5 ms·

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect

by andai 4y ago

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SARS-related_coronaviruses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA... Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic? I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands. (And while we're on the subject, did anything come of the thing about Pfizer engineering the virus, ostensibly for vaccine research purposes?)

mikeyouse 4y ago
Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2
- chitowneats 4y ago
  True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this. Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.
    - chitowneats 4y ago
      The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic. I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.
        chitowneats 4y ago
        Unfortunately, you seem fundamentally confused about the position of people who are skeptical of zoonotic origin. Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than position B) A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese, Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps viral experimentation generally, and the result was a global pandemic Versus B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their consumption Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is mostly used today to shut down debate in Western countries.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        I’d rather just leave you to your false dichotomy. Thanks though.
        chitowneats 4y ago
        [flagged]
- baja_blast 4y ago
  No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    It was available well into 2020 if you read past the shitty early headlines.
    - tripletao 4y ago
      I guess you're referring here to Flo Débarre's misleading tweet, which you linked to four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997 As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.
      - mikeyouse 4y ago
        Right, a database put online in June 2019 - widely claimed to be “suspiciously removed” in Sept 2019, actually wasn’t. It was available into 2020 at which point after a bunch of hacking attempts, they took it down. And certainly “everyone hasn’t agreed” because in every thread about the topic people imply like this 6 Month old database is a smoking gun when it’s self evidently not.
        tripletao 4y ago
        I don't think the server is conclusive evidence of anything, but your representation seems misleading to me. The date when the information became publicly unavailable seems like the relevant one to me, even if the server remained connected to the Internet for a few months afterward. And you seriously believe their claim that it was taken down due to "hacking attempts"? Given the international importance of the subject, is there really no one anywhere in China who can keep a simple database-backed website running? Or could they not share the information in a form that obviously presents no information security risk, like a dump on a flash drive?
- himinlomax 4y ago
  Even if we had them and they were found to be different, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they repeated the same experiment with different source material.
colechristensen 4y ago
The evidence there is not that that particular group created covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play out.
Izkata 4y ago
> Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic? I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though. > I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands. Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.
- tripletao 4y ago
  The BANAL viruses collected in Laos are closer than RaTG13. No published virus is close enough that SARS-CoV-2 could readily be derived from it in the lab, though some people have speculated about pathways via accelerated evolution during serial passaging. I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it. As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.
  - andai 4y ago
    Thanks. To clarify my question, the part about Pfizer seems to be that they were engineering virus variants after the pandemic started, and doing so intentionally in a laboratory, not (merely) as a byproduct of overly-specific vaccines exerting evolutionary pressure. What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...

by andai 4y ago

mikeyouse 4y ago

Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2

chitowneats 4y ago
True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this. Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.
  - chitowneats 4y ago
    The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic. I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.
      - chitowneats 4y ago
        Unfortunately, you seem fundamentally confused about the position of people who are skeptical of zoonotic origin. Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than position B) A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese, Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps viral experimentation generally, and the result was a global pandemic Versus B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their consumption Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is mostly used today to shut down debate in Western countries.
        mikeyouse 4y ago
        I’d rather just leave you to your false dichotomy. Thanks though.
        chitowneats 4y ago
        [flagged]
baja_blast 4y ago
No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  It was available well into 2020 if you read past the shitty early headlines.
  - tripletao 4y ago
    I guess you're referring here to Flo Débarre's misleading tweet, which you linked to four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997 As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      Right, a database put online in June 2019 - widely claimed to be “suspiciously removed” in Sept 2019, actually wasn’t. It was available into 2020 at which point after a bunch of hacking attempts, they took it down. And certainly “everyone hasn’t agreed” because in every thread about the topic people imply like this 6 Month old database is a smoking gun when it’s self evidently not.
      - tripletao 4y ago
        I don't think the server is conclusive evidence of anything, but your representation seems misleading to me. The date when the information became publicly unavailable seems like the relevant one to me, even if the server remained connected to the Internet for a few months afterward. And you seriously believe their claim that it was taken down due to "hacking attempts"? Given the international importance of the subject, is there really no one anywhere in China who can keep a simple database-backed website running? Or could they not share the information in a form that obviously presents no information security risk, like a dump on a flash drive?
himinlomax 4y ago
Even if we had them and they were found to be different, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they repeated the same experiment with different source material.

colechristensen 4y ago

The evidence there is not that that particular group created covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play out.

Izkata 4y ago

> Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic? I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though. > I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands. Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.

tripletao 4y ago
The BANAL viruses collected in Laos are closer than RaTG13. No published virus is close enough that SARS-CoV-2 could readily be derived from it in the lab, though some people have speculated about pathways via accelerated evolution during serial passaging. I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it. As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.
- andai 4y ago
  Thanks. To clarify my question, the part about Pfizer seems to be that they were engineering virus variants after the pandemic started, and doing so intentionally in a laboratory, not (merely) as a byproduct of overly-specific vaccines exerting evolutionary pressure. What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...