21 ms·

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most impor

• inciampati 3y ago
  No, not all labs working on viruses do research on dangerous viruses. Bacteriophages for instance, are a deep research topic, and (aside from potential effects on our microbiome) are completely benign to humans. That's just one of many counterexamples.
  • th0ma5 3y ago
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    • inciampati 3y ago
      They prefaced the statement with "most importantly" so it seems they thought it was their key point.
      • th0ma5 3y ago
        What secure labs don't work on dangerous viruses? I guess I now wonder about your correction heh.
  • bryanlarsen 3y ago
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    • asynchronous 3y ago
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      • andsoitis 3y ago
        > what ended up leaking from the lab was a coronavirus Did a coronavirus leak from the lab?
      • foldr 3y ago
        These coincidences can happen. For example, Russian disinformation exploited the coincidental location of the Salisbury poisonings (near Porton Down).
  • P_I_Staker 3y ago
    He's talking about the good researchers, I think. They're looking at dangerous viruses.
• ratg13 3y ago
  >Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) As of 2022, this is no longer true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RaTG13
  • zosima 3y ago
    And crucially, researchers from the Wuhan lab were studying bat virus samples from Laos, before covid. https://www.business-standard.com/amp/article/current-affairs/wuhan-scientists-were-studying-laos-bat-viral-samples-before-covid-report-121112201019_1.html https://www.business-standard.com/amp/article/current-affair...
    • pcrh 3y ago
      Those viruses are slightly more related to SARSCoV2 than RaTG13, however note 1) that they were found even further away from Wuhan than was RaTG13 and 2) that they still remain too different from SARSCoV2 to be its direct ancestor. One of the things we know for sure is that that about 50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2, so they are not its direct ancestors.
      • dotandgtfo 3y ago
        >50 years of evolutionary changes separate RaTG13 and BANAL-52 from SARSCoV2 Do you have a source for this? Also, I'm no biologist, but is comparing the base rate of evolutionary changes still relevant if SARSCoV2 wasn't of natural origins? E.g. through creating chimeras or 'serial passaging' as described in this article? Wouldn't that create an environment where 50 years could pass in a way shorter timeframe?
        • pcrh 3y ago
          This is the study I alluded to: >Evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID- 19 pandemic >Divergence dates between SARS-CoV-2 and the bat sarbecovirus reservoir were estimated as 1948 (95% highest posterior density (HPD): 1879–1999), 1969 (95% HPD: 1930–2000) and 1982 (95% HPD: 1948–2009), indicating that the lineage giving rise to SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating unnoticed in bats for decades. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4 You should also know that SARSCoV2 1) is not a chimeric virus, and 2) that the present study includes viruses linked to RaTGP13 but more distant from SARSCoV2, i.e. it includes evidence from viruses unassociated with the pandemic.
• living_room_pc 3y ago
  > Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. That is completely untrue. Agricultural labs for instance research plant viruses which are _incompatible_ with humans completely. Still these plant virus would have to be researched under stringent isolation because of the damage they may pose to crops. > Most importantly, the general reader should know Speak on our level, don't baby us.
  • th0ma5 3y ago
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  • pcrh 3y ago
    Agricultural viruses are dangerous to human food security. At least the ones under study usually are.
    • peteradio 3y ago
      > Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any ill-intent. What exactly are you trying to say here anyway? If they were researching some other virus type it wouldn't be getting a look. But they were researching coronavirus.
• zosima 3y ago
  The Huanan Seafood market paper has been heavily critized. Especially the fact that covid was not found in a single animal sample does make the evidence rather weak. In addition it seems that the lack of sampling from outside the market and the fact that the market is a busy place in the center of the city where the virus would likely be once it's spreading from person to person , does not really lend support to the conclusions in the paper at all.
  • pcrh 3y ago
    >The Origins of Covid-19 — Why It Matters (and Why It Doesn’t) >More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal machine, indicated the presence of both SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-susceptible animals.5 Recently released findings included raccoon dog DNA, pointing to a possible SARS-CoV-2 progenitor. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp2305081 https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMp2305081
    • reuben_scratton 3y ago
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      • deleted 3y ago
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      • toast0 3y ago
        > Humans brought the virus to the market. It's screamingly obvious and always has been. Well of course, the racoon dogs et al all come in via human transport. Testing infrastructure was poor, and maybe it still is. Chinese government interest was not in finding facts, but in taking action to 'solve the problem'. It's hard to find facts when the people with power just want the problem to go away. IMHO, that doesn't weigh in favor of either explaination. The wuhan local government and the chinese national government would have likely taken the same actions regardless of the source, because they're both not very interested in facts. US health authorities pushing on the market theory are just doing their typical behavior of taking what little information is available and pushing it with no nuance. I enjoyed seeing the cdc stickers telling me not to use a mask out in public areas when the cdc was requiring them; the congitive dissonance was so palpable.
• secondcoming 3y ago
  Some janitor or whatever sold an infected animal to the market.
  • Clubber 3y ago
    It could be as simple as someone got infected in the lab and went to the market.
    • Pigalowda 3y ago
      Right? As if any handling or safety gear and equipment is 100% perfect. Never any needle stick or glove failures. Respirators and protective clothing always 100% perfect. Everyone perfectly followed all lab safety precautions with no absent minded failures. Just perfect all the time forever. I’ve always thought it was a handling contamination that got into community spread. It’s a very parsimonious explanation.
      • Gasp0de 3y ago
        Did you read the article? They patented a device to cut off blood flow to limbs in case of accidental injury with a needle.
        • Pigalowda 3y ago
          I didn’t see that part, only skimmed as it’s pretty long. A tourniquet won’t do anything for a needle stick injury. That’s pretty silly. A virus landing in a capillary bed takes 1 minute to reach the heart. If the tourniquet somehow did stop fast enough, what will they do? Debride the entire area? Sounds like total bullsh.
  • cheaprentalyeti 3y ago
    If they were doing experiments with serialized passage through so-called humanized mice and they escaped you'd have the engineered virus suddenly showing up being carried by many different species at the wet market in spite of natural viruses jumping species much more slowly.
• amoss 3y ago
  The map showing the clustering around the lab is not labelled in the article. It looks like the map from the senate report which used internet search history. I recall that their point in the original report was that there was a cluster of internet searches for flu-like symptoms clustered around the institute, rather than the market. There is no new direct evidence in the article, simply the weight of existing indirect evidence synthesized together. There does not seem to be another hypothosis for how the virus emerged that has as much indirect evidence pointing towards it? The main gist of the article is: * The institute applied for funding for a specific piece of research (inserting a furin cleavage site). * The institute claims it did not perform the research. * Covid is what we would expect if somebody did perform that research. * The research would have been performed at the time and place where covid emerged. It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing.
  • thevagrant 3y ago
    Research applications, in particular to obtain funding. It is common for researchers to apply to grants/funding for work they are already doing. They tweak the research application to meet whatever the funding criteria is using knowledge they have from existing experiments.
  • ricksunny 3y ago
    Chief among key new assertions the parent article makes, https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/1667662325090746370?t=6utzB7y9NeK1fkT1mXFblA&s=19 https://twitter.com/BlockedVirology/status/16676623250907463... • WIV added FCS's to coronavirus(es?) exactly as described in DEFUSE, according to a US lab collaborator. • Zhou Yusen "fell" off the roof of the WIV in May 2020 • WIV was working on a 'closer [than published] unpublished variant' • Of all caves/mines, only scholarly attempts to access the Mojiang mine made touched off access denial and confiscation of samples from other mines from the authorities. While alluded to in the past, (https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandemic-china-only-on-ap-bats-24fbadc58cee3a40bca2ddf7a14d2955 https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-coronavirus-pandem... ) this is the first time to my awareness that the Mojiang mine has been uniquely & unequivocally associated with the authorities' clamp-down efforts, that too with attribution to Alice C Hughes, PhD
• prepend 3y ago
  > indication of any ill-intent I don’t think ill-intent is the accusation, I think the argument is that the lab has poor safety protocols and made errors. I haven’t studied the “lab leak theory” extensively, but everything I read seems to be about lab failures resulting in a leak, not anything purposeful or ill-intentioned.
  • kcplate 3y ago
    This is the straw man that people who want to argue against the possibility lab leak use to try and ad hominem the person arguing for the possibility.
  • revelio 3y ago
    Unfortunately, the article states explicitly that there was ill intent and extensive PLA involvement with the lab. The military was also given positions of responsibility in the Wuhan institute, according to a US Senate report. A book published in 2015 by the military academy discusses how Sars viruses represent a “new era of genetic weapons” that can be “artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponised and unleashed”. The authors are PLA researchers, and one of the book’s editors has collaborated on numerous scientific papers with Wuhan scientists. They discuss how Sars can be weaponised by fusing it with other viruses and “serial passaging” the resulting mutant to make it more dangerous. The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power.
    • bostonsre 3y ago
      If true, it's probably good that they were incompetent in leaking the virus and incompetent in making a vaccine to front run the virus. Wonder if that would have started world war 3 of they successfully vaccinated their population then either accidentally or on purpose released the virus.
      • revelio 3y ago
• himinlomax 3y ago
  The problem with Wuhan lab is that the Chinese dictatorship blocks any independent inquiry into it. If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt.
  • sgift 3y ago
    > If they had nothing to hide, they wouldn't be hiding everything. If that was a criminal case, this kind of behavior would be taken as a evidence of guilt. No, it would not. First, dictatorships hide things all the time, whether there is something or nothing. It's just how they operate. (Many democratic governments do to btw. How often do we need freedom of information requests just to find out that it was totally benign, the government just stone-walled because they could). Second, not saying anything is not evidence of guilt in any criminal case in the civilized world. Everyone has the right to silence.
    • Ithnolog 3y ago
      Governments aren't people. They don't have rights. Same for corporations.
      • pessimizer 3y ago
        Governments have neither rights nor duties, so saying they don't owe you anything is essentially the same thing. Governments do what they can get away with doing.
    • himinlomax 3y ago
      "Your honor, you can't blame my client for messing the victim's body, he's a known necrophiliac, and since the evidence is tainted you can't prove he was the murderer." Top notch defense right there.
      • th0ma5 3y ago
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• BryantD 3y ago
  What a terrible article. “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.” The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.
  • jakear 3y ago
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    • BryantD 3y ago
      That point is inaccurate. I quoted the stats; they are what they are.
      • jakear 3y ago
        Stats say nothing of relative severity, why do you think they’re relevant in any way? Edit: is your argument seriously “uhm actually, event X happens 0.054% of the time, so when you said {more rare version of X} doesn’t happen you’re wrong”
        • BryantD 3y ago
          Um, those are the numbers for hospitalization. So yes, there’s information about severity there. And yep, that’s my argument! The frequency of deadly viruses escaping from a bio lab is even lower, so if we’re going to eliminate possibilities based on percentages there are a few others that should get thrown out. It’s a minor point but, as I said, it’s sloppy reasoning. If the anonymous researcher had said “low probability” I wouldn’t care. Instead, this reads like someone who’s willing to hand wave specifics for the sake of rhetoric.
          • jakear 3y ago
            Hospitalization doesn’t mean severity. It has more to do with your confidence in your immune system and health insurance than anything else, though the hospital’s extra capacity and desire to make a buck off you is up there too. But if you’re here to be put off by the smallest use of rhetoric, sure pop off on that.
• jug 3y ago
  Also, before one draws conclusions based on the _kind_ of virus that is researched, coronaviruses aren't even uncommon. So better evidence is clearly necessary than innuendo.
  • Biorealism 3y ago
    It's not just a coronavirus, it's a sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site never seen before in sarbecoviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. The only link with Wuhan is WIV's sampling in both locations. In 2018, WIV was part of a proposal with EcoHealth Alliance and UNC to add furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-related bat coronaviruses. DARPA declined to fund it. This investigation suggests the work went ahead. Something Nick Patterson suggested often occurs even when funding is declined. WIV had both NIAID and CAS grants to study spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. They were also doing classified work with the PLA from 2017.
• AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  I’m sure most of this is true or at least true-ish but to be appropriately skeptical, all evidence which has a Chinese source here should be considered as potentially made up. Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up. The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting with creating novel pathogens has an outbreak of a novel pathogen next door? No no, it’s because of climate change (an actual argument I have seen).
  • oneshtein 3y ago
    They may cover up something completely orthogonal to Covid. For example, they may cover up a corruption scheme, to steal money granted for research, or they acted as proxy for Russians, to spy at USA, or they mismanaged facility and leaked virus from the lab in Wuhan second time, AFTER the initial outbreak (1.5-2.5 month of delay between projected start of epidemic in mid-September-mid-October and start of epidemic in Wuhan in December must be explained somehow), etc.
  • snowwrestler 3y ago
    The “circumstantial evidence” is only novel if the event in question is novel, which the emergence of a new strain of a virus is not. It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not. SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.
    • AbrahamParangi 3y ago
      This would all be more compelling if the WIV were not explicitly experimenting with creating viruses like SARS-COV-2! If HIV had emerged proximal to a lab experimenting with creating viruses like HIV then that lab origin theory would be much more credible!
• ajross 3y ago
  My position hasn't changed for years: if covid was really a lab creation we'd know, because someone would have told us. An email dump, a memo, a document, an interview. Something would have leaked out. The incentives are just too high and the access is too pervasive[1] to believe otherwise. Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone made this thing, someone else would have told us by now. [1] This is science! There are notes and logs and backups and email and chat and whiteboard photos and conference attendees and visiting scholars, all spread around a population all trained to compete with each other.
  • Etherlord87 3y ago
    What is the time limit a secret of this magnitude could survive without being revealed by someone? A year, two years? If we look at our history, we will only see secrets that were revealed within that maximum period? Snowden revealed quite shocking information, and I think it is safe to say the secret of mass surveillance was going on for much longer than 4 years.
    • ajross 3y ago
      And if such information pops up, I will (with great surprise) re-evaluate my priors. Nonetheless I think history bears out my intuition here. The overwhelming majority of conspiracies likes this, especially ones in fundamentally civilian organizations like science labs, don't survive a year if that.
      • ergodic1 3y ago
        Making the claim that you know the proportion of conspiracies that get reported implies you know the number of conspiracies not reported. Im not aware of any way you could know that or the relative proportion of each. Where do you get your certainty here?
        • ajross 3y ago
          I have no certainty, that's the point! The evidence for natural evolution is pretty reasonable (it matches every other pandemic ever -- these are hardly unknown!), the evidence for lab genesis is at best circumstantial and frankly pretty heavily spun by everyone dealing in it. You want the fact that I can't prove you wrong to be evidence that you're right, and that's not how logic works.
• deleted 3y ago
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• revelio 3y ago
  The article is only facts and direct evidence. Where is the innuendo? It covers specific experiments they were doing, in order and in detail, complete with specific biological information and funding sources. It also provides extensive evidence of constant coverups by the lab, like this one: There was also no mention of the mouse deaths in the grant renewal application Daszak filed to the NIH later that year. In this account, he said the mice had experienced “mild Sars-like clinical signs” when they were infected with the mutant virus. It had actually killed six of the eight infected humanised mice. Daszak eventually provided details of the experiment’s deadly results to the US authorities in a report after the Covid-19 pandemic. He now says his 2018 statement about the “mild” illness was based on preliminary results — even though the experiment in which the mice died had taken place several months before he issued the statement So these people are all known liars. The US Government banned GoF research, they got around it by claiming their work was urgent and safe, they ignored reporting requirements, when they finally did report what they said was a lie, and now they're still lying to try and cover previous lies. So when these people say they want to insert furin cleavage sites into coronaviruses, a coronavirus appears right next door that has a FCS - the first one ever seen - and they say, oh well we changed our minds and never did it, well, with overwhelming probability they're lying again.
  • chihuahua 3y ago
    And of course Daszak is known for loudly proclaiming that no one is allowed to even think about whether Covid-19 could have been leaked from a lab. His credibility is reduced, to put it mildly.
• denton-scratch 3y ago
  The article implies (but doesn't state) that RaTG13, although discovered in the Mojiang cave, was worked on in the Wuhan lab. It does state that it was being worked-on by Shi Zhengli ("Batwoman") and her team at the lab.
• darkerside 3y ago
  > The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab Is this a case of yet another heat map being a population density map? I assume the wet market is a popular local destination and gathering place, while the lab is not. You would expect there to be more cases where there are more people. I speculate in ignorance of the actual social dynamics in the city of Wuhan.
• stainablesteel 3y ago
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  • dang 3y ago
    It's against the site rules to accuse other users of being shills in this way. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. Instead, if someone is wrong or you feel they are, please explain how they are wrong and provide correct information without taking swipes. For a longer explanation of why we don't allow this, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851 and https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=true&page=0&query=by:dang%20astroturf https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The short version is that the vast majority of these perceptions aren't grounded in evidence and we don't want discussions to be poisoned by accusations of bad faith. p.s. Your comment would have been fine without that first paragraph.
• canadianfella 3y ago
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• beebmam 3y ago
  It is excusable for a lab to accidentally leak a contaminant. It is not excusable to cover it up and prevent a full investigation, like China has done.
  • jesusofnazarath 3y ago
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  • th0ma5 3y ago
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    • Biorealism 3y ago
      The NIH terminated the Wuhan Institute of Virology's subaward for continued refusal to share records last year. WHO is still pleading with the PRC to share data on both the animal trade and Wuhan labs. https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-alliance-grant-after-its-wuhan-partners-refuse-to-deliver-information-on-coronavirus-studies/amp/ https://thebulletin.org/2022/08/nih-to-terminate-ecohealth-a...
      • th0ma5 3y ago
        Not really what the parent was talking about
• willyt 3y ago
  The Times is not a great source. It’s just tabloid style journalism targeted at a higher ‘reading age’. Can’t remember the exact figures but something like 16 compared to ‘The Sun’ which targets 10. A better source would be The Telegraph, if you like your opinion pieces right leaning. The Economist, The Financial Time and The Guardian are also good sources if we’re talking about British newspapers here.
  • barneygale 3y ago
    The Telegraph published a supplement written by the Chinese government until April 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/14/daily-telegraph-stops-publishing-section-paid-for-by-china https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/apr/14/daily-telegrap...
  • realjhol 3y ago
    The Guardian - are you serious?
    • unmole 3y ago
      The Guardian's opinion pieces can be downright unhinged and their headlines can have a partisan spin. But the actual reporting is usually solid.
• Amezarak 3y ago
  > Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. Maybe I'm deeply confused, but the Wuhan lab was reported by NYMag to be the one that discovered RaTG13. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... > How Did It Get Out? 1. The Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, where, in 2013, fragments of RaTG13, the closest known relative of SARSCoV-2, were recovered and transported to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; 2. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Shi Zhengli’s team brought the RaTG13 sample, sequenced its genome, then took it out of the freezer several times in recent years;
• randomperson01 3y ago
  There is no reason to suspect Ill intent. Accidents happen. It is well known the WIV were doing gain of function research on SARS-related CoVs. It is also known that the WIV were partners in a proposal to insert human specific cleavage sites into SARS+related CoVs https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-grant-darpa/ https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra... The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is < 1/1000 There is no evidence for any infected animals at the Huanan market https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2 There was a known ascertainment bias towards reporting associated with the market https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23 The modelling by Pekar et al inferring multiple spillovers at the market was flawed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 Prior to the pandemic, the State department literally warned the US govt. a SARS-related accident was a real risk at the WIV https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...
• pbreit 3y ago
  "not in itself an indication of any ill-intent" Was that even insinuated? "no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab" Wut? "Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744119/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744119/
• dehrmann 3y ago
  > all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses There should be more attention on this. We're busy worrying about AI that can troll at a college level, while scientists are still busy making frankenviruses after a pandemic plausibly caused by a lab leak.
  • Fomite 3y ago
    You've jumped from "do research" to "making frankenviruses" - which beyond being a sensationalist term with no formal definition, isn't necessarily the sum totality of viral research. Just the bit that the popular press likes writing lurid articles about.
    • dehrmann 3y ago
      Fair enough, but I'd file gain of function research in that category, it's common, and seeing a possible outcome of it, it's something we need to rethink very carefully.
      • Fomite 3y ago
        In that regards, I actually agree with you. It's been the better part of a decade since I saw a talk by a colleague I immensely respect arguing against it, and I think it's value (whether it caused this outbreak or not) is speculative at best. But I should not that not all viral engineering is gain of function, and while it gets a lot of attention, even in laboratory virology is relatively rare.
• HardlyCurious 3y ago
  Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right? The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. Gain of function research is real, scientists intentionally make viruses which could start a pandemic. They do this for the purposes of knowledge and preparedness for the inevitable natural spillover events that will happen. It isn't nefarious. But it is risky, and there many people now and before who thought it was a practice that should be curtailed because of the risk.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • godelski 3y ago
    > No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up kinda being like MAD except you're also the aggressor. The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk). Not to say that this can't happen, but it is well known enough that were a contagious disease to get out, it would be more likely accidental. It would also be odd to release the disease into your own community first. I'm not saying it was or wasn't a lab leak or bioweapon, but if we're discussing weapon vs accident, there's good reason to believe a weapon is unlikely. Gain of research has significant value outside weapons and this also shows you why the weapon arguments against GoF aren't of high concern to those that are close to the work. Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).
    • startupsfail 3y ago
      Can the lab be sued out of existence for damages? It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been some positive sides: diminished air travel, diminished carbon emissions, transition to work from home, more pedestrian zones in the cities, mRNA vaccine technology. But the negative side from the pandemic is still overwhelming. Arguably this lab should be sued out of existence for damages.
• Biorealism 3y ago
  The thing with Wuhan Institute of Virology is they were particularly studying the spillover risk of SARS-related coronaviruses. The nearest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 are found in Yunnan and Laos. One clear link with Wuhan is the fact Wuhan Institute of Virology sampled both locations. You can't read much into the early case data that David Relman described as "hopelessly impoverished". There were likely much earlier cases based on excess mortality data (a key reason WHO haven't accepted market origin). Also, there is a clear sampling bias in the cases in the article cited above. https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23 https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23
• onethought 3y ago
  Exactly. The lab leak theory is a story of cherry picking evidence to match your conclusion. Why was the wet market on the other side of the city the only identified outbreak site if it came from the lab? There were/are many markets on the other side of the river that would be much more relevant to residents living and working on that side. People looking up flu symptoms in the middle of winter is not evidence of anything abnormal. I don’t understand the intellectual effort going into the lab leak theory… it feels like some kind of state run propaganda piece, I assume to just keep a negative view on China in people’s minds. It’s crazy given that whatever the truth there is no consequence… literally an inconsequential endeavour
  • adh636 3y ago
    Trying to better under the origins of a global pandemic is not an inconsequential endeavor.
    • onethought 3y ago
      That’s not what people are doing, they are trying to prove a lab leak theory, else all this effort would be in “how’d it get to that wet market” if you can’t answer that, then you do not have a logical chain to its true origin lab leak or not.
      • pessimizer 3y ago
        How have you justified deciding that the only important question for anyone to answer is why it was in the wet market? What's the case for that? It wasn't exclusively in the wet market, it was in lots of places.
        • onethought 3y ago
          Because right now that is the origin point. But we also know it was there for quite some time before it hopped to humans. It wasn't in a lot of places... it was just at the wet market as far as we know, we have no earlier outbreaks than that.
• tim333 3y ago
  It had data that is new to me. Especially: >They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa. That procedure is pretty much exactly what you'd have to do to make covid in a lab. Assuming that's true, it's pretty much a smoking gun.
  • masswerk 3y ago
    For a smoking gun, I'd expect evidence. This is just reporting on a diffuse claim of hearsay, allegedly by what might be labeled a party with geopolitical interest in the public narrative. It may be disinformation just as well. (Especially, as similar claims were already repeatedly made based on what turned out to be false links, like the Wuhan Institute being just around the wet market.)
    • tim333 3y ago
      Well yes, is the claim true or not? The article has: >The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak. They said the Wuhan scientists... So presumably The Times has the names of the researchers and someone like the FBI could investigate and see what correspondence if any they have with Wuhan about it.
      • masswerk 3y ago
        This was not in the version I was seeing. (This was only the first 4 paragraphs.)
• _gabe_ 3y ago
  > Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.
• tripletao 3y ago
  > Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud. It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned. > The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0]. The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me). In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice. > Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off. I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1 https://twitter.com/NimwegenLab/status/1563490916006264833 https://twitter.com/NimwegenLab/status/1563490916006264833 https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1509431997713764352 https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1509431997713764352
• karaterobot 3y ago
  > Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. The article says that the viruses from Mojiang were transported to the Wuhan lab and studied there.
• srj 3y ago
  It may just be that they went looking for covid cases there and found them. If they looked around the institute they may have found clusters there too.
• bomewish 3y ago
  > innuendo... rather than any direct evidence. May be a good idea to get acquainted with inference to best explanation, and to understand that 'direct evidence' should not automatically be awarded epistemological primacy over 'circumstantial evidence' (or what you're calling 'innuendo').
• zh3 3y ago
  Reference the statement that several employees were ill in the months leading up to the outbreak, these were tested and (reportedly) did not have Covid antibodies - this also seems to be missing from the article.
• TheBigSalad 3y ago
  Only three labs in the world had Coronaviruses and this lab specialized in it. Yes the first cases were traced to the market, but it's in the same town as the one lab in the world that specializes in very similar viruses (which were never naturally observed nearby). It is objectively quite a coincidence if the virus didn't leak from that lab.
  • 0x706B 3y ago
    Source? Coronaviruses (e.g. SARS and MERS) have been researched all over the place as it was years ago (before COVID outbreak) already stated as one of the major virus groups with potential for pandemics. Prolly you'll have a hard time finding a metropolis which wasnt researching corona viruses.
• xjlin0 3y ago
  > genetic clocks show that RaTG13 and SARSCoV2 diverged almost 50 years ago. Converting the distance in phylogenetic analysis to evolutionary distance is based on natural gene drafting rate, which does not consider passaging with human selections.
• kneel 3y ago
  >the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab. This is false
• Izkata 3y ago
  > Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) A closer relative was found like a year or so later, can't remember the name though.