9 ms·

Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legi

by rzz3 4y ago

Very well put. One thing I’d add, is that this entire debate regarding the lab leak hypothesis is entirely politicized, and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

mikeyouse 4y ago
That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.
- byecomputer 4y ago
  I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a301509-8308-462a-8119-b13c861075e8_640x613.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazhan+Ave,+Jianghan+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/Wuhan+Institute+of+Virology,+CAS:+Hubei+Engineering+and+Technology+Research+Center+for+Viral+Diseases,+44+%E5%B0%8F%E6%B4%AA%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%AD%E5%8C%BA+Wuchang+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China,+430071/@30.608929,114.2829193,12z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x342eaeb553b58fd7:0x355ff7d1fe8e8fb7!2m2!1d114.2622935!2d30.6165888!1m5!1m1!1s0x342ea56945e84d71:0x402ec92fd18fef96!2m2!1d114.3508524!2d30.5391912!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data' maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of the rivers and also very close to the lab. That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's pretending to be.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction? You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread? In any case, they directly address this; > Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density. > It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019. As for: > It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.
    - pbreit 4y ago
      Two lineages does not preclude a lab leak. And only B was centered at the market. The market hypothesis is lacking.
    - byecomputer 4y ago
      > You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV Yes, an article comparing two possible originating locations should obviously show both on that graphic (especially when both places are well-within the frame of the image); I can't see any good reason for the author to have omitted that. > but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread Yes. And that's not contradictory to the lab leak idea, because people aren't trees and they go places after work. I think it's entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the virus escaped from the lab on a person and ended up successfully taking root in a less-than-sanitary wet market just across the river. If two-headed turtles started showing up at a Popeye's 20 minutes away from the Turtle Experiment Laboratory, would you say that Popeye's was the source of the two-headed turtles? > You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Again, there's no reason both theories can't be true here. The caged, dirty animals definitely seemed to be the virus' first stronghold, but that doesn't mean that the new bat virus couldn't have come from the New Bat Virus Laboratory 20 minutes away from the wet market. > Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed. My point is that it made the bias of the author nakedly apparent. It's an pro-wet-market argument piece, not an objective look.
themitigating 4y ago
Is each theory equal in terms of probability based on the evidence? That's much more important than stating that both could be true
- pb9494 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kristjansson 4y ago
    GIGO
acdha 4y ago
> I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have. This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.
- thereddaikon 4y ago
  Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself. The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it. So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
    - cameldrv 4y ago
      This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV. Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence. In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2]. If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9
ethbr0 4y ago
> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from. If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future. If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are. Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.
- est31 4y ago
  You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.
- incrudible 4y ago
  You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    That is a substantial value, to be sure. But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control. If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.

by rzz3 4y ago

mikeyouse 4y ago

That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.

byecomputer 4y ago
I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8a301509-8308-462a-8119-b13c861075e8_640x613.jpeg https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazhan+Ave,+Jianghan+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China/Wuhan+Institute+of+Virology,+CAS:+Hubei+Engineering+and+Technology+Research+Center+for+Viral+Diseases,+44+%E5%B0%8F%E6%B4%AA%E5%B1%B1%E4%B8%AD%E5%8C%BA+Wuchang+District,+Wuhan,+Hubei,+China,+430071/@30.608929,114.2829193,12z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x342eaeb553b58fd7:0x355ff7d1fe8e8fb7!2m2!1d114.2622935!2d30.6165888!1m5!1m1!1s0x342ea56945e84d71:0x402ec92fd18fef96!2m2!1d114.3508524!2d30.5391912!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. Obviously the virus proliferated in the market, but that doesn't necessarily make the market the origin. The two bottom 'Weibo data' maps from the first link show clusters on both sides of the rivers and also very close to the lab. That's just the most obvious bit of bias, but I'm confident that article isn't being as fair-handed as it's pretending to be.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction? You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread? In any case, they directly address this; > Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density. > It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019. As for: > It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people. You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.
  - pbreit 4y ago
    Two lineages does not preclude a lab leak. And only B was centered at the market. The market hypothesis is lacking.
  - byecomputer 4y ago
    > You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV Yes, an article comparing two possible originating locations should obviously show both on that graphic (especially when both places are well-within the frame of the image); I can't see any good reason for the author to have omitted that. > but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread Yes. And that's not contradictory to the lab leak idea, because people aren't trees and they go places after work. I think it's entirely reasonable to hypothesize that the virus escaped from the lab on a person and ended up successfully taking root in a less-than-sanitary wet market just across the river. If two-headed turtles started showing up at a Popeye's 20 minutes away from the Turtle Experiment Laboratory, would you say that Popeye's was the source of the two-headed turtles? > You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases! Again, there's no reason both theories can't be true here. The caged, dirty animals definitely seemed to be the virus' first stronghold, but that doesn't mean that the new bat virus couldn't have come from the New Bat Virus Laboratory 20 minutes away from the wet market. > Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed. My point is that it made the bias of the author nakedly apparent. It's an pro-wet-market argument piece, not an objective look.

themitigating 4y ago

Is each theory equal in terms of probability based on the evidence? That's much more important than stating that both could be true

pb9494 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kristjansson 4y ago
  GIGO

acdha 4y ago

> I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have. This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.

thereddaikon 4y ago
Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself. The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it. So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..
  - cameldrv 4y ago
    This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV. Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence. In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2]. If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste. [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9

ethbr0 4y ago

> and I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth Not to be glib, but what would be a legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth? That this plausibly could have been of natural origin would seem to override any value in discerning where it actually came from. If it was a lab leak, "Oops." We hastened it occuring naturally by some amount of time. Lots of people died, but that would have happened in an inevitable spillover event anyway, albeit farther in the future. If it wasn't a lab leak, well there we are. Or, in other words, what would we do differently if it were a lab leak? Increase biocontainment protocols? Okay, so we've made human-origin less likely. We still have to deal with naturally-occurring in the future.

est31 4y ago
You raise good points, but note that not everyone is rational here. Covid has in fact shown irrational so many people are, even in the 21st century. If it were discovered to be a lab leak from something previously discovered in the wild, especially from a NIH funded lab, hell would break lose and it would hurt many aspects of biological and medical research.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  If authorities decide based on political considerations to not investigate a mistake that led to millions of deaths and tens of millions more lives destroyed, they lose an enormous amount of credibility in the eyes of the public. Full integrity is the only chance we have of having a healthy political atmosphere where the public can trust the establishment.
incrudible 4y ago
You underestimate the time value of not having a pandemic today, as opposed to perhaps hundreds of years in the future. Serial passage through humanized mice is not exactly something that happens in nature.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  That is a substantial value, to be sure. But I also look at it the other way: COVID was perhaps the smallest scale event that could produce fundamental change in the way we (as in, humans) approach biodefense and disease control. If we needed a wakeup call, better to have it now than ~2100, when we're estimated to reach peak population + continued concentration in cities.