5 ms·

> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1. They sequenced RaT

> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1. They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing it. We also know about their SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1 work because they published it. Before the pandemic they had no reason to keep work on RaTG13 secret. This is a case of Schrodinger's BSL4 lab. We know they built chimeras of other viruses because they told the world about that, we know they sequenced RaTG13 because they published that sequence, but there's a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor backbone that they found, which for some reason they picked to be the backbone in a new set of experiments, which they had perfect secrecy over and nobody has ever found any evidence of it.

smsm42 4y ago
The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no evidence will be seen by anybody.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed up (happens all the time, security services have enough idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the proof. That's why they do it.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - smsm42 4y ago
        Not sure how you made this conclusion... But of course we need to look if there's new evidence - that's what I just said, that there could be new evidence, but if there won't be then we couldn't know for sure.
        SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Because we can now say that there was any evidence we want but the totalitarian state destroyed it. We can now make any argument where the state destroying evidence fills in the gap of the theory.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Maybe we should stop supporting the study of dangerous viruses in facilities that don't maintain adequate levels of transparency. Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I'm not making an argument regarding this instance, but to have a theory that you can't disprove really makes it not a theory and impossible to engage with.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      > In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason. Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
      - lamontcg 4y ago
        Another point is that in the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-2004 the Chinese government acted similarly: > Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same. Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein-fbi-iraq-iran https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
  - initplus 4y ago
    The circumstances that make the theory unfalsifiable (lack of transparency/controls in Chinese biological research) are the issue here. Due to the lack of transparency we will likely never have definitive proof for the origin one way or the other. At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
  - himinlomax 4y ago
    It's not, because all it would take to falsify it would be to do an exhaustive search of the lab's documentation and a comprehensive interview of lab employees. We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      How would that falsify the theory? If you find no evidence you can just claim that the state destroyed it.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc. They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason. That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state, not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything else is secret by default. And the standard mode of action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every time. Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than Apple, and the reason is they live in a totalitarian state and Apple doesn't.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      We know they constructed Chimeras of the WIV1 SARS-1-like virus because they published it: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113 Pretty bad secrecy. We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/
      - brigandish 4y ago
        How long had they been working on either of those before publishing? You're giving the end points of the research, the person you're replying to is saying the end point wasn't reached, hence it was still secret.
        slumos 4y ago
        See if you can determine that for yourself by e.g. reading the second paper as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph and then looking at the publication date.
audunw 4y ago
Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it. The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior. It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence. The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something. Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-rejects-who-investigation-hubei-wildlife-tourists-enjoy-enshi-bat.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r... There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china. The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA. The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc. It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.
kranke155 4y ago
What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly that. It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead. Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools). And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed. What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
  - kranke155 4y ago
    Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event. If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
xyzzy123 4y ago
The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking. You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 "Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China" MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished. Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE "confidence update". Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there. While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is. They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that? This is an engineering product. As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
kevinpet 4y ago
If you are not a native English speaker, you may want to know that you are pretty drastically misreading parents comment. He is not saying "I know this specific virus is present" but "the lab studied SARS related coronaviruses" which you in fact seem to agree with.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  They're not related enough to matter. I've lived in the United States all my life, you're just missing the point.
ikrenji 4y ago
they collected dozens if not hundreds of samples of various viruses. not all the work gets published. in fact majority of scientific effort doesn't get published. experiments either don't work or you don't get interesting results etc... doubly so if a global pandemic started before you were done with your current project

smsm42 4y ago

The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no evidence will be seen by anybody.

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.
- smsm42 4y ago
  Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed up (happens all the time, security services have enough idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the proof. That's why they do it.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - smsm42 4y ago
      Not sure how you made this conclusion... But of course we need to look if there's new evidence - that's what I just said, that there could be new evidence, but if there won't be then we couldn't know for sure.
      - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
        Because we can now say that there was any evidence we want but the totalitarian state destroyed it. We can now make any argument where the state destroying evidence fills in the gap of the theory.
- lmm 4y ago
  Maybe we should stop supporting the study of dangerous viruses in facilities that don't maintain adequate levels of transparency. Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    I'm not making an argument regarding this instance, but to have a theory that you can't disprove really makes it not a theory and impossible to engage with.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    > In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason. Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.
    - lamontcg 4y ago
      Another point is that in the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2002-2004 the Chinese government acted similarly: > Early in the epidemic, the Chinese government discouraged its press from reporting on SARS, delayed reporting to WHO, and initially did not provide information to Chinese outside Guangdong province, where the disease is believed to have originated.[19] Also, a WHO team that travelled to Beijing was not allowed to visit Guangdong province for several weeks.[20] This resulted in international criticism, which seems to have led to a change in government policy in early April. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak There was no BSL4 lab in Guangzhou and they didn't sterilize the market there right away, so in that case they were able to eventually track the virus to its origins--yet the reaction of the Chinese government was basically the same. Americans have a fairly severe problem with assuming that other nations and people's will react with transparency to the US if they have nothing to hide. This is the same problem we saw with Hussein and the way that he tried to block the weapons inspectors and it turned out by his own admission that it was due to him not wanting to appear weak in the view of Iran and Hussein was preoccupied with Iran: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein-fbi-iraq-iran https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jul/02/saddam-hussein...
- initplus 4y ago
  The circumstances that make the theory unfalsifiable (lack of transparency/controls in Chinese biological research) are the issue here. Due to the lack of transparency we will likely never have definitive proof for the origin one way or the other. At a minimum the US government should not be funding any biological research in places without adequate transparency/controls.
- himinlomax 4y ago
  It's not, because all it would take to falsify it would be to do an exhaustive search of the lab's documentation and a comprehensive interview of lab employees. We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    How would that falsify the theory? If you find no evidence you can just claim that the state destroyed it.
lamontcg 4y ago
The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc. They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.
- smsm42 4y ago
  Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason. That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state, not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything else is secret by default. And the standard mode of action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every time. Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than Apple, and the reason is they live in a totalitarian state and Apple doesn't.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    We know they constructed Chimeras of the WIV1 SARS-1-like virus because they published it: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113 Pretty bad secrecy. We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/
    - brigandish 4y ago
      How long had they been working on either of those before publishing? You're giving the end points of the research, the person you're replying to is saying the end point wasn't reached, hence it was still secret.
      - slumos 4y ago
        See if you can determine that for yourself by e.g. reading the second paper as far as the first sentence of the second paragraph and then looking at the publication date.

audunw 4y ago

Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it. The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with something like that happening some time prior. It's so far the only theory I've read that seems to match the evidence. The evidence doesn't seem to indicate that it was engineered, or that it was a product of gain of function research on animals. I think there would have been more solid evidence pointing in that direction by now, if that was the case. They would have published something related to it, or non-Chinese researchers connected to the lab would have known something. Yet there's no evidence of any related animal resorvoir, and the virus was very well adapted to humans from the very start. And everything points to the virus passing through the lab somehow. Those things put together seems to point at them having sampled a virus that already made the jump to humans, and that somehow during the sampling, or retrieving the sample from storage, the virus escaped.

lamontcg 4y ago
There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism: https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-rejects-who-investigation-hubei-wildlife-tourists-enjoy-enshi-bat.htm https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r... There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china. The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time. And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA. The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc. It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.

kranke155 4y ago

What about the request to use gain of function research to add furin sites to coronaviruses? That seems to me the smoking gun, since this lab asked for funding to do exactly that. It’s a bit like Jaime Meitzl (sp?) said - for the first time in history you find a unicorn (furin binding site in a coronavirus) next to a lab that asked for funding to make regular horses into unicorns. But the lab says it’s “natural origin”.

lamontcg 4y ago
The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead. Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to produce a pandemic really isn't a smoking gun that we actually did it, because we're just studying and copying what nature is already doing (who is actually a much better geneticist than we are, with vastly greater tools). And since you want to talk about suspicious "unicorns" how about the idea that a lab worker was infected in the lab, and then the only thing that they did was visit the wet market. They didn't infect anyone they lived with, or go to any restaurants, or go visit grandma and this Typhoid Mary/Mike has no existence outside of working in the lab and visiting the wet market. And this idea gets worse if you include more workers in WIV having supposedly been exposed. What fits with the facts better is that they genetically engineered the virus in perfect secrecy and deliberately let it loose in the wet market, which is just insanity--nobody gains anything from doing that, but it is also impossible to argue against.
- kranke155 4y ago
  Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event. If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.

xyzzy123 4y ago

The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking. You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 "Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China" MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished. Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE "confidence update". Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.

lamontcg 4y ago
HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there. While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is. They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that? This is an engineering product. As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.

kevinpet 4y ago

If you are not a native English speaker, you may want to know that you are pretty drastically misreading parents comment. He is not saying "I know this specific virus is present" but "the lab studied SARS related coronaviruses" which you in fact seem to agree with.

lamontcg 4y ago
They're not related enough to matter. I've lived in the United States all my life, you're just missing the point.

ikrenji 4y ago

they collected dozens if not hundreds of samples of various viruses. not all the work gets published. in fact majority of scientific effort doesn't get published. experiments either don't work or you don't get interesting results etc... doubly so if a global pandemic started before you were done with your current project