19 ms·

Lab Leak 2.0?

• jeffbee 5y ago
  This mile-long gibberish has no more logic to it than the argument that the eye is so complex it could not have evolved, therefore God created life.
• Batfarts 5y ago
• muddi900 5y ago
  I would recommend this review of of Viral as a counterargument: https://t.co/wBZ3iVzwg8?s=09&utm_source=pocket_mylist https://t.co/wBZ3iVzwg8?s=09&utm_source=pocket_mylist
• nnx 5y ago
  This should be un-flagged. It's an interesting detailed write-up, worth to investigate further to say the least.
• stonogo 5y ago
  None of these Substack-based lab-leak hysteria pieces ever address "so what?" I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir, where the author includes "seems to have come from mice" as evidence for the former and not the latter, which is confused. Regardless, there is nothing actionable about any origin theory aside from "be mad at some unnamed scientist" or, as some of these conspiracy-theory vendors would prefer, "be mad at science in general." So, what is the call to action here? Stop researching gain of function entirely?
  • dls2016 5y ago
    How many SARS lab leaks should we tolerate? It has happened before and killed people and with this attitude will continue to happen. https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/6/news.pdf?ua=1 https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/6/news.pdf?ua=1
  • thepasswordis 5y ago
    >stop researching gain of function entirely? Yes
    • nemo44x 5y ago
      Seriously. The incentive for these researchers is awful. Their goal is to take a virus that maybe isn’t a threat and find a way to manipulate it to see how it could be a threat if it somehow naturally mutated into some specific otherwise engineered form. It’s the only way to justify their job. No one will subsidize researchers who come up with “nothing to see here”.
  • bpodgursky 5y ago
    > Stop researching gain of function entirely? Yes, this was very explicitly stated. And this is nowhere near the first call to do so (a lot of very respected scientists were calling for a stop to GoF research before the pandemic). Whatever claims GoF research had beforehand of helping w/ pandemic preparedness have evaporated, because none of the successful responses to the pandemic (vaccines, antivirals) have relied on GoF research whatsoever. It appears to a high risk with no reward.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Aliabid94 5y ago
    There are a lot of implications if this is a lab leak, including: - Are labs involved in this research sufficiently secure? Do we need to raise the standard of security? - Is the cost-benefit of gain of research worth it? - Should China be forced to pay reparations/ sanctioned for hiding the source? All of these conversations depend on whether its a lab leak.
    • omginternets 5y ago
      I would add to that: "is it an intentional means of destabilizing the West?" To be clear: I see no evidence that Omicron is even a second lab-leak, much less that it's part of a sinister plot. My point is that there are immediate geopolitical implications, in addition to the scientific and public-health implications you have highlighted.
      • addicted 5y ago
        Which makes it even more ridiculous that random people on the internet are coming up with the lab leak theories and that American intelligence agencies, spanning 2 wildly divergent administrations, have not said anything to support this.
        • omginternets 5y ago
          Yes, we agree. This thread is about the implications of the lab-leak v2 theory, assuming it were true.
        • ctoth 5y ago
          > IC analysts assess that a natural origin and a laboratoryassociated incident are both plausible hypotheses for how SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans. Analysts, however, disagree on which is more likely, or whether an assessment can be made at all, given the lack of diagnosticity of the available information. Most agencies are unable to make higher than low confidence assessments for these reasons, and confidence levels are tempered by plausible arguments for the opposing hypothesis. For these hypotheses, IC analysts consider an exposure that occurs during animal sampling activity that supports biological research to be a laboratoryassociated incident and not natural contact. [0]: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declassified-Assessment-on-COVID-19-Origins.pdf https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...
  • howaboutnope 5y ago
    > So, what is the call to action here? Stop researching gain of function entirely? I'd say it's this: > We need to decide whom to believe: the people with a lot to lose and their not-very-parsimonious or plausible-sounding explanations, which receive almost all the media attention; or the people with expertise and parsimonious explanations who don’t have a dog in this fight.
  • torstenvl 5y ago
    Millions of people are dead. I think it's worth having an objective public debate about what steps would be appropriate to reduce the risk of this happening again. I don't see that "be mad at science" has anything to do with an insistence on an honest exploration and testing of hypotheses. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums up the scientific approach as follows: "Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas that pass the test, reject the ones that fail. Follow the evidence wherever it leads. And question everything." Cosmos (2014). Why is that approach considered so anathema when it comes to hunting down the killer of millions of people?
    • omginternets 5y ago
      I suspect you have a bit of a straw man in mind. The opposition would likely say something like: "GoF is the best means at our disposal to fight diseases much worse than COVID".
      • dimitrios1 5y ago
        I suspect that the opposition then is not considering the gravity of this research being responsible for the deaths of millions. Which is obviously absurd, so there is definitely something else going on.
        • omginternets 5y ago
          I suspect: 1. You don't know what my position actually is, as I haven't stated it 2. You are confusing assertion and evidence In order to be even remotely convincing, you would have to show that the risk/reward ratio of GoF is stacked against GoF. Right now, you're just aggressively telling us that it is. You'll note that no matter how bad you demonstrate COVID to be, the opposition could (rightly!) claim that there are potentially worse diseases. And no matter how bad you postulate a future GoF-related outbreak might be, they could postulate a scenario in which humanity were saved by GoF. This is a hard question. It's literally a philosophical one. I really wish you wouldn't be so snarky.
          • 5y ago
  • chaxor 5y ago
    I think much of the interest in theories of lab leaks, or various other theories - credible or not, are mostly propelled with the same thrust as groundbreaking science itself: they want to find some truth about the world that's been unnoticed or less discussed. This is what motivates conspiracy theories and scientific discoveries alike. It's even true about flat Earth kids, however misguided they may be. The "so what?" is always an after thought, and often is irrelevant to the goal of simply finding something new.
  • ctoth 5y ago
    Yes. > We need to make efforts to stay informed about what’s happening with these viruses and the status of GoF research. We need to tell our friends and families, to use whatever platform we might have, big or small, to promote the end of this research. We need to get this in the public eye, so the public can demand change. We need to demand change, and not take no for an answer.
  • ibejoeb 5y ago
    > I see nothing here to convince me that Omicron is a lab leak as opposed to an animal reservoir The majority of the the piece goes to arguing exactly that. What's the counter?
    • pugworthy 5y ago
      > The majority of the the piece goes to arguing exactly that. What's the counter? To the person you're quoting's benefit, there is evidence given, but it doesn't convince them. That's all they are saying.
  • MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
    There's nothing hysterical about the article. Nor do they encourage the reader to conclude they should "be mad at a scientist/science in general". In fact they explicitly encourage the reader to believe and engage with scientists; just, you know, the ones that don't have obvious conflicts of interest around virology and specifically GoF research, who have been some of the most visible and vocal in speaking out against the Lab Leak theory. Also there's a clear call to action, which is to stop GoF research. Did you even read tfa?
• monocasa 5y ago
  All of the GoF research procedures I've read stress natural evolution, but still rely on random mutations at the end of the day, which would still leave you with a natural looking count of silent mutations in the general case. As a GoF researcher you don't want to cull 'silent' mutations because those are a major source of building blocks for useful mutations.
  • cassepipe 5y ago
    Damn this is the first comment contrarian to the article that acually addresses the main argument : Silent vs non-silent mutations ratio. The article pretty much convinced me and I am not sure I am really unconvinced yet but I have to thank you.
    • civilized 5y ago
      The S:NS ratio cited in the blog post also appears to be simply incorrect: https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1471336024827568130?s=20 https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1471336024827568130?s=...
      • dljones 5y ago
        So, you take on faith that the s/ns ratio as described by "Eigenrobot" who is quoting "Brett" (who are they?) is correct, and the s/ns ratio described by many microbiologists and genome experts, identifiable on their Twitter accounts, is wrong? I mean, we can find anyone on Twitter saying anything. I could create an account right now that says I'm an expert on time travel and tweet about it. And of course now that omicron is circulating widely in humans, its pattern and ratio of mutations is occurring as one would expect. I wonder why something we know is a natural occurrence (mutation as it infects humans worldwide) looks natural. It makes me wonder why the original omicron looked so weird. To me this is not a conversation about whether a lab leak occurred. It's a conversation about why the experts are not ruling out hypotheses that explain the information so they can (if necessary) move on to other hypotheses. Just dismissing hypotheses that explain the existing information is not very scientific, unless the hypotheses are untestable or are truly off the wall. This hypothesis is not truly off the wall.
• beardedwizard 5y ago
  So how are they keeping all the scientists involved in such a leak quiet? How many of these scientists are there?
  • MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
    A cover up isn't very hard to execute if the involved parties all have aligned incentives - in this case, not ruining their careers, possibly destroying their entire professional field, and publicly accepting culpability for millions of deaths and other damages.
    • beaned 5y ago
      Also does anyone know how many scientists would actually be involved anyway? What is the minimum?
      • daxuak 5y ago
        I've seen fundings and positions related to COVID research popping up since at least mid 2020. Biorxiv submissions exploded. Certainly not a small group to deal with.
      • MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
        Not that many, probably 1, or maybe 3 to be conservative. Of course there are the institutional and governmental parties as well, but still not that many (1 lab director, maybe 1 executive above them, plus a handful of regulators with detailed knowledge of the labs operations). If it is the case that, say, the WIV leaked the initial virus, there's probably less than a dozen people in the world with positive knowledge of that fact.
        • coolspot 5y ago
          And they all are going to die in accidents.
      • natch 5y ago
• netizen-936824 5y ago
  As someone who wasn't totally sure about the lab leak hypothesis before, this is rather convincing. Especially for the path that omicron took. I'm also surprised gain of function research has not been banned, the risk is far too high
  • GolfPopper 5y ago
    I found it completely unconvincing, particularly when it came to discussing the "lab leak". From the article, where the author speculates about why the omicron variant is so genetically different from other variants of the virus:> "One parsimonious hypothesis is that some engineering has been done to it, in order to make its evolution look so unnatural. I have not heard another parsimonious hypothesis." A New Scientist article from two weeks ago suggests two other hypothesis for the evolution of omicron: that it either evolved in a single immune-compromised person, or that it jumped to an animal population and then jumped back: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302268-how-did-the-omicron-coronavirus-variant-evolve-to-be-so-dangerous/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2302268-how-did-the-omi... I've been following COVID news the same way I do the weather during tornado season. That is to say, consistently and with an effort at personal awareness, but I'm hardly an expert. Yet I'm aware of several other "parsimonious hypotheses" which the author is not, and, worse, they apparently consider their own ignorance as evidence.
    • cherioo 5y ago
      The author actually mentioned those two theory several paragraphs down in the article. However, this actually made the article less credible to me, as this make me feel the article's purpose is to build a narrative and try to discredit everyone else, not to fairly evaluate all theories equally. One thing I have been feeling about internet is there are too many experts on it, so one can always find enough quotes that support ones theory. However, as a reader, it's become impossible to determine whether particular expert should be trusted.
    • netizen-936824 5y ago
      The article you linked was extremely short on details and mechanisms In the paper that the article links about mutations in an HIV patient (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.03.21258228v1.full-text https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.03.21258228v...) There is a figure 1 and the left side (A) which shows a maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. If you examine this tree, you can see that the highlighted piece is based off a recent (to the HIV patient's case) variant. On the other hand, the linked article (https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20 https://bprice.substack.com/p/lab-leak-20) has a tweet by Jonatan Pallesen showing a tree for Omicron. This tree shows that Omicron is based off of a variant from a surpringly long time ago. This alone is bizarre. That combined with the lack of silent mutations is extremely suspicious. I'm not saying this is concrete evidence or anything, but its very strange and doesn't appear to line up with a natural course of evolution
• daxuak 5y ago
  I don't like certain aspects of publishing with peer review, but if one is so confident with their lab leak theory, try go publish in journals or put it up in one of the preprint servers instead of substack. The key is to demonstrate not that your claims are based, but that you have tried various ways to invalid the conclusions but could not success.
  • howaboutnope 5y ago
    This discussion instantly garned upvotes, not one substantial argument against the article, and was flagged off the front page. At least this person has a reasoning and stands behind it, that's heads and shoulders above the tactics of those who want to bury this.
    • PennRobotics 5y ago
      This post had 40 points within 20 minutes, which is the reading time of the article at 200 WPM plus a minute or two for figures. How many of those upvotes were from people who didn't read or who skimmed the article?
      • hermitdev 5y ago
        I read the article, then up voted. On refresh it was buried. I had to find it via my upvoted submissions. In my opinion, the immediate flagging is a symptom of the hostility of even discussing the origins, lab leak or not.
        • PennRobotics 5y ago
          I agree on the hostility, and I also hadn't flagged. I wanted to see how the post evolved as I read the article and looked into each linked source's motivations, so I made a note of the points (14 after 10 minutes) specifically because I felt there would be a lot of biased discussion. The instant popularity of the post could have three factors: multiple votes from one source, individuals already well-versed in disease propagation and clandestine government action who support more visibility in the post, and people who believe the post could have merit without actually putting a great deal of their own research into the sources. I'm in the fourth camp: agnostics. That's why I haven't contributed to the popularity of the post. However, two years of hearing about this disease does a lot to build resent for armchair epidemiologists.
• option 5y ago
  a coincidence which is almost always ignored is that China had huge Hong Kong protests with no resolution in sight until a global pandemic hit halting all and any street protests there.
  • bArray 5y ago
    I believe it's important to separate China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I don't doubt that the Hong Kong protests were a major problem for the CCP and that COVID allowed them to implement a series of restrictions and laws to stop protests. I also don't doubt the very real possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan (in fact, given how the CCP have responded, I find it very likely). What I do doubt is that this virus was released to combat the Hong Kong protests. If it was on purpose, it was a huge self-inflicted wound, as the CCP's inability to contain the virus has made them look weak internally and externally. It's hugely crippled their own economic growth which was set to overtake the US, which has now been set back at least 5-10 years based on projections (if they are to be believed). If I were an evil regime, I would probably fake terroristic plots from the protestors and then respond to them heavily. There were plenty of other options available too, such as "starving out" the protestors (a tactic I believe they employed). What's more likely is that the CCP are very good at utilizing the current situation to serve their own means. They are surprisingly bad at it though and seem to completely misunderstand how they are perceived on the world stage.
    • jazzyjackson 5y ago
      To participate in this intriguing line of inquiry, It may be a case of aligned incentives. A new virus occurs (even CCP does not know whether it is lab-leaked), and it is allowed to exist for some time (doctors arrested for spreading rumors). Definitely prefer incompetence to malice here, but maybe a decision was made to "sit back and assess" while the problem grew more serious. Faking terroristic plots and blaming protesters is old hat, and the outcome of cracking down on the free territories while you still have the #2 Navy in the world are predictable. Hong Kong is not alone in desiring independence, and Beijing is not willing to lose face. A re-run of Tienanmen Square was starting to look inevitable. What if instead of that well-trod path of war, they chose to boost the poll numbers by allowing a crisis to occur and saving the day? The cost of an economic slow down, well it's a risky calculus, but if the pandemic becomes global, they will not be left that far behind the competition. In fact, a totalitarian regime may be better-able to enforce health mandates and become productive again sooner. What's more, USA was also dealing with a kind of dueling rebellion between BLM and Trump-Forever types. Perhaps the two agreed that the world needed a cooling-off. /tin-foil
• ctoth 5y ago
  Curious why this was flagged?
  • ufo 5y ago
    A blog post full of wild speculation, whose main sources appear to be a bunch of Twitter threads. Have we not learned anything in the past two years?
    • ekianjo 5y ago
      > A blog post full of wild speculation Asking valid questions, though. Is that better to bury one's head in the sand?
      • ufo 5y ago
        This is the perenial problem with all these poorly sourced "just asking questions" posts, in any topic (from covid misinformation to holocaust denial). By the time someone who actually knows their shit has a time to issue a proper response, the original wild speculation has already spread like fire on social media and landed in front of a bunch of eyeballs. There are many things in the original article that raise red flags about how accurate it is (for example, barely even paying lip service to the non-lab-leak hypothesis, and using twitter as a primary source). Given that, I'm going to be less charitable about the questions it's asking.
    • MaxfordAndSons 5y ago
      It also cites Science, The Taiwan Times, and Forbes (shrug). But more importantly, it's well reasoned. It's not "wild speculation". It's learned speculation based on history, opinions of experts, and independent sources, synthesized with deduction. I understand the reflex to push back on claims of conspiracy. I find the mainstream meme conspiracy theories (flat earth, 9/11 was an inside job, etc) to be somewhere between laughable and terrifying. But this is a unicorn among conspiracy theories: both the initial conditions are plausible (that this was an accident, of a kind that has happened before, not a nefarious pre-planned event with dubious benefit), and the conditions of the conspiracy are plausible (the set of people with positive knowledge of a given leak would be quite small, and their incentives to keep it secret would be strongly aligned).
• ibejoeb 5y ago
  There is no legitimate reason for this to be flagged. What happened to the vouch option?
  • formerly_proven 5y ago
    Vouch goes away if you keep vouching for things that get flagged again (or something like that).
  • dawnerd 5y ago
    There sure is. I flagged it because it’s speculation and conspiracy stuff shouldn’t be on HN. Sure it could be a leak but armchair detective work can be dangerous.
    • WaxedChewbacca 5y ago
    • alanfranz 5y ago
      It’s quite well written. It may be false, but why should it be a conspiracy?
      • rajup 5y ago
        It is a conspiracy because it does not fit into GPs world view and what they think is right. Apparently presenting citations and data is “speculation” these days…
    • gojomo 5y ago
      There's nothing in the HN Guidelines which would suggest this sort of article is disallowed: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Also, everything that's unpleasant to consider isn't a 'conspiracy'. Labs have performed gain-of-function experiments that create nastier viruses fairly regularly, often proudly publishing their work. Those same kinds of labs, while they always try not to, sometimes leak dangerous disease-causing agents - typically by infecting a researcher who then infects others in the community. So the speculated chain of events doesn't even require any malice – just known-to-happen events cooccuring at an inopportune time. And how can "armchair detective work" like this be "dangerous"? Hackers love to engage in armchair detective work! Unless there are reckless accusations placing potentially innocent people in danger – not at all true of this article – there's no grounds for suppressing good faith discussion, at least not in any culture that values open discussion of ideas, including even suspect ideas, to confirm/refute/improve them.
• ayjchan 5y ago
  This is Alina Chan, one of the co-authors of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. In defense of a natural origin of Omicron, this study describes the remarkable evolution of SARS-CoV-2 during convalescent plasma treatment of an immunosuppressed patient for 3-4 months; the mutations also reduced sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y We know that there is a large immunocompromised population in Africa and that Covid-19 is rampant there. We also know that most hospitals, regardless of country, don't have the resources to track the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in their immunocompromised patients. So it's not unexpected that a variant like Omicron could have evolved over an entire year in an immunocompromised individual before finally infecting others. If there is any evidence that a lab in the region was serially passaging SARS-CoV-2 in neutralizing antibodies/patient serum, then I'd say there is something to go on for a potential lab origin. But at the moment, there is not even circumstantial evidence pointing to this happening in Africa. Maybe setting up a secure channel for whistleblowers with evidence of the above would be the most productive approach. The above is not to say that I don't think there needs to be much more transparency and accountability from scientists working with pathogens. https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1468582694007279616 https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1468582694007279616
  • nnx 5y ago
    "Omicron could have evolved over an entire year in an immunocompromised individual before finally infecting others" Is it likely that this infected person would not have started any detectable cluster this whole time? How do you explain the ratio of functional vs silent mutations?
    • ayjchan 5y ago
      Evolution experiments in the lab mimic natural evolution. The ratio of functional vs silent mutations has also been used to characterize the evolution of viruses under natural selection.
      • netizen-936824 5y ago
• skylabmelody 5y ago
  Fauci himself shared these concerns during International Consultative Workshop on H5N1 Gain of Function Research (2013): https://youtu.be/4fsVN34LRb8?t=7229 https://youtu.be/4fsVN34LRb8?t=7229
• sydthrowaway 5y ago
  What if it was engineered in the lab to be LESS lethal and severe, so it could finally end COVID 19?
  • BbzzbB 5y ago
    That's a dangerous gamble which cannot be put back in the box in the event that it fails to be less dangerous. Like throwing a enormous amounts of sulfur in the atmosphere to take out CO2. It's the sort of decision that would have to be taken by isolated group or nation on behalf of the rest of humanity despite potentially catastrophic unintended consequences. Maybe the result will be that it's a "less dangerous than Delta collective immunizer", but I wouldn't be thrilled if it's an intended variant (even if a lab leak isn't much more reassuring). I'm also unclear how such researchers could come to the conclusion that it is less dangerous and more contagious with humanized mice considering it is the result (AFAIU) of it contaminating and replicating in the airways rather than the lungs. I'd be curious for someone more informed than me (an ecologist with very superficial understanding of viruses and studies in mice), but if I'm correct that lung vs. airway contamination isn't quite replicable in humanized mice vs. humans, intentional "alter and release" seems dubious.
  • dboreham 5y ago
    Funny I was about to post the same thought. It's the vaccine for Republicans.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    It's certainly a possibility, but an incredibly reckless, unethical route to take. One mistake, and you end up killing far more people than before. Not that I'd put such a plan past some people...
• d23 5y ago
  I'm open minded, but my bullshit detectors started going off around the point where it was casually implied that we all know and it is widely accepted that delta was leaked from a lab. I tried googling it but could find nothing. Then I looked at the two sources the author links: > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 Neither of these have nearly enough evidence or support for such a massive claim (the second doesn't even mention delta), as far as I can tell, and I can find no other reputable sources that make a similar claim. Heck, I can't even find un-reputable ones that mention this. Am I missing something? I'm not going to continue with the article if this is how flimsy the sourcing is.
  • tunesmith 5y ago
    I had never heard that before either. I remember multiple sources saying the discovery originated in India. I think an essay that represents surprising information as obvious is usually a good indicator of bias.
    • cassepipe 5y ago
      You misread because of a poorly worded sentence. She does not claim Delta's origin was a lab leak at all but that there has been a lab leak. Instead she implicitly compares Omicron and Delta showing that Delta did evolved naturally whereas it is unlikely of Omicron.
  • Sevaris 5y ago
    I feel like you're unfairly biased. The author doesn't say what you think they do. All they're saying is that there was a lab leak of delta in 2021 as an example of lab leaks being possible. They do not argue that this was the source of delta, nor that this was the source of any other strain. Just that it happened. Sorry, the hysteria on HN is ridiculous. At least read the damn thing and try to be objective about it.
    • d23 5y ago
• croes 5y ago
  Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists. Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator. I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.
  • chana_masala 5y ago
    You might find the work of David Gelernter (computer scientist) interesting. He's not a creationist, but he has abandoned the theory of evolution. > Suppose, then, that every bacterium that has ever lived contributes one mutation before its demise to the history of life. This is a generous assumption; most bacteria pass on their genetic information unchanged, unmutated. Mutations are the exception. In any case, there have evidently been, in the whole history of life, around 10^40 bacteria—yielding around 10^40 mutations under Axe’s assumptions. That is a very large number of chances at any game. But given that the odds each time are 1 to 10^77 against, it is not large enough. The odds against blind Darwinian chance having turned up even one mutation with the potential to push evolution forward are 10^40x(1/10^77)—10^40 tries, where your odds of success each time are 1 in 10^77—which equals 1 in 10^37. In practical terms, those odds are still zero. Zero odds of producing a single promising mutation in the whole history of life. https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/ https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin/
    • jagger27 5y ago
      I really regret spending time reading this drivel.
    • yyx 5y ago
      It took 4 billion years to get to this point. Plenty of time.
      • chana_masala 5y ago
        If you read the full review, it's not at all.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• zucked 5y ago
  If any of this is true, and I don't have enough brain power to decipher if it is or is not, would it be at least in the realm of possibility that Omicron was not an accidental leak; perhaps, rather, a deliberate one, to counteract the original (and Delta variant's) virulence and impact? We know that the virus is likely to continue to mutate in the wild, on its own - and that the virus in the wild has upended our way of life with great economic costs. Is this a viable path way to introduce widespread natural immunity? Omicron introduces mutations with extremely high contagious properties but very mild virulence. In one swoop, you expose vaccine-hesitant and developing nations to a virus they're likely to survive, help inoculate them against future mutations and outcompete the dominate strains such that the human race is somewhat protected against future infections. In effect, you kind of "undo" the original mistake.
  • ei8htyfi5e 5y ago
    So you’ve seen The Last Ship’s finale on Hulu…
• cletus 5y ago
  In some ways this reminds me of the ill-fated flight MH370. It's not that there's compelling evidence that the pilot took deliberate action to divert the plane and assumedly land it in the Indian Ocean in a place where it would be hard to find because of the distance from land and depth of the ocean. It's that it's the only theory that fits the facts. Likewise, it's not that there's compelling evidence of a lab leak (now or in 2019/2020). It's that we're sort of left with it by process of elimination. For example: if Covid-19 came from an animal population (eg via Wuhan wet markets) then why hasn't that population been found? The sources of SARS and MERS were, I believe, found relatively quickly. Just like we shouldn't just accept the prevailing theory of MH370's disappearance as fact and we should continue to look for the plane and hopefully factually establish what actually happened, we shouldn't take the "lab leak" hypothesis as fact. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. As for the articles claims about Omicron origins... I really don't know. I'm certainly no virologist so can't speak to the mutations. That's an odd-looking graph though. I'm also wary of drawing conclusions from anything to do with statistics, just because it's so easy to make a mistake. My favourite example is the long-running idiocy about "natural immunity" being better than a vaccine. This is based on comparing two populations: vaccinated and unvaccinated. Except... those populations aren't equivalent. The vaccinated group includes people who would've died without the vaccine (and thus are more likely to have comorbidities). Those people are dead in the unvaccinated population.
  • peteradio 5y ago
    For Christ's sake with the natural immunity. It's the survivors who wish to have their rights. It's not some pissing match with the vaccinated.
  • saalweachter 5y ago
    >> The sources of SARS and MERS were, I believe, found relatively quickly. > But it took nearly 15 years and extensive animal sampling to find a closely related virus in bats. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01541-z https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01541-z
  • nyolfen 5y ago
    > Likewise, it's not that there's compelling evidence of a lab leak (now or in 2019/2020). It's that we're sort of left with it by process of elimination. For example: if Covid-19 came from an animal population (eg via Wuhan wet markets) then why hasn't that population been found? The sources of SARS and MERS were, I believe, found relatively quickly. there's a great deal of compelling evidence for alpha leaking from a lab; e.g. the director of the WIV publishing papers about introducing furin cleavage sites, which have otherwise never been detected in coronaviruses, into bat coronaviruses in the years leading up to the pandemic. if anybody has not read the nicholas wade essay in the bulletin of atomic scientists from last year that was mentioned briefly in the linked piece, i strong recommend it: 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...
• daenz 5y ago
  Ban it all until we have an established colony on another planet/moon specifically for this kind of research. It's not worth the risk otherwise. But something tells me that "oops we created a dangerous virus now we need to seize more control" offsets that risk to the governments of the world.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    Even then, the people working on this other planet/moon will probably want to come back home to Earth at some point. Maybe a leak that way is much less likely than a leak from an Earth-based lab next to a population center, but I would bet on humans still failing at perfect safety protocols, and bringing something nasty back to Earth regardless. As the article states, we should be clearly weighing the benefits of gain-of-function research against its risks. It seems like that was the intent of the 2014 funding ban in the US, but we never actually did that work, and that's horrifying. And if the some/many/all of the benefits of GoF research can be realized through other means, even if those means are more difficult or costly, we should probably just do that anyway.
• pazimzadeh 5y ago
  > "[A virus wouldn’t be expected to develop a bunch of resistances to the current human antibodies if it evolved in] An animal, because animals in natural circumstances don’t have human antibodies" Animal antibodies would work just fine to put selective pressure on the virus.
  • downrightmike 5y ago
    That's why viruses coming out of bats are so scary. Bat immune systems are strange and complex, but they allow the virus room to exist and mutate.
• john_moscow 5y ago
  What kinda raised suspicions about Omicron for me is that it propagates considerably faster in the bronchial tissue, while being much slower in the lungs [0]. Given the current state of biotech, it is not possible to just edit the viral RNA achieving the desired clinical result, but is entirely feasible to keep applying minor edits and measuring the propagation rate in different tissues in vitro, effectively optimizing it to be more transmissible and less lethal. The snapshot of the phylogenetic tree, showing how Omicron "branched out" mid-2020 highly supports this assumption. It is also quite obvious that an endeavor like this would be against all written rules and norms and would face backlash of epic proportion even if it wouldn't backfire, so it's safe to assume we won't hear an official confirmation of this theory from any of the governments. [0] https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/omicron-propagates-70-times-faster-than-delta-in-bronchi-study-69540 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/omicron-propagate...
  • zzt123 5y ago
    I am reminded how even in as controlled an environment as China, He Jiankui broke the rules.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    And if this were the case, they don't seem to have done a particularly good job. People have already died of omicron, and that alone would be an indictment of the end result. "First, do no harm", and all that.
• aaron695 5y ago
• civilized 5y ago
  This post takes many screens of text to get to the point: we don't know how omicron evolved from its last known ancestor in Spring 2020 to November 2021, when it burst into the world stage. Ergo, lab leak. It's a great deal of throat-clearing for a one-sentence argument from ignorance. Alina Chan has pointed to a more plausible alternative in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29789480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29789480
  • cassepipe 5y ago
    The main argument is the ratio of silent vs non-silent mutations. So you are actually making a false presentation of her argumentation and I believe this is called... slander ? Although the claim that there's little chance for Omicron to have developped resistance to antibodies in an immunodepressed patient (that is without antibodies) needs to be adressed to. I would love to see a reasonable fact-based response to the article that actually take into account the points being made.
    • civilized 5y ago
      > The main argument is the ratio of silent vs non-silent mutations. Incorrect. She claims four supporting lines of evidence and does not label any one of them as the "main" argument. The NS:S ratio is just the second of four presented. She is throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks, because she lacks the expertise to evaluate how strong any one of her arguments is. > So you are actually making a false presentation of her argumentation and I believe this is called... slander ? No, it's not called slander. I just didn't see it when scrolling through this poorly organized and low-information blog post to extract the 1-2% of text that contained novel or interesting claims. Honest mistake. If we want to talk about this silent/non-silent ratio seriously, we need to look at the data a little more carefully and not just trust some random Twitter person's guesstimate. There is at least one other random Twitter person who doesn't agree with the ratio presented in the OP. This second person does a transparent calculation citing an authoritative source, so it's a lot higher quality claim than the first random Twitter person: https://twitter.com/TheBrettRGM/status/1471317205014900739 https://twitter.com/TheBrettRGM/status/1471317205014900739 If you look at the counts of non-synonymous and synonymous mutations for each variant listed at https://covariants.org/variants https://covariants.org/variants, you will see that all variants have a very high NS:S ratio. So either the entire evolution of the virus is being guided by mad scientists in secret labs, or we armchair virologists are over-interpreting the NS:S ratio. > Although the claim that there's little chance for Omicron to have developped resistance to antibodies in an immunodepressed patient (that is without antibodies) needs to be adressed to. Immunocompromised people don't lack antibodies. I think there is ample evidence at this point that this person is not an expert and the arguments made are probably much less strong than they may sound to a layman.
• alex_young 5y ago
  If the author actually had some kind of evidence that there was a lab leak source of Omicron, don’t you think it would be mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the blog? Instead we have a long list of connect-the-dots tweets, out of context quotes, and unsubstantiated speculation going on for 2/3s of the post before we even get to the Omicron stuff. The meat of the speculation is a scary looking graph plotting genetic delta from the origin. Here’s a more objective plot from the Wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant#/media/File%3AOmicron_SARS-CoV-2_radial_distance_tree_2021-Dec-01.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2_Omicron_variant#/... Notice anything? Looks like Gamma and others have similar genetic distances without other mutations. Sensational blogging is pretty sensational. That’s about it.
  • MichaelDickens 5y ago
    The plot on Wikipedia looks to me like it has lots of variants with frequent branches coming off of each variant, except for Omicron, which went a great distance with no branches and then started branching rapidly again. This seems most consistent with a lab leak.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • cassepipe 5y ago
    Have you actually read it ? Can you give your opinion about the ratio between silent/non-silent mutations ? Because it is the main and most compelling argument.
    • kelnos 5y ago
      Another commenter pointed out that the probability of this ratio is around 4% (haven't checked the math on that, though; statistics was never my strong suit). While that sounds like it's unlikely, this virus is bouncing around and mutating in hundreds of millions of people. When your absolute numbers are that large, unlikely events should be expected to happen, and happen fairly often.
• newbie789 5y ago
• thurn 5y ago
  This is interesting, but even a brief discussion of selection bias would help it be more convincing. If you pick the most wildly successful mutation out of the thousands of available choices of course it is going to be an outlier in numerous ways. Isn't it perhaps even likely that the most widespread variant would have a low number of silent mutations and strong immune-evasion capabilities?
  • kelnos 5y ago
    It's definitely likely that the most widespread variant would have strong immune-evasion capabilities, but I don't see how it follows that it it's likely that it would have a low number of silent mutations. The immune-evasion would be something that evolution would select for, but the number of silent mutations (low or high) would seem not to matter where evolution is concerned.
• Sparyjerry 5y ago
  The article is very well written, as was the last article on lab origin theory. Previous articles have already recognized that this mutation (technically 33 mutations) emerged from a strain prior to even the naming of the Alpha strain. That by itself had resulted in several theories, a few of which were mentioned: a lab leak, that this was mutating within a single population for over a year before spreading, that is was mutating within a single person, or that it traveled to another species where it spread rampantly and mutated then traveled back. This adds further data and it's great to see articles that use highly credible PHD sources like this, and the explains things in easy to understand ways. I feel it does move the probability closer to a lab origin but as the article states it is still only more likely in their opinion. Some articles or people have an odd level of conviction behind non-definitive data or an emotional attachment to the origin of the virus and I'm not seeing that in this article.
• chaostheory 5y ago
  If we're revisiting this subject, it's time to revisit these articles "LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses." https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra... "Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research" https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug... "RaTG13 – the undeniable evidence that the Wuhan coronavirus is man-made" https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html
• TTPrograms 5y ago
  The sample distribution of viruses is incredibly important for this sort of analysis, and much of the argument here only makes sense through the lens of uniform virus sequencing. If you have imbalanced sequencing and imbalanced transmission you can also explain these differences. The important thing is that mutations occur at a certain rate per virus per unit time. If you have an isolated population that's sequenced infrequently then (1) that strain will appear to evolve more slowly as there's a smaller population capable of mutating, and (2) once that strain is sequenced it's going to look far from what you've seen already since you haven't been tracking the intermediate mutations in this population. The S/N ratio can be analyzed in terms of a random walk in high dimension. Variance in these walks grows over time (in terms of distance from origin, i.e. number of mutations), so the discrepancy doesn't seem super far from what's plausible under the null hypothesis. Perhaps someone can do the math on that. The hypothesis merits further investigation, but the strength of the evidence presented here really requires some complex statistical analysis to determine if innocuous explanations fit. The analysis is far more complex than I would expect an epidemiologist or virologist to apply in the course of their work.
• boublepop 5y ago
  > “If a $1000 PhD side project could kill millions of people, we must end viral [gain-of-function research], or it may end us.” This sentimental reminds me of a talk given by a government bomb expert where a naive student asked “why do we allow the ingredients for bombs to be sold in store, shouldn’t we ban them all?” The answer of cause is that if we do that, then we suddenly don’t have gasoline, orange juice, basic electronics, fertilizer or even just basic sanitation products available anymore, but of cause anyone who wanted to make a bomb would still be able to do so easily. If it really is the case as pitched that 1000$ gets you a virus that will bring down nations, why on earth would we leave the field only to bad actors? Would that not just make it ever so more important that such researched happened openly and under well funded, strictly controlled conditions so we know what to expect and so we can start to develop plans for counter measures for when the next 9/11-like fanatic driven attack comes along?
  • validuser 5y ago
    There's an infinite number of possible viruses. Inventing some random new ones doesn't protect anyone.
    • trenchgun 5y ago
      We need to be able to defend from the dark arts. Just like in Harry Potter.
  • roenxi 5y ago
    It isn't a question of sentiment, it is a question of magnitude. Even in the worst case, a psychopath bomb maker just can't do that much damage.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    I don't know if this is truly the case (outside my area of expertise), but the article claims that most of the benefits of gain-of-function research can be realized through much safer methods. If true, the "good guys" don't really lose much by refusing to do what the "bad guys" might be doing.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  somehow these lab leak 2, lab leak 3 etc weaken the case for lab leak 1 this is becoming the new russiagate
• indigodaddy 5y ago
  I posted this article on my Facebook feed and it was promptly auto-deleted by Facebook. A sad state of affairs indeed. *EDIT* it looks like it didn’t actually get deleted. When I went to edit the post my edit wouldn’t take and it said the post was deleted. But I am still seeing the post, so I think it’s “there” at least..
  • fer 5y ago
    At this point I'm no longer sure if that'd be good or bad. It's highly speculative, and does a lot of cherry picking, and an informed reader can read it for what it is, but it dumbs down some things so far as to make it fodder for the tinfoil hat crowd. And it's especially ugly when it justifies the cherry picking as "it's because these people don't make their living with GoF research". Substack is becoming YouTube for text at this point.
    • indigodaddy 5y ago
      Hmm, dunno, I thought it was a great article, with the main takeaway being that GoF research is unequivocally and inarguably dangerous AF, should be halted ASAP, if not forever then for a long period of time where we can proverbially have a breather such that the scientific community can engage in an official reassessment/reexamination upon its safety and viability.
      • fer 5y ago
        It's great to oversee certain hypotheses, but as a whole it's largely clickbait, IMO. Aside from what I said, for example, GoF research generally introduces silent mutations at about the same rate as natural evolution, because it's experimental evolution after all. Likewise, such research often implies loss-of-function, due to uneven selection pressure (unless you do GoF in humans, which isn't really needed in a pandemic scenario). But on the other hand, he raises the point of the low level of silent mutations, which is more a case of genetic modification than GoF, and doesn't even mention the possible loss-of-function. So even though the lab leak is plausible, she's using arguments that contradict each other, knowing that at least one of them is invalid (most certainly the GoF one).
• m0llusk 5y ago
  We have a record of successfully tracing viral origins. This is extremely detailed and difficult science. The last two coronavirus outbreaks took around fifteen years to understand. The previous pandemic was HIV which took even longer than that. Thinking that there is a quick and easy way to understand the origins of SARS-CoV2 variants based on narrative inference is essentially asserting that it is different this time. That might be the case, but it will probably take a long time to be sure. In the mean time we can be confident that we understand previous natural viral origins and also predict that there will be more coronavirus outbreaks no matter what people do in labs. Science and history did not suddenly change because there is an interesting hypothesis linked to a dramatic narrative.
  • wand3r 5y ago
    I am in no way informed about this area but from just a layman/logical perspective: > The last two coronavirus outbreaks took around fifteen years to understand. Is it possible that because these diseases had less impact, less people worked on them? It seems like virtually every scientist in even a tangentially related field is working on Cov-2. Not to mention that we have made significant improvements in technology even over the last decade. I am not saying that this proves or disproves your comment, but couldn’t it be said that more people, resources and technology could get us answers faster in 2019? Especially if we are building of research and knowledge we have acquired over the preceding 2 decades?
• 2-718-281-828 5y ago
  the reason why the coronavirus was developed in a Chinese lab and financed by Fauci is because China is in an advantageous situation for GoF research having humans for experiments at disposal. they use Falun Gong and Uighurs for that purpose. it's the same logic that applies to black sites operated outside of the US.
• acconrad 5y ago
  I’m flagging this as misinformation and surprised this is scoring so high on HN. This author presumes every major VoC stemmed from a lab leak. From the wild strain to Delta to Omicron. This is sensationalist, unsubstantiated claims with weak supporting evidence.
  • alfon 5y ago
    Note that the author does not imply that Delta originated from a lab, but rather that Delta leaked from a lab at the end of 2021, and cites a supporting source.
• civilized 5y ago
  Re: the claim about the non-synonymous/synonymous mutation ratio (N:NS ratio): if you calculate this ratio for each variant listed on https://covariants.org/variants https://covariants.org/variants, you will see that all variants have a very high NS:S ratio. So either the entire evolution of the virus is being guided by mad scientists in secret labs, or we armchair virologists are over-interpreting the NS:S ratio. I think there is ample evidence at this point that this person lacks expertise in virology, and the arguments they make are probably much less strong than they may sound to a layman.
• cityzen 5y ago
  "I’m talking about omicron, and no, it’s not a joke." I'm lost, who is the author? Without names and credentials this just looks like some kind of covid fan fiction or something.
• rdw 5y ago
  It repeatedly asserts that immunocompromised patients cannot have antibodies ("weirdness" 3 & 4), but, immunocompromization is a spectrum. Many people can produce antibodies but not as many as normal. If the piece hinges on getting this pretty basic element wrong, how wrong is it about some of the more sophisticated analyses?
  • dljones 5y ago
    Not what it says. Immunocompromised people, in order for their "omicron" to develop resistance to the various treatments available (the monoclonal antibodies) must have been exposed to those treatments. If they were exposed to those treatments, they were being followed medically. If they were being followed medically, and receiving long-term treatments, it's then odd that they didn't infect a single other person in a year and a half. On the other hand, there's the somewhat bigoted implication that "oh there are a lot of remote people in Africa that don't come in contact with anyone else." Well, then how did their omicron develop resistance to all the fancy treatments? Either it's an immune compromised patient who never came in contact with anyone else, and the specific resistance to monoclonal antibodies, which they never received, is not explained. Or it's an immune compromised patient who received intensive treatments for a long time, in which case the lack of any intermediate variants ever being documented is not explained. S/he didn't say immunocompromised people don't have antibodies. S/he says mice don't have human antibodies, so if the "mouse hypothesis" is correct, how did the mice, unless they were lab mice, get the immunity to all these human treatments?
• lenkite 5y ago
  This virus is just too profitable and many folks at big pharma are unhappy that there are not yet in the top-10 billionaire list. Expect to see more variants and more 'booster' shots in the upcoming years. They will milk this opportunity for all its worth.
• amai 5y ago
  I believe the theory for an accidental lab leak in Wuhan is more convincing, because it actually started near to a lab. Where is the evidence here that the first cases of Omikron were detected near a lab. Are there any labs in South Africa that could be responsible for such a leak?
• amai 5y ago
  "Is molnupiravir the missing puzzle piece that can explain Omicron and its 3x higher mutation rate than normally observed in SARS2?" https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1474116195444006922 https://twitter.com/ydeigin/status/1474116195444006922