9 ms·

> Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry... I can

by timr 5y ago

> Given the early epidemiological nexus of the wet markets there is every reason to believe this arose out of a reservoir in the fur or meat industry... I can make the same argument for lab origin: "given the early epidemiological nexus of a government virology laboratory in the same city as the index cases, many of whom worked at the lab..." The rest of your comment boils down to "science is hard and often ambiguous"...which it is, but is not an argument either way, and certainly not a reason to leap to one conclusion or the other. BTW: the close relatives in Yunnan and Laos aren't actually that close. But it all depends on how you define "close", which just begs the original question. I wouldn't call the known relatives dispositive.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
inter_netuser 5y ago
including the strain from the outbreak that the batwoman published in 2015 or so? That one was supposedly the closest.
alevskaya 5y ago
An epidemiological nexus is much smaller than an entire city and the details of the early cases matter. Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. If the nexus were in fact WIV we'd expect a very different pattern of early cases (eg conference travel - a lot of researchers from WIV were at a Nipah conference in Singapore just before the outbreak!) You could of course argue that the authorities just covered up any damning links, but the early outbreak was pretty chaotic and information wasn't well controlled... and in any case at that point we're not longer capable of arguing based on any evidence at all. My point is simply that a lack of fully verified lineage analysis is completely unsurprising and not at all evidence in favor of conspiracy. I used to engineer viruses... By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close - the mosaicity of coronaviruses in these bats complicate matters - but likely within a decade of a common ancestor to sars-cov-2. Closer than any other sample that we know WIV were working with beforehand (again, people claim they were hiding what they were doing, except there was no reason whatsoever to do so before the pandemic). Though "not close" for sure in the sense that even if they did have these strains, you would never evolve sars-cov-2 from them in a dish, there simply wouldn't be enough passages to do so. And that's sort of the point - the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea, and we know that these coronaviruses jump all the time from close animal contacts, having caused two other epidemics in the last 20 years...
- timr 5y ago
  > Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. So? It's a market. People go there, in large numbers. Is it really surprising that you'd find traces of a widely circulating respiratory virus in a place where large numbers of people congregate? > By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close RaTG13 is closer than the BANAL viruses, and we already knew about it. You have to look at specific genes and squint and make hand-wavy arguments about how SARS-CoV2 evolved from recombination of ~5 different viruses to make any sort of claim that this is strong evidence of natural evolution. I'll give you this: the RBD of BANAL-20-52 is the closest match yet for the RBD of SARS-CoV2. Still no furin cleavage site, though. https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09c... > the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea I love this. The evolutionary story is too complicated and improbable to imagine, but sure, the idea of making a few relatively simple additions to a known virus is "nutty". And hey...it's not like there was a lab in Wuhan writing grants about similar transformations or anything. You have to be kidding. Look, I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but you're simply in love with a theory and dismissing all evidence to the contrary.
  - dnautics 5y ago
    The furin cleavage site looks suspiciously like a hallmark cut-and-paste operation that is exactly what I would do as a genetic engineer.
    - hcknwscommenter 5y ago
      Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?
      - dnautics 5y ago
TickCount 5y ago
The problem with relying so heavily on argument from coincidences is that one then incurs the epistemic responsibility to seek out and explain alway other coincidences in the neighborhood putatively pointing to alternative explanations (a step people often forget, but is essential for the validity (insofar as one can speak of validity) of one's argument from coincidences). And such coincidences are always easy to find, since coincidences are cheap. (To take just one example, the pandemic happened shortly after the World Military Games, which US servicemen attended, at a time when the relations between the two countries were at their worst in recent times, and who came from a country one of whose household names novelists once publicly fantasized about all the world's nations coming together and use biological weapons to wipe out the entire population of China, based on none other than the desire to curb China's peaceful rise (cf. Unparalleled Invasion)) Do these "coincidences" need explaining away? Do they need to create a presumption in favor of the bioattack theory? If not, what is it about spatial proximity coincidence that gives it such power to confer that sort of presumption?

by timr 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

inter_netuser 5y ago

including the strain from the outbreak that the batwoman published in 2015 or so? That one was supposedly the closest.

alevskaya 5y ago

An epidemiological nexus is much smaller than an entire city and the details of the early cases matter. Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. If the nexus were in fact WIV we'd expect a very different pattern of early cases (eg conference travel - a lot of researchers from WIV were at a Nipah conference in Singapore just before the outbreak!) You could of course argue that the authorities just covered up any damning links, but the early outbreak was pretty chaotic and information wasn't well controlled... and in any case at that point we're not longer capable of arguing based on any evidence at all. My point is simply that a lack of fully verified lineage analysis is completely unsurprising and not at all evidence in favor of conspiracy. I used to engineer viruses... By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close - the mosaicity of coronaviruses in these bats complicate matters - but likely within a decade of a common ancestor to sars-cov-2. Closer than any other sample that we know WIV were working with beforehand (again, people claim they were hiding what they were doing, except there was no reason whatsoever to do so before the pandemic). Though "not close" for sure in the sense that even if they did have these strains, you would never evolve sars-cov-2 from them in a dish, there simply wouldn't be enough passages to do so. And that's sort of the point - the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea, and we know that these coronaviruses jump all the time from close animal contacts, having caused two other epidemics in the last 20 years...

timr 5y ago
> Aside from the contact-tracing, investigators were able to get positive PCR recovery of sars-cov-2 from -environmental samples- at the wet markets, indicating an incredible degree of contamination there. So? It's a market. People go there, in large numbers. Is it really surprising that you'd find traces of a widely circulating respiratory virus in a place where large numbers of people congregate? > By natural standards the Laos samples are extremely close RaTG13 is closer than the BANAL viruses, and we already knew about it. You have to look at specific genes and squint and make hand-wavy arguments about how SARS-CoV2 evolved from recombination of ~5 different viruses to make any sort of claim that this is strong evidence of natural evolution. I'll give you this: the RBD of BANAL-20-52 is the closest match yet for the RBD of SARS-CoV2. Still no furin cleavage site, though. https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09ca-d494-4a7c-a65b-9eec9c0a06b8.pdf https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-871965/v1/986c09c... > the evolutionary "risk surface area" of zoonosis is many orders of magnitude larger than this nutty lab-leak idea I love this. The evolutionary story is too complicated and improbable to imagine, but sure, the idea of making a few relatively simple additions to a known virus is "nutty". And hey...it's not like there was a lab in Wuhan writing grants about similar transformations or anything. You have to be kidding. Look, I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but you're simply in love with a theory and dismissing all evidence to the contrary.
- dnautics 5y ago
  The furin cleavage site looks suspiciously like a hallmark cut-and-paste operation that is exactly what I would do as a genetic engineer.
  - hcknwscommenter 5y ago
    Really? I'd like to hear more about this. What exactly looks so "suspicious" that it can't be explained by typical recombination events that are known to occur naturally in RNA viral genomes?
    - dnautics 5y ago

TickCount 5y ago

The problem with relying so heavily on argument from coincidences is that one then incurs the epistemic responsibility to seek out and explain alway other coincidences in the neighborhood putatively pointing to alternative explanations (a step people often forget, but is essential for the validity (insofar as one can speak of validity) of one's argument from coincidences). And such coincidences are always easy to find, since coincidences are cheap. (To take just one example, the pandemic happened shortly after the World Military Games, which US servicemen attended, at a time when the relations between the two countries were at their worst in recent times, and who came from a country one of whose household names novelists once publicly fantasized about all the world's nations coming together and use biological weapons to wipe out the entire population of China, based on none other than the desire to curb China's peaceful rise (cf. Unparalleled Invasion)) Do these "coincidences" need explaining away? Do they need to create a presumption in favor of the bioattack theory? If not, what is it about spatial proximity coincidence that gives it such power to confer that sort of presumption?