sure?

lamontcg 5y ago
There's 1,000 nucleotide differences between the closest known progenitor and SARS-CoV-2. That is an evolutionary distance of 30-40 years in a coronavirus. You can't replicate that many years of evolution by serial passage in a lab. Serial passage isn't a magic wand. And the rest of it is that you're arguing in favor of a science fiction explanation for the capabilities of the WIV lab.
- willupowers 5y ago
  30-40 years difference from SARS-CoV. However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development. These unpublished sequences may have been much closer to SARS-CoV-2. I think you should read the leaks.
  - jml7c5 5y ago
    >However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development. Could you give the page # for this?
- createdapril24 5y ago
  This is a question I've encountered a few times. How quickly, versus natural evolution, can serial passage evolve a virus? Using this figure, we could have some parameters around how much time such a project must have taken and its latest start date (assuming its evolved from known or closely-related-to-known viruses). Using this figure, and a theoretical timetable, we can also specify how close a cousin virus we would need to have for such a process to develop SAR-CoV-2. This could give us a more specific understanding of the feasibility of such research. For example, RaTG13 is closest known virus was discovered in 2013. Does the rate of serial passage enable evolution from RaTG13 over ~7 years? If not, this provides a factual argument allowing us to determine even if gain-of-function research was imposed on RaTG13 the moment of its discovery, it could not have been developed into SARS-CoV-2. (I don't know how to evaluate the actual accuracy of this, but provided as a example of how knowing the serial passage rate would be helpful).

btilly 5y ago

The proposal that this article is about weakens your argument significantly. They were going to experiment with multiple backbones, experimenting with multiple variations of spikes, looking specifically to try novel types of furin cleavage sites. There was no public reporting of what happened with this research. We don't know what they have because WIV database was taken offline. They claimed to have searched it, but what they claimed was the closest match in the database was not, in fact, as close as a sequence they had published. Given that demonstrable lie, there is no way to verify any claim about what sequences were or were not known and possibly involved in this research. Furthermore the person who submitted the proposal was also the person who broke ethical standards to preemptively shut down all discussion of a human release. That isn't to take away from the possibility of a natural spillover. The facts that you say about that are facts. But accidental release is also possible. And the lack of transparency from those who are most likely to have made the mistake heightens suspicions, it does not lessen them.

lamontcg 5y ago
But at the end of the day you have zero evidence of any of that actually happened. The backbone doesn't exist, the spike doesn't exist, the effort necessary to culture that completely unknown virus in the lab isn't documented anywhere. And the grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2. And going from sequence to live culturable virus that you can work with is _difficult_. They aren't out collecting bats in the morning and whipping up live novel virus backbones in the evening. And if they actually carried out the research in this grant proposal you don't get from there to SARS-CoV-2, those are all SARS-1-like. It is research that "sounds like" what happened with the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover, but that isn't a strange coincidence. They were researching the thing they were worried about happening, and then it happened. Their research proposals naturally rhyme with what actually occurred because they had studied and understood the problem enough to guess more or less accurately what the process would be. There are still massive gaps in between this proposal and SARS-CoV-2 that you could fly a plane through.
- willupowers 5y ago

darawk 5y ago

> 1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research > 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things. That may be true. But the people doing this work are the ones who would develop and then publish such knowledge, if it were indeed something they were working on. > It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened. It isn't. What is suspicious is the following: 1. It happened in the city that houses the lab where this research was proposed to take place. 2. The natural reservoir of these viruses is hundreds of miles from this city. 3. The outbreak occurred exactly 2 years after this research was originally proposed, in the city that it was proposed to take place in, in roughly the amount of time one might expect this research to take. 4. Peter Daszak, despite coming out forcefully against the lab leak theory, and purposely downplaying his involvement with the lab in so doing, and being inexplicably selected as a member of the WHO team to investigate the lab origin theory, completely neglected to mention having made this proposal a mere two years prior. If I were a major virus researcher, and my proposal to investigate the exact thing that just caused a massive global pandemic had been denied by DARPA two years prior, I would be shouting it from the rooftops as vindication. See, had you just let me investigate this, maybe we could have avoided this pandemic! But he didn't do that. He didn't mention it at all, despite its obvious relevance to all that has gone on. This is not the behavior of someone with nothing to hide. Whether or not this virus originated in this lab, it's pretty clear that Peter Daszak is up to something he'd rather the world not discover.

Mizza 5y ago
I have a little long bet going that in 10 years, Peter Daszak's name will be on the same lists as the world's worst mass killers. Imaging writing this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159294/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159294/ and then being forced to disclose this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8215723/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8215723/ 4.5 million dead so far. More than Pol Pot, less than Leopold II. There's still time.

ramraj07 5y ago

All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? Can you conclusively rule out that this virus wasn’t engineered (and then maliciously covered up) in a lab? The reason this approach is important is because the stakes here are higher. This means people who should have been careful weren’t, and are responsible for the death of millions and they’re happy continuing to cover up their part in it. The more important part here is an investigation on the origins of the virus is more about beurecracy than the actual science so unless you can conclusively prove that this virus could have never been engineered by a human you should stop bringing “improbability” of all of these processes as why we should trust these scientists.

shadowgovt 5y ago
Natural occurrence is how almost every known virus exists. Given that prior, "can you disprove the lab" is the Russell's Teapot hypothesis. No, I can't. I also can't disprove it rode in on a meteorite or was beamed in by aliens. And I'm not about to start.
- btmorex 5y ago
  We haven't had the technology to create novel viruses for very long so you statement is meaningless.
  - stablechaos 5y ago
    And the novel technology to create novel viruses was being actively developed in this lab. They've proudly and openly published results to this effect. Further, they were trying to get tens of millions in grant funding to develop the technology further.
passivate 5y ago
That is the wrong way to go about it. You have to approach it as you would in legal theory. Innocence is not something that is proven. The verdict is guilty or not guilty (which means evidence wasn't sufficient to convict, but that doesn't mean the defendant is innocent). In this case you have to prove that the virus was engineered by providing evidence. >All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? What you're proposing isn't science and it isn't what 'real scientists' do.

googlemaps 5y ago

There is a nearly identical RBD in the wild. But... without the furin cleavage site. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649716 And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other

uap 5y ago
What if EcoHealth (originally Wildlife Preservation Trust International) was infiltrated by eco-terrorists who did the reasearch anyway then released a depopulation virus to punish humans and 'restore balance' to the ecosystem, in a sicko 'Army of the 12 Monkeys'-style act of terrorism? But either they weren't that successful (only 5 million deaths is not depopulation) or their goal was lockdowns and reduced air travel to give the environment a breather.
- CyanBird 5y ago
  Please don't pollute HN with mindless, needless speculation
- mikeblackson 5y ago
  I tend to think this was a malicious release. There was quite a bit of tension between the US and China when this virus emerged. I would not be surprised if the US released this virus in Wuhan during the War Games of 2019. If China was attempting to attack the planet, why would they release a virus in their own country when releasing it in any major city would've been just as easy?
- DisjointedHunt 5y ago
  What if it was Aliens? /s One of the reasons i despise the Silicon Valley tone of conversation is how naive (read removed from the brutality that exists in the world outside the US' protected borders) the line is. Like, are you kidding me? - Research Lab near outbreak - Connected to person that proposed a similar GoF research for a grant in the US and was turned down - History of loose ethical standards and evidence of published works connecting the CCP to military usage of viruses - Absolutely no evidence of natural origin circumstantial or otherwise in spite of over 18 months of looking And we have people here closing their eyes, fingers in their ears going "la la la" with moronic arguments like : "Can you show me the evidence?" I mean, can you constructively participate in the discussion with an attempt to push it forward and call out the clear risks of weaponizing infectious vectors instead of saying "Nothing to see here, show me more" in the face of all we've seen. All that does is gives a pass to the people doing this in the dark. Accident or not, that work is ongoing and if a literal global mass casualty event doesn't help regulate it, what will ?

COGlory 5y ago

What is a viral backbone?

ImaCake 5y ago

A lot of comments against this, but I think this is a pretty good summary of why I think this is a zoonotic spillover event. To put it bluntly, evolution is much more creative than us and SARS-COV2 seems like a master stroke. Much of the arguments in favour of the lab escape hypothesis read like arguments made by people who are not virologists or related experts.