Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins, but this did not get mentioned in any reports. Instead he warns other not to discuss it. He does not include notes that research was done on modifying bat viruses to make them infectious to human cells. These behaviors look like a guilty person, do they not?
The wuhan and eco-health researchers had already started work on the furin cleavage sites and why would they stop when DARPA blocked it? Funding can’t only come from the US. Did CCP also block this research?
> there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China.
Yeah, turns out 26 of the 27 scientists all had some conflict of interest related to the Wuhan lab:
>All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
Think about what you're actually saying: most of the world's coronavirus experts have some kind of link to one of the world's leading laboratories' researchers, colleagues, or funders. Would you expect anything else?
Suppose something strange happened and there were suspicions that it was CERN that was involved. Now a letter gets penned by the world's top particle physicists saying it's highly unlikely that the experiments at CERN would be involved. What do you suppose the likelihood would be that those particle physicists would have links to the researchers, colleagues or funders of CERN?
Do also note that damn near every lab today would not propose a new approach or project without already secretly having gone half the way in it with prior funds. No one proposes a potential novel idea without already being fully sure it will work.
100% true for theoretical/computational physics, solid state physics, optics, catalysis research, and many more. You use existing grants to explore completely different topics and once you have something promising where you are 50-80% there, you write the next grant. Rinse, repeat.
Particle physics (or gravitational wave research for example) is the odd one out here. Maybe because it is 100% fundamental research, where it is known to not produce applicable results.
Not true where you have to get ethics consent. You can't do this because you're lab will be shut if you are found to be doing experiments in secret. Yes - in some labs for maths, physics and so on you are right, but not medicine & biology.
If you don't believe this then look at the failure rate of the projects.
The other thing is that the funding agencies really, really, really don't like this - they want high risk research not handle turning. So if you get caught out you will get blacklisted - it's misconduct.
Certainly not true in the area of particle accelerator experiments. Every single step there is done in public so to say. And it's not that it's a niche, literally thousands of scientists and engineers work on this stuff. (Also I know people that had to change thesis topics half-way through, although I cannot fully recall the reasoning for that.)
It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe. Actually there are even documentaries from before the pandemic, not sure why this has to be double-emphasized.
There's one documentary from ARTE.tv, a french-german state-owned TV station that I watched in Spring 2020 but which was from around 5 years ago at that time. I cannot find it but I'd add a link here if I do eventually. (Not easy since so much similar content has popped up since then)
One particular reference (point) the documentary was revolving around was the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies which has been pointing out the problem with zoonotic epidemics/pandemics vs. populations and wild ecosystems intertwining too much. (AIDS, SARS, MERS)
Maybe that's interesting enough:
"Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs ..."
That said, all this conspiracy discussion is giving the research a bad taste. I mean they cannot build up a lab in a bat cave or ignore the whole issue. And this is not the first epidemic/pandemic of this sort.
Corona virus and gain of function was done in the US and when a leaked accident occurred it got banned and outsourced to the world. The research labs and stories was famous during MERS outbreak. India, Pakistan and China is the best known countries with advance research labs for it.
This 'looks guilty' thing is akin to witch hunting.
If millions of people died and you were right there when it happened, a likely suspect, you might want to deflect blame as well.
Populism and Politics have little to do with the truth. If the masses are fired up over one theory, or if the highly politicized academic community is fired up over one of their own sensitivities, it can be destructive for many involved.
Refusing legitimate investigation - now that's a bad sign because people should want to clear their names.
We don't know what the answers are but it warrants further investigation.
He absolutely did try to hide things. He tried to hide his relationship to the original Lancet article denouncing the lab leak theory, because he knew it was a staggering conflict of interest:
Person organizing PR statement takes actions to make that PR statement as effective as possible? Not exactly a cover up. I don’t “like” my own instagram posts for the same reason.
Exactly, and it looks like almost all of them did:
>All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.
Scientists absolutely need to investigate themselves as well, to avoid biases and blind spots. Just because someone is smart, doesn't make them arbiter of truth. So we need to examine ourselves AND facts.
> Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins (...)
As a reference never hurts, specially in a topic prone to disinformation, here's a link to the WHO's page on its official list of members of their "Global Study of the Origins of SARS-COV2".
Dr. Peter Daszak, Ph.D (EcoHealth Alliance, USA) is listed as a member.
Because the Trump administration decided that along with a bunch of other offshore collaboration funding decided to pull the money (America First!). There's a Vincent Racaniello episode on Microbe TV that explained what happened there. I don't remember the episode but here's his channel:
I think if folks would listen more to virologists than the press they'd find out that it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses (that's actually in his coursework - also on his channel), but it's also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function" (for weaponising) which has been suggested as the source of SARS2 and that whole Wuhan conspiracy theory thing.
But why would one denial from one particularly finicky funding source (Trump-era US agencies) make researchers – who thought they were doing essential work – stop such essential work? Why wouldn't they use other funding, possibly from overhead funding or prior grants, or from other less-finicky funders? And in a jurisdiction – China – where many of the same limits or reporting-requirements might not exist?
Are virologists the only humans who, thwarted by one jurisdiction's limits, give up without considering doing their career-making, essential-to-humanity work elsewhere?
> …it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses… [and] …also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function"…
Indeed, but humans do incredibly difficult things all the time. In fact, they're often attracted to the challenge, and seek funding to help them do it, and often don't let a 'no' from any one funder stop them from bootstrapping work in other ways.
It's also incredibly difficult to engineer & get approval for vaccines to a brand-new disease, but that got done, recently, faster than ever before.
It was incredibly difficult to create nuclear weapons, but a lot of countries have done it independently.
Given the significant number of dangerous pathogen escapes from disease labs, it's also "incredibly difficult" to keep dangerous contagions safely contained. It's comparatively easy to accidently let them out!
Covid wasn't a brand new disease. They had most of the research necessary to create a vaccine completed two years before the outbreak. We would likely have had the Johnson and Johnson vaccine by July of 2020 if Trump hadn't shut down the pandemic response team purely because it was created by Obama. They were the ones already preparing the ground work necessary for a vaccine to existing SARS Corona virus diseases that had already emerged as far back as 2011. Project Warp Speed wasn't so successful because it provided funding or cut red tape, most of the vaccines we got didn't even participate. We got vaccines so fast because nearly a decade of related research had already been completed.
My point is it would have required a virtual miracle for the proposed gain of function research to have produced something that could have escaped in the time framed that is possible regarding the rejected grant request. Additionally, good research has proven that Covid couldn't have been due to gain of function research either.
Most of your points about coronavirus vaccine research also apply to coronavirus gain-of-function research: scientists have been studying these viruses for decades. They've also been proposing – & sometimes doing! – gain-of-function-like work on these same viruses for years.
And why would it take a "virtual miracle" to accomplish via purposeful lab work the same thing that a 'wholly natural origin' explanation would suggest happened by dumb luck in natural recombinations?
What if it was both 'natural origin' and a 'lab leak'? For example, perhaps a wholly natural zoonotic event created the novelty, but it wasn't circulating in humans until after researchers found that crossover-ready virus in the wild – doing research similar to that in this just-revealed proposal – & brought it to Wuhan for study. Then, either with or without further 'gain-of-function' tinkering, inadvertently let it loose into an urban population?
The 2019 nipah conference was December 09-10. The first COVID patients with symptoms had only entered the hospital the previous day and the epidemic was still unrecognized. Why was anyone talking about a vaccine for a disease no one knew existed at an unrelated virus conference? Can you source anything to that effect?
1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
4. There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites
5. Furin cleavage sites have independently evolved in multiple different branches of coronaviruses, probably a dozen times that we know of now.
6. The furin cleavage site is short and can easily happen through recombination with another virus due to coinfection.
7. This is very likely what happened due to infection with the SARS-CoV-2 ancestor and an HKU9-like virus.
It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
The proposal that this article is about weakens your argument significantly.
They were going to experiment with multiple backbones, experimenting with multiple variations of spikes, looking specifically to try novel types of furin cleavage sites.
There was no public reporting of what happened with this research. We don't know what they have because WIV database was taken offline. They claimed to have searched it, but what they claimed was the closest match in the database was not, in fact, as close as a sequence they had published. Given that demonstrable lie, there is no way to verify any claim about what sequences were or were not known and possibly involved in this research.
Furthermore the person who submitted the proposal was also the person who broke ethical standards to preemptively shut down all discussion of a human release.
That isn't to take away from the possibility of a natural spillover. The facts that you say about that are facts. But accidental release is also possible. And the lack of transparency from those who are most likely to have made the mistake heightens suspicions, it does not lessen them.
But at the end of the day you have zero evidence of any of that actually happened. The backbone doesn't exist, the spike doesn't exist, the effort necessary to culture that completely unknown virus in the lab isn't documented anywhere. And the grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2. And going from sequence to live culturable virus that you can work with is _difficult_. They aren't out collecting bats in the morning and whipping up live novel virus backbones in the evening. And if they actually carried out the research in this grant proposal you don't get from there to SARS-CoV-2, those are all SARS-1-like.
It is research that "sounds like" what happened with the SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover, but that isn't a strange coincidence. They were researching the thing they were worried about happening, and then it happened. Their research proposals naturally rhyme with what actually occurred because they had studied and understood the problem enough to guess more or less accurately what the process would be. There are still massive gaps in between this proposal and SARS-CoV-2 that you could fly a plane through.
"Zero evidence", huh? The epicenter of Covid-19 was the middle of a major metropolitan city (instead of a rural area near lots of animals), blocks away from a major virology lab which was specifically studying these viruses, collecting hundreds of wild strains from field operations, in research DARPA said before the fact endangers the local community and was banned by NIH, trying to specifically create this virus as closely as possible for the research to be successful...
It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames. Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
SARS was first discovered in a major city too. This makes a lot of sense. If there is an outbreak in a rural village, the chances of it spreading worldwide are slim. It is quite possible that small outbreaks happen occasionally without anyone noticing. Who is going to test a few villagers that got pneumonia for novel coronaviruses?
I would also argue that in the age of factory farming it is not so clear if more human-animal contact happens in rural areas or in big population centers. SARS was eventually traced back to palm civets which are farmed animals. In this industry wild animals, many of which are susceptible to SARS-like coronaviruses, are being bred in large numbers. To me this sounds like a perfect breeding ground for the viruses as well.
It's the totality of the evidence taken together, not a series of things to be considered independently. When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences. Or, at the very least, if there's no serious investigation by the people in charge of something so significant, an injustice is being done.
Also, factory farming is far safer than all other forms of farming. If the outbreak was unrelated to WIV and centered in Wuhan, wet-markets and exotic animal markets are the likely culprit.
> When a lot of "coincidence" add up, they cease being coincidences.
The internet doesn't handle subtlety well, so just to spell it out...
If we admit things are coincidences then they can't be added up to get evidence. Lots of coincidences isn't evidence. The point is these things aren't coincidences. If a new coronavirus breaks out next door to a lab studying coronaviruses, then the lab is a possible source of the virus and the proximity is evidence. It is weak evidence and still unlikely, but evidence nonetheless.
However, when the lab is very close and the closest known bat virus (RaTG13) is a very long way away as is the case for SARS-CoV-2 then that is starting to get quite murky as evidence goes. It would be much easier for RaTG13 to travel the rather large distance from its natural location to Wuhan in a freezer/test tube than in a bat.
And there are three completely plausible explanations for why Shi Zhengli and Peter Daszak's research could have led to the outbreak:
(a) It was successfully created in the lab using gain of function research they were developing
(b) It was accidentally or purposefully cultured naturally from one of the many strains they had collected from the field
(c) A researcher, assistant, or contractor was infected in the field as they were doing field work
Option (c) is particularly compelling because it doesn't require much additional complexity beyond the "official explanation". It still maintains that the origin of Covid-19 was a zoonotic spillover event, but points to the research as the direct cause of that event. And it's not necessarily the case that if the virus was in the bat population already that it necessarily would have spread. Rural populations might become briefly infected with a pandemic-level virus, but the spread is naturally quarantined since they have little contact with major metropolitan areas.
"A lot of small things adding up" is also how conspiracy theories are formed and sustained. Be it Qanon, GME, Pizzagate, 9/11-was-an-inside-job, etc. They all rely on small details that are not individually damning, but in aggregate fit a compelling narrative. You have to be extremely wary of this sort of thinking.
I don't think that a lab leak is implausible, but your statement that the small pointers "cease being coincidences" because they fit a narrative imparts far, far too much certainty to the lab leak theory.
Well, there is the similarity between features of the virus and research being proposed in a grant application written half a world away just a couple of years before the virus spread to humans. That's a coincidence of note.
Yea agreed this seems like an additional data point, that looks suspicious, but it is very new (at least to me) and I will wait to see what experts make of this.
You're correct, however after years of examining blood samples from hospital patients it was possible to trace the phylogeny of SARS to a zoonotic origin. This has not been possible for SARS‑CoV‑2, least of all because the government doesn't want such an investigation to take place. I can't think why.
How many major cities are there? hundreds. How many with a research center experimenting on coronavirus? (1 china, 2 in the USA) Just in China there are more than 100 cities with 1 millions people. Odds are 99+% that it has something to do with the research center. A very generous take would be that it has 1% chance of being unrelated.
The “zero evidence” claim is fun because every day there is a failure to discover an origin species is de facto evidence of a non-zootonic origin, since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory.
The "zero evidence" claim is a blatant attempt to shift the burden of proof. In my opinion the burden of proof remains with those hypothesizing zoonotic origin.
I’d suggest the opposite. [edit: not the opposite, the same!]
If it’s conceivable that gain of function research can release a virus that kills millions, then the burden of proof is with the researchers to prove that they’re safe and this didn’t happen.
> since that evidence is not subject to being hidden and is highly incentivized to find given it would be exculpatory
Why? The wet markets in Wuhan were sterilized and emptied (meaning that the animals inside were removed, killed, and their carcasses disposed of) at the very start of the outbreak - several days before anyone had definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 could be transmitted by person to person contact.
I'm sure that the Chinese government would love to have definitive evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is zoonotic, but that evidence likely went up in smoke (January 1st, 2020) weeks before anyone realized that COVID-19 would turn into a legitimate pandemic (January 23rd, 2020).
I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records. There is a progression in cases and some particularities that can be studied to establish the origin of a disease.
> I can't find the reference right now but the evidence can be gathered from hospital records.
This is why there has been a lot of attention on certain animals, such as raccoon dogs and minks. It turns out that a lot of the early infections linked to the various Wuhan markets were from shop owners and employees who either sold or were in close contact a small number of animal species. It also turns out that these animals can be infected by SARS-CoV-2. See https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/animal-sales-from-wuhan-wet-....
The issue is that (as far as I'm aware) there's no immediate evidence that SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans from any of these animals, only that there was an (again, as far as I'm aware) unknown intermediary species. However, because the animals at the wet market were disposed of, there's no way to definitively link SARS-CoV-2 to them.
> It's like seeing smoke billowing out of a building and refusing to accept that there's a fire until you see the flames.
The stuff you cite is circumstantial at best. Yes, given the seriousness of covid i would like someone to investigate it, but i would hardly call it billowing smoke.
> Very convenient that your standard of evidence surpasses anything we can possibly obtain after the CCP scrubbed everything.
Is that really relavent? Say CCP would in theory destroy evidence if such a situation arised. That's not an argument that says it is china's fault, its just an argument that we might not ever know. Its not like the people arguing that it was natural aren't using lack of chinese whistleblower as the evidence for naturalness.
At the very least i'd like evidence that suggests there is a higher probability that it was a chinese experiment than a natural occurance. Occam's razor and all. Arguing that it might be impossible to know what happened, increases uncertainty, but doesn't affect the relative probabilities.
Occam's razor works against your argument...given everything we know so far, the simplest explanation is that a chinese lab leaked a virus and it's covering it. There is no jump in logic needed. It's actually easier to explain why the virus was so close to the Wuhan lab.
Maybe it's the other way around. They put the lab in Wuhan because it's easy to get many samples of the zoonotic viruses of concern due to the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.
In other words, your argument is like saying occam's razor concludes that fire extinguishers start fires because they are always found in the vicinity of fires.
Also I think many on this thread greatly underestimate the adaptive and evolutionary capabilities of nature. Having done some wet lab myself, I'm impressed at the ability of nature to do lateral gene transfer, and also it's damn hard to make any experiments work. Plus there are multiple layers of safety and containment around any lab experiment. Movies make engineering look like AI robots in labs and biology experiments that work on the first try, and people who say lab near outbreak must implicate the lab have probably spent more time watching movies about outbreaks than trying to engineer organisms themselves. Having spent a lot of time trying and failing to engineer organisms, occam's razor screams to me that the most likely explanation is natural evolution.
The real lab of concern are the hundreds of millions of people living in close contact with animal reservoirs, performing millions of competitive, uncontrolled evolution experiments daily, with single hosts sometimes simultaneously infected by multiple viruses, thus facilitating lateral gene transfer... and this continues to be the status quo. If you can accept that MERS and SARS CoV-1 are naturally evolved, then occam's razor would indicate that SARS CoV-2 is just one point in a series, and yet another coronavirus outbreak is likely to emerge in the next decade or so, from a dense urban area near animal reservoirs.
Distracting ourselves by fantasizing that only humans could be so devious to create such a virus makes us miss a very important opportunity to try and prevent the next outbreak through careful monitoring and research.
So, if you believe that we should have fire departments and fire extinguishers near ignition sources then, maybe we should have /more/ labs like Wuhan's in high risk areas, not less. And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.
It's concerning that threads like this, on a forum as ostensibly pro-science as HN, are pushing ourselves further away from science and transparency...
> the presence of many natural reservoirs and wet markets, and you want a lab near the action because you want to be able to study the hot spots.
The closest relative to this virus (it's not even that close, just 95% similarity) was found in a bat cave hundreds of miles away. They flew it in Wuhan and made experiments on it (this is all documented, not some crazy theory). Something tells me it's more likely to escape from the lab right there, rather than somehow infect people for hundreds of miles undetected. Your analogy is wrong, the lab is not really a fire extinguisher, because a fire extinguisher cannot cause fires on it's own! Lab leaks happen all the time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
A better analogy is: a nuclear scientist works with heavy metals at a lab (far away from home), suddenly his family gets radiation poisoning. I wonder if it was the scientist that made a mistake, or should we focus all our search for natural radiation sources in the family's house? Sure, it's always a possibility, but what is it more likely? Also, you should at least acknowledge that the person is working with radiation and investigate that possibility thoroughly.
> And we'd want to encourage more cross border cooperation, not antagonize it, because viruses don't give a damn about your politics.
The Chinese took the virus database offline 2 months before the official outbreak...what a coincidence. And what a cooperation effort. Renaming the closest relative virus to hide it's trail. And a lot more.
Yeah, we need more cooperation, and China needs to do it first. They created this mess, the least they can do is cooperate rather than hinder investigations. We need better lab security and better protocols worldwide.
China hasn’t tried to hide the evidence that COVID stated there. But to “hold China accountable” implicitly makes the assumption that they did something wrong and should be punished.
There’s a number of perfectly reasonable ways for COVID to start without China doing anything, and making accusations based on thin evidence is not going to encourage collaboration.
> I dont understand why you keep saying there is thin evidence, we know Covid started in China
I’ve not said that. My comment is in relation to idea that COVID was released from a lab.
> They literally murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people and yet you still defend a dictatorial regime?
I’m not interested in defending the CCP, I just take offence at the idea of the search for the origin of COVID being a witch hunt. People seem to be much more interested in vilified China, and than they are in the actual origin of COVID.
If you wanna criticise the Chinese government, then be my guest, I won’t defend them. But if you’re going to allow a dislike of China to cloud our understanding of where COVID came from then I’m going to make an objection.
We should focus on evidencing the origin of COVID, not finding reasons to further demonise China. If China have intentionally made it difficult to do that, then criticise the action, but it doesn’t change the fact we don’t have strong evidence of a lab release. Certainly the evidence is currently stronger than the evidence suggesting a natural jump.
> Please read my comments again, I never claimed it leaked from a lab.
What hell are we talking about then?
> China claims Covid started in the US, where is the evidence for that?
You bought this up not me. I personally don’t give a shit what China claims. I’ve certainly never claimed that COVID originated in US, nor supported the idea. I have no evidence, and have done no research on this claim because I think it’s completely irrelevant, why the hell do you keep putting words in mouth?
> Who is we? Is China included as well?
China can whatever the hell China wants. So no “we” does not include China, I’m only talking about us here on west. Specifically those who seemed to be determined to prove that China is guilty a crime greater than being the unlucky nation where COVID made the jump. Something that’s a naturally occurring event, which is expected to happen on a semi-regular basis. Indeed the lack of new novel virus in the 20th and 21st century is some what notable, especially when you consider how globalised we are as a species.
So China can murder innocent people all over the world, hide or destroy evidence, buy all the PPE from other nations and not be held accountable and you support this, wow, just wow.
> Something that’s a naturally occurring event
Can you give some evidence for this wild claim that Covid was a naturally occurring event.
Read the link which you gave again but this time see who has funded it. It was funded by the Chinese govt which we have already established that it cannot be trusted.
Dont fall for such state sponsored propaganda and stop making personal attacks using a throwaway account, its very unbecoming.
Occams razor states "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity"
It doesn't seem neccesary for a chinese lab to be involved, and the only evidence so far (afaik) is that it exists and was studying something similar. Meanwhile there exists (albeit definitely not ironclad) evidence that china wasn't involved.
If there is no evidence beyond circumstantial evidence that china had a lab near by, and there is a pretty much equally reasonable explanation that the event happened by chance, than i think occam's razor favours the one with less entities involved.
I'm not saying that china isn't involved. I'm saying that we basically have no idea and the argument that china did it is no more strong than the alternative. On the balance i find the natural explanation more compelling, but ultimately we have no idea. I also think there may be some cognitive biases going on - covid 19 has hurt, and we want scapegoat to blame. If it was natural, than we have only ourselves to blame for being underprepared. If china did it, we convinently have someone to hate.
If you take it like that, the it seems like the lab leak theory is even more probable. For the lab leak to work, we have all the entities we need: the bat fever a few years ago, ongoing studies on those coronaviruses, outbreak near the lab, very suspicious lab behavior, Chinese coverup.
If you take the other hypotheses, it goes like this: some bat coronavirus -> jumps to an unnamed animal -> jumps to a human. There is an unknown entity in this equation, which is the third party animal. This is necessary for the theory to work.
If you make me chose between a theory that has all the elements and one that might or might not find a mythical animal in the future...I think Occam's razor favors the one with all known elements. Otherwise, ad-absurdum, you can win any argument stating it's Occam's razor: you just introduce a single magic black box which can substitute any number of entities.
I am not doing this to blame China. I blame China for the opacity of the response, which at times seemed like they didn't care what happens with everyone else. I can blame China regardless of how this virus appeared. I also blame our top scientists, which covered their asses instead of coming out with everything they know and work for the greater good.
What I do want is better bio-labs safety protocols, something that can be monitor by third party inspectors, say from UN, just like we have for nuclear facilities. Lab leaks happen, it's not a Chinese thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
The specific claims here that are most compelling to me are:
"The grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2." The counterargument is "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." The takeaway is that it is not likely this specific proposal was funded elsewhere, leading to SARS-CoV-2.
"If they actually carried out the research in this grant proposal you don't get from there to SARS-CoV-2, those are all SARS-1-like." I do not personally know how to evaluate the accuracy of this claim, but if true, it resonates with the first claim: this proposal funded elsewhere would not lead to SARS-CoV-2.
The argument claims about it being hard/expensive I think are less compelling, as there is a lead time of several years with experts in field performing research. A more compelling version of this argument would look like (completely making up numbers): "On average, it takes 4.5 years to develop the first samples of a novel virus using a selected backbone, CRISPR technology, and gain-of-function culturing. Therefore, even if this research was funded in 2018 we would not expect it to have led to SARS-CoV-2". I'm not saying that argument is accurate at all, just saying it's more specific than "it's difficult".
The argument claims about the evidence being missing I think isn't going to be motivating for a person who has a reasonable expectation that secret research is done and does not have trust in government transparency (either US, China, or otherwise). I'm not making a point here that evidence isn't needed (far from it, evidence IS needed). I'm evaluating from a polemic perspective what kinds of claims and arguments are useful for advancing the conversation with someone who holding a dissonant viewpoint.
Thank you by the way for making specific claims that can be fact checked such as the two referenced at the top of this comment.
> "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere."
It isn't as simple as altering the proposal. You're speculating a very large and hidden process using sequences that were kept perfectly secret and have not been leaked, with virus backbones that would take considerable effort to create but which were never shared publicly (and kept perfectly secret before SARS-CoV-2 happened before there was any need for perfect secrecy). We have this leaked information from 2018 about the proposal with the WIV1/SHC014 backbones which leaked because it was not kept with perfect secrecy. Yet they managed to do all that work in perfect secrecy without any leaks. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory. It requires a bit of a time machine because Daszak would have to have known in 2018 to tighten up his "OpSec" in response to the pandemic that hadn't happened yet and leaks that hadn't yet occurred.
Things are also getting worse for the lab leak theory on other fronts, I just stumbled across this a few minutes ago:
If there's multiple lineages from multiple zoonotic spillover events that makes the lab leak theory a poor fit and will require a lot more mental gymnastics.
... but then you'd have to explain the infection geography in humans with two events. Not saying it's not possible, but lining it up with what's known epidemiologically speaking is different.
Also, I'm not sure why the lab leak hypothesis is suddenly trickier. They had all sorts of samples.
Labeling this all as "mental gymnastics" as in the article, or "a dagger in the heart of the lab leak hypothesis" is just the sort of motivated analysis confirmatory bias that caused all this in the first place. I'm not sure how arguing that SARS-CoV-2 involved two spillover events with crossover from multiple species is less mental gymnastics than "a lab had multiple samples".
Honestly I'd like to see more dispassionate discussion of this. That Nature piece is shameful.
At some level I don't care if it was a lab leak or not but I wish there wasn't this level of motivation behind both sides.
In any event, the grant proposal should raise a lot of red flags regardless. What bothers me often is this implied assumption that if the lab leak hypothesis is false, everything else is fine. It's all fine that a plausible biosecurity failure scenario was ridiculed, that major research groups clearly lied about and tried to cover up conflicts of interest, that we can trust these (GoF) lines of research are safe, that we can just trust the authority figures to not cause another pandemic, etc. etc. etc.
You should def care if it was a lab leak or not, because as we have learned the only way we are going to address these risks properly if it was. The way to see this is obvious is that we are not acting as if it was a lab leak, and we should be.
Really? I find it halfway interesting, as it is a discussion between someone who clearly understands the science and bureaucracy that surrounds that type of work, and someone who is chaining speculation and "what if's" like their life depended on it.
Definitely. Because companies need both types of people to succeed. I’ve also been on both sides of the table. It’s easy to underestimate the what-iffer and to overestimate the established senior —- and vice versa.
Jaysus, I just wanted to say thanks for a convo. To confess my sins, I didn’t read it too closely on either side. I’m currently trying to fall asleep. The idea that people did know a thing or two about biology on HN was appealing.
I have to say though, the flagged reply was thoroughly entertaining. Thank you sir or ma’am for the high praise; I aim to please.
First, it really doesn't take major effort to make a viral backbone. You'd like to make a protocol that generates them in high multiplex (thousands, millions, billions) and then selects on that background to find functional ones. The current virus could descend from a recombinant generated with such an approach. It might never have been sequenced or observed directly because it was one of innumerable examples that were competitively cultured.
But, this nature piece is really problematic. When removing likely sequencing errors, the independent "spillover events" appear to fit perfectly into a single phylogeny with each node separated by a single mutation. And the A clade descends cleanly from the B clade. There are not enough mutations between them to support a complex explanation like multiple spillovers. This is linked but not explained properly by the nature piece https://virological.org/t/evidence-against-the-veracity-of-s...
That and a coupe authors already arrived at contrary conclusions before this nature piece was even released. It fails to even acknowledge their work, compare, or comment why there should be favor in their own claims above others with different approaches that might be better suited (biostatistical methods to model a progenitor and the probable evolution of the lineages).
You seem to be suggesting that because this 2018 grant was recently "leaked", we now have... perfect info on all other grants & projects, including any that are part of the 'black budgets' of the US or China.
But maybe some things just haven't leaked yet? Or were kept secret by others even more skilled at secrecy & misdirection than Daszak?
>Yet they managed to do all that work in perfect secrecy without any leaks. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory.
But nobody is alleging that they did all the work in perfect secrecy. Clearly we know about a lot of the work: you'd use the same equipment, location, and so forth. Only a few things are left that need to be secret; namely, the origin of the viral sequences that preceded SARS-CoV-2. And if those were present in the wild it seems not entirely surprising that WIV could have simply obtained them.
Furthermore, it is not really that surprising that research which potentially develops weapons of mass destruction is kept secret, pandemic or no. Whether it caused the pandemic or not, people are still generally concerned that this kind of thing was occurring.
That is a good example to consider: the conspiracy theories were around things like magic crypto-breaking boxes, men in black getting crypto keys, or deeply-hidden backdoors in Windows. What they actually kept secret was that they were tapping cables covertly using the same tactics against American companies that they’d used throughout the Cold War — the secret being that they were using them domestically.
Applying Occam, I’m going to bet that the origins of the virus will turn out to be entirely zoonotic or that someone got infected doing fieldwork rather than the lab engineering claims.
> The counterargument is "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." The takeaway is that it is not likely this specific proposal was funded elsewhere, leading to SARS-CoV-2.
That sounds like a very tenuous line of reasoning to me. Almost like saying "We know that Mr. A proposed shooting Mr. B, so let's reconsider that Mr C. may have stabbed Mr. D."
These researchers were apparently simulating the process of spillover and host adaptation of recombinant coronavirus in the lab. Of course this process will resemble a natural event in some respects. In a natural event, we would expect some traces of the adapting virus to be left in the world. Here, there are none. The virus appears having already adapted completely to it's new host.
The only evidence that exists is indirect because of China's stonewalling. When International researchers are denied access to the EpiCentre of a global pandemic, you cannot use the argument that there is no evidence.
It's even worse than that. They did actually given access to Wuhan lab to WHO investigation team tasked with studying the possibility of lab leak, back in February/March last year. The team concluded that that it could not have leaked from Wuhan lab. The name of the lead investigator of the team? Peter Daszak, the very same one. I'm not making this up.
Calm down dude. Clearly you have some attachment to one theory over another, which is poor science.
The investigation will continue and those missing items you mention just might turn up since it appears from the leak that there are might be a significant number of unpublished sequences at WIV and EHA, etc.
If science is unsatisfied by what is found, actual scientists will move on and look elsewhere. This leak evidence is compatible with the man origin suspicions however.
People without something to hide don’t go to the lengths of coverup and propaganda campaigns that we have seen here. Perhaps Covid-19 was fully natural in origin, but what appears to be fairly obvious to me is that there are certain actors within the viral research community that are doing some things that the general worldwide public would view as extraordinarily dangerous. Things that might also be considered illegal in countries that are providing funds. Things that might be viewed reasonably by the general public as a possible cause of a worldwide pandemic.
There seems to be an extraordinary amount of CYA here.
At the end of the day we also have zero evidence of the animal transfer hypothesis. The SARS-CoV-2 virus was never documented in bats (prior to its spread among humans). No one has been able to demonstrate the capability of the virus to acquire it's current features in vivo in bats.
But that doesn't invalidate the animal transfer hypothesis. Because that isn't how science works -- or even just how KNOWLEDGE works. No one[1] operates under perfect certainty; we collect stronger or weaker evidence for various possibilities.
This grant application doesn't "prove" that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from a lab. But nothing "proves" it wasn't. The existence of this grant application is evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis, demonstrating conclusively that someone in the world was thinking, prior to the pandemic, about performing modifications to coronaviruses similar to what we have observed in the virus.
Interesting that the no lab peole keep beating the same "evidence" drum, conflating to the public eye evidence and proof meaning.
Every single denial comment around here hinges on this confusion in terms and then tries to stick the "no proof" meaning to all the evidence, instead of bringing whatever evidence there is that it was a natural strain evolution or debating the various points.
Funny how instead a meta analysis of the discussion show one side piling up evidences while the other insists in trying to convince people that no proof equals no evidence.
> 1. There is no viral backbone anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
> 2. There is no spike protein anyone knows of which would have been used in this research
> 3. The PRRAR furin cleavage site is not one humans would have tried it is unlike any other known furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses
I believe what you mean to say here is that there is no published literature describing these things. That may be true. But the people doing this work are the ones who would develop and then publish such knowledge, if it were indeed something they were working on.
> It is not particularly suspicious that the thing which we were worried about happening and causing a zoonotic spillover event is the thing which actually happened.
It isn't. What is suspicious is the following:
1. It happened in the city that houses the lab where this research was proposed to take place.
2. The natural reservoir of these viruses is hundreds of miles from this city.
3. The outbreak occurred exactly 2 years after this research was originally proposed, in the city that it was proposed to take place in, in roughly the amount of time one might expect this research to take.
4. Peter Daszak, despite coming out forcefully against the lab leak theory, and purposely downplaying his involvement with the lab in so doing, and being inexplicably selected as a member of the WHO team to investigate the lab origin theory, completely neglected to mention having made this proposal a mere two years prior.
If I were a major virus researcher, and my proposal to investigate the exact thing that just caused a massive global pandemic had been denied by DARPA two years prior, I would be shouting it from the rooftops as vindication. See, had you just let me investigate this, maybe we could have avoided this pandemic! But he didn't do that. He didn't mention it at all, despite its obvious relevance to all that has gone on.
This is not the behavior of someone with nothing to hide. Whether or not this virus originated in this lab, it's pretty clear that Peter Daszak is up to something he'd rather the world not discover.
I think employing probabilities and likelihoods which are subjective and will needlessly cause back and forth arguments over their use and validity.
Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anything.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It all comes down to burden of proof. The more circumstantial evidence of a lab leak piles up, the more reasonably open-minded people will tend to shift their priors in that direction.
You will only accept hard evidence, yet you are aware that parties in China have actively removed some possible evidentiary sources. And others in USA promoted a campaign to shut down lines of enquiry, whilst withholding relevant information.
Many disciplines use Bayesian statistical models. In this case it may be the only way to "prove" a lab leak - assuming that were actually true.
I understand how this makes me sound like a conspiracy theorist. I hate that. It would certainly be better to have hard evidence. I belive we have to reserve judgement in it's absence. And keep investigating both avenues.
For me the things that sticks out is that they found the origin of the original sars in mere months, but nothing when it comes to Sars-cov-2. I don’t know how big animal reservoirs can be tbh.
Btw A conspiracy theorist doesn’t change his conspiracy when new evidence comes to light. So if you are a critical thinker, you just want to know what happened there, whether lab or natural origin (or a combination of both?)
As I remember for SARS-1 it was bats via palm civets sold in wet markets.
It would be interesting to see an updating Bayesian model played out over 18 months of investigation into SARS-COV-19 natural origin with no result so far. Absence of evidence is not proof of non-natural origins, but it does shift one's priors.
Thanks. I guess beyond the stereotypes there's no actual conspiracy theorists. Just people reasoning imperfectly with imperfect data.
Statistical models work great for well defined problem spaces like the probability of rolling a die in a particular way. You can reason in your own mind the probability of aliens or extinction events or lab leaks or anything really, but it doesn't get you very far (IMO) in proving anything.
To paraphrase Wernher von Braun - "Hard data is worth a thousand expert opinions." :)
You seem to be conflating subjective and opinion on the one hand with statistical on the other.
Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion.
Your example of rolling dice is Frequentist, not Bayesian. We wouldn't use Frequentist stats in this domain, for the reasons you mention.
>Actually, Bayes statistics works great in poorly defined problem spaces where we can update our priors as new information becomes available. Just like in the issue under discussion.
Can you give me a few comparable scenarios where it worked great?
I don't know whether Bayesian search is currently being used to search for the unknown reservoir species from which SARS-COV-19 jumped to infect humans (assuming a natural cause).
Under this approach, the longer the search goes on, the more we may lessen our confidence in the prior assumption that it was a natural infection.
The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution are a mountain of evidence. Why don't you trust them?
We don't see adaptation to the new host. This means that either the spillover happened a long time before it was detected (months, years), or the proximal host was a primate. Or, the virus could have been adapted to human cells and their surface proteins in relatively straightforward laboratory experiments. Then, if accidentally released, the phylogeny and virus adaptation process would look exactly like the one we are seeing with hundreds of thousands of viral genomes.
A spillover from nature would look like SARS1. There are rapid phenotypic adaptations in the beginning of the epidemic. The initial virus is infectious, but not anything like SARS2. In SARS2, it takes many months for real phenotypic change to appear. The rate of variation is clock-like because there are few easy phenotypic wins to be made.
This is hard evidence. What do you make of it? Maybe you have to understand genetics and evolution to "read" this material, but that doesn't negate it.
Why do you say so? Co-evolving organisms/species and their cross-interaction in a large changing global environment is not a deterministic process, or rather is not a process that we can predict with any great degree of accuracy. What things would "look like" is extrapolation, not evidence.
In any case, my main objection to your argument is that you're drawing inferences from an imperfect dataset and them employing backwards reasoning "Well nothing else explains it except theory A". Sorry, but that doesn't satisfy me. I still want to see actual evidence of actual work being done in an actual lab that corroborates the hypothesis. It is pretty much impossible to keep such large multi-year scientific development projects secret in this day and age. There are dozens of people involved, past employees, lab assistants, etc, etc. I work in biotech (I'm not claiming to be any expert on anything) and maybe that's why I'm finding it difficult.
>The viral phylogeny and history of it's evolution
... point to it being a natural zoonotic spillover event. Wuhan had a virus institute because it is a place where novel viruses are found, not the other way around.
This is not true as far as I’m aware. Novel bat coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2 are usually found deep in bat caves in the south of China, ~2000km away from Wuhan. The WIV was established in the 50s, long before serious coronavirus research was a thing.
> Could you provide some data to support the assertion that the virus was engineered? I'm hoping something like a leaked paper, or a lab notebook, or maybe hand written data on a piece of scrap paper that somebody found in the garbage bin in china.. I mean, I'll take anything.
Where did I say it was engineered? We have no evidence of its natural origin either. Can you provide its natural reservoir? An animal sample? Another coronavirus with this furin cleavage site? Anything?
What we are trying to do is ascertain the likelihoods of various scenarios given the evidence we have. Not the evidence we wish we had. I do not believe, nor have I anywhere asserted, that we have proven the virus was unnatural in origin. I also do not believe we have proven that the virus was natural in origin.
What I believe is that the evidence is presently insufficient to determine, and fairly ambiguous. What is unambiguous is the extraordinarily shady and self serving behavior of Peter Daszak. Why it is that he's doing that, I don't know. It could be because he participated in the engineering of this virus, but it could be for entirely separate reasons that pertain to him. I do think we should at least make a serious effort to find out, though.
Yeah, because all those things weren’t scrubbed in the first 4 hours after this became globally known. All the evidence we have is by necessity circumstantial.
Any example where this has happened in the past on a global r&d science project? We're talking about scientists and lay people assisting them, not trained spies. Past employees, disgruntled employees, warehouse personnel, vendors/suppliers , bat handlers, emails, paper, nothing?
And you know what, northern Laos where the RBD was found, and south Yunnan, where the well documented sars outbreak happened (which presumably led to the discovery of ratg13), share a border with each other
What if EcoHealth (originally Wildlife Preservation Trust International) was infiltrated by eco-terrorists who did the reasearch anyway then released a depopulation virus to punish humans and 'restore balance' to the ecosystem, in a sicko 'Army of the 12 Monkeys'-style act of terrorism? But either they weren't that successful (only 5 million deaths is not depopulation) or their goal was lockdowns and reduced air travel to give the environment a breather.
One of the reasons i despise the Silicon Valley tone of conversation is how naive (read removed from the brutality that exists in the world outside the US' protected borders) the line is.
Like, are you kidding me?
- Research Lab near outbreak
- Connected to person that proposed a similar GoF research for a grant in the US and was turned down
- History of loose ethical standards and evidence of published works connecting the CCP to military usage of viruses
- Absolutely no evidence of natural origin circumstantial or otherwise in spite of over 18 months of looking
And we have people here closing their eyes, fingers in their ears going "la la la" with moronic arguments like : "Can you show me the evidence?"
I mean, can you constructively participate in the discussion with an attempt to push it forward and call out the clear risks of weaponizing infectious vectors instead of saying "Nothing to see here, show me more" in the face of all we've seen.
All that does is gives a pass to the people doing this in the dark. Accident or not, that work is ongoing and if a literal global mass casualty event doesn't help regulate it, what will ?
These are all very compelling claims. I am wondering if you can provide at least one reference for each. E.g. "There are now many known related sarbecoviruses which have been found with furin cleavage sites" is a claim that can be referenced pretty easily with a link to papers reporting said sarbecoviruses.
From your first link: "SARS-CoV-2 is the only virus in subgenus Sarbecovirus having this feature"
From your second link: "Finally, the poly-basic (furin) site present in SARS-CoV-2 is absent in both RshSTT182 and RshSTT200."
Your third link doesn't discuss furin cleavage sites very much.
Your fourth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin".
Your fifth link literally doesn't contain the substring "furin".
Your sixth link at least partially supports your claim with a single mention of furin, saying "The two viruses shared part of the furin cleavage site unique to SARS-CoV-2", but the whole truth is that while they have insertions at the S1/S2 cleavage site in the spike protein, they do not contain the full furin cleavage site. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RmYN02
From your seventh link: "None of these bat viruses harbors a furin cleavage site in the spike."
(Protip: in this claim #4 of yours under discussion, you should change "sarbecoviruses" to "betacoronaviruses".)
I only reviewed the first link. What I took away from it is that furin cleave sites occur in the family of coronaviruses naturally, but have not been seen in those most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. This note about not having closely related coronaviruses having such a feature is also true of SARS-CoV-1, which also leads evidence to its ability to occur naturally within a given subgenus (unless we posit also original SARS was lab-leak, but I do not think anyone has posited this.)
I believe the uniqueness has been established by the issue that the specifics of the 12-nt insertion is never found anywhere in a natural setting. Many papers have gone back and forth over this and there's no natural example.
All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way? Can you conclusively rule out that this virus wasn’t engineered (and then maliciously covered up) in a lab? The reason this approach is important is because the stakes here are higher. This means people who should have been careful weren’t, and are responsible for the death of millions and they’re happy continuing to cover up their part in it.
The more important part here is an investigation on the origins of the virus is more about beurecracy than the actual science so unless you can conclusively prove that this virus could have never been engineered by a human you should stop bringing “improbability” of all of these processes as why we should trust these scientists.
Natural occurrence is how almost every known virus exists.
Given that prior, "can you disprove the lab" is the Russell's Teapot hypothesis. No, I can't. I also can't disprove it rode in on a meteorite or was beamed in by aliens. And I'm not about to start.
And the novel technology to create novel viruses was being actively developed in this lab. They've proudly and openly published results to this effect. Further, they were trying to get tens of millions in grant funding to develop the technology further.
That is the wrong way to go about it. You have to approach it as you would in legal theory. Innocence is not something that is proven. The verdict is guilty or not guilty (which means evidence wasn't sufficient to convict, but that doesn't mean the defendant is innocent). In this case you have to prove that the virus was engineered by providing evidence.
>All valid points, but let’s be real scientists and work the other way?
What you're proposing isn't science and it isn't what 'real scientists' do.
Your parent said like scientists. Not like jurists.
And as far as I understand it, they are correct. Science doesn't convict an effect, it provides a lower bound on the likelihood of the effect's existence.
How about we at least agree that we can all imagine this having been a lab leak, and therefore should take the requisite changes to protocols, funding, and so on that we would do if it were proven as such.
Depends on which real scientists you are talking about.
I've worked with many "real scientists" who will consider possiblity unless they see conclusive evidence against it. On the frontiers, there is very little conclusive evidence; this is why they are the frontiers.
I have also met "real scientists" who actively dismiss conclusive evidence if it doesn't line up with what they think will get funded.
It doesn't seem the first flavor is the one you are talking about.
>I've worked with many "real scientists" who will consider possiblity unless they see conclusive evidence against it. On the frontiers, there is very little conclusive evidence; this is why they are the frontiers.
Oh sure, I consider the possibility that there might be aliens out there. However, we both know that this is very different than considering the possibility that Obama was a reptilian. In any case, scientific frontiers are areas of active research. So yeah, lets go spelunking!
>I have also met "real scientists" who actively dismiss conclusive evidence if it doesn't line up with what they think will get funded.
I'd argue there is more evidence for the lab leak theory than either aliens or reptilians; it's a tremendously low bar. There is not even flimsy circumstantial evidence for aliens, yet many people believe.
Yes knowingly abandoning the princinples of science in order to acquire money is quite the flaw. For whatever reason it is basically non-existent among grad students, but not uncommon among successful professors. It's almost like our institutions select for and reward this behavior.
There's more than science here. This is also game theory, if a lab leak is still plausible. Why was this being researched? Who knew about it and why was it covered up, and to what extent was it covered up?
Personally I think it's naive that people are omitting human and government intentions from all this, as if they are not actors in complex political world. These huge world changing events don't happen in a vacuum, and government actors are usually aware of all these ongoing research efforts for agendas and specific goals, which of course includes misleading the public.
Game theory could plausibly explain why PRC keeps resurfacing their unsubstantiated US military origins theory.
Assuming an actual lab leak at WIV, from a US project similar to the one rejected by DARPA. And PRC is aware of all these facts.
Under these assumptions, this story/rumour could be seen as a threat, which re-emerges whenever PRC feels under pressure: "We won't go down alone for this"
Agreed, and it was unsubstantiated till now (and also with the funding of it, etc).
My point was mostly that we won't really be able to figure out the microbiology details of it in order to make reasonable conclusions. I think it would be like trying to figure out the physics of the nuclear bomb during the Manhattan project, and concluding no such bomb can be built because no physicist has figured out nuclear reactions yet.
There's nothing in that list that argues against SARS-CoV-2—and its spike protein and furin cleavage site in particular—being produced by serial passage through any of a variety of cell lines expressing human ACE-2.
It does seem unlikely that the SARS-CoV-2 genome, or spike protein, or even just a small segment including the furin cleavage site, was synthesized. Although without knowing what protein folding modeling capabilities and synthesis capabilities the WIV had, who knows for sure?
There's 1,000 nucleotide differences between the closest known progenitor and SARS-CoV-2. That is an evolutionary distance of 30-40 years in a coronavirus. You can't replicate that many years of evolution by serial passage in a lab. Serial passage isn't a magic wand.
And the rest of it is that you're arguing in favor of a science fiction explanation for the capabilities of the WIV lab.
30-40 years difference from SARS-CoV. However, the proposal actually says it would use other unpublished sequences for development. These unpublished sequences may have been much closer to SARS-CoV-2. I think you should read the leaks.
This is a question I've encountered a few times. How quickly, versus natural evolution, can serial passage evolve a virus?
Using this figure, we could have some parameters around how much time such a project must have taken and its latest start date (assuming its evolved from known or closely-related-to-known viruses).
Using this figure, and a theoretical timetable, we can also specify how close a cousin virus we would need to have for such a process to develop SAR-CoV-2.
This could give us a more specific understanding of the feasibility of such research.
For example, RaTG13 is closest known virus was discovered in 2013. Does the rate of serial passage enable evolution from RaTG13 over ~7 years? If not, this provides a factual argument allowing us to determine even if gain-of-function research was imposed on RaTG13 the moment of its discovery, it could not have been developed into SARS-CoV-2. (I don't know how to evaluate the actual accuracy of this, but provided as a example of how knowing the serial passage rate would be helpful).
Serial passage isn't magic, it is just what nature does.
In the lab you'll get a handful of mutations not thousands.
After serial passage through some large fraction of a billion humans, with large evolutionary pressures due to the recent species jump, the delta variant is still well over 99% homologous to the reference Wu-1 strain.
A 96.1% different would require serial passage through billions of organisms, but they measure this difference in terms of years of evolution in nature which is on the order of 30-40 years.
In the lab we can vastly exceed natural mutation rates, rendering this appeal to nature baseless.
The rate of evolution is a function of the mutation rate and the effective population size. There is no reason to believe that a lab setting, with highly parallel evolution on a very large, diverse population, will be as slow as passage through hosts in nature. The application of mutagens, and also the lack of selection by a host immune system can support much higher rates of change. And in coronaviruses, recombination is also very frequent, and this could easily give rise to multiple % levels of divergence in a single step. Finally, it's trivial to synthesize a genome of this size, and also to synthesize pools of related viruses based on common backgrounds.
The 30-40 year figure assumes the related virus is a direct ancestor and it stayed within the same species, which is quite a big if. It's useful as a metric within a single population, but not exactly evidence hard enough to play genetic detective.
If they just share ancestors that time is basically halved towards the most recent common ancestor, which puts it back somewhere in the mid 2000s. When evolving in parallel, within different species, the divergence grows really quick. Also when viruses jump species the mutation rate skyrockets at the beginning[0][1] to adapt to the novel host, which could easily account for most of the difference between RaTG13 and Wu-1 anyway.
> After serial passage through some large fraction of a billion humans
Wouldn’t this count as parallel passage though? Sure there’s more variability and evolutionary pressure on the mutations, but the speed of evolution (the number nucleotide mutations) is the same over the same period of time regardless of how many billions of people it infects in parallel.
> How quickly, versus natural evolution, can serial passage evolve a virus?
Look how many infections were needed to go from Covid Classic to the Delta Variant. What's that a billion?
Comment I read from someone that aught to know what they are talking about pointed out that gain function in a lab produces viruses that are good at infecting cells in petri dishes. Not ones that are good at infecting vertebrates with full fledged immune systems trying to kill it.
Not really speculation any longer. Daszak made a bunch of statements that poured water on this potential concern, and so many other contradictor statements to this evidence. When there is a discrepancy or a number of discrepancies (in this case), there is a good chance of a valuable investigation.
A lot of comments against this, but I think this is a pretty good summary of why I think this is a zoonotic spillover event. To put it bluntly, evolution is much more creative than us and SARS-COV2 seems like a master stroke. Much of the arguments in favour of the lab escape hypothesis read like arguments made by people who are not virologists or related experts.
Guys, two points here. One, this proposal was rejected. This did not happen! Two, their proposal was for genetic manipulation of an existing virus, which research on the existing corona virus shows was not the case.
This has nothing to do with the corona virus strains we are currently dealing with, and more importantly, there has never been any credible research proving that Covid was made in a lab. The only paper that got any traction suggested it was non-manipulation based gain of function research, but that was disproved only a few weeks after the paper's release as well. I know we all want to know where it came from, but the odds against us ever having actual evidence of it being from a lab are virtually zero. And no, rejected research proposals do not constitute proof of anything.
> There's evidence that COVID-19 was not created by direct genetic manipulation.
There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (or well, with such a low chance it may as well be) have occured naturally.
What am I supposed to believe here? Even the people on my side of the fence, even the people that research this stuff themselves all seem to have an agenda and when research turns up one thing, I can practically guarantee that other research turns up the opposite.
There’s too much damn smoke in this whole thing for there to be no fire.
Yes the football players were on the field, they talked about kicking the ball, they requested to kick the ball but suggesting they might have kicked the ball is a conspiracy theory.
People have asserted in this thread that it would take 30-40 years for the closest known natural covid relative to aquire the necessary 1000 mutations and turn into covid. And yet here we are, almost 2 years since the pandemic started, with no identified natural reservoir for covid.
Where is the covid source?
-----
Consider https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00991-0.pdf, a pro natural origins review of the literature. They tie themselves into knots to explain that the infamous furin cleavage site, while absent in the closest covid relative, could have naturally occurred, even if they admit they have zero actual evidence for that.
> Although the furin cleavage site is absent from the closest
known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 (Andersen et al., 2020), this is
unsurprising because the lineage leading to this virus is poorly
sampled and the closest bat viruses have divergent spike proteins due to recombination (Boni et al., 2020; Lytras et al.,
2021; Zhou et al., 2021). Furin cleavage sites are commonplace
in other coronavirus spike proteins, including some feline alphacoronaviruses, MERS-CoV, most but not all strains of mouse
hepatitis virus, as well as in endemic human betacoronaviruses
such as HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 (Gombold et al., 1993; de Haan et al., 2008; Kirchdoerfer et al., 2016). A near identical
nucleotide sequence is found in the spike gene of the bat coronavirus HKU9-1 (Gallaher, 2020), and both SARS-CoV-2 and
HKU9-1 contain short palindromic sequences immediately upstream of this sequence that are indicative of natural recombination break-points via template switching (Gallaher, 2020). Hence,
simple evolutionary mechanisms can readily explain the evolution of an out-of-frame insertion of a furin cleavage site in
SARS-CoV-2 (Figure 2).
On the flip side, Nicholas Wade claims that Peter Daszak grant application proposes exactly that:
> The..grant proposal..now puts beyond doubt that engineering cleavage sites into SARS-like viruses was a technique to be explored at..Wuhan
Probably in bats or other animals prone to corona viruses. Likely some animal that naturally does not interact with humans a lot, and has significant populations in remote habitats. Basically everything that can live in difficult terrain is rather likely. Less likely, but far from impossible: it mutated over extended periods of time in some animal meat factory farm on an accelerated schedule thanks to how these farms operate, with animals showing few if any symptoms thanks to the young ages of the entire population (no old animals in your factory farm ;), until it finally made the jump to humans.
>to aquire the necessary 1000 mutations
They compared strains we already now about because somebody sequenced them; the important word there is "known". The thing about that is that there is a ton of strains we do not know about because nobody sequenced that particular local cohort of animals. Hell, we do not even know every species of animals are on planet at all, if the still hight rate of discovering new species is any indication - and we do constantly discover species that we can see with our naked eyes without having to whip out lab equipment.
>And yet here we are, almost 2 years since the pandemic started, with no identified natural reservoir for covid.
There is a real good chance that this "natural reservoir" is just a place nobody looked at with a sequencer hunting for virus strains, i.e. most of the Earth.
Or it might have been created in a lab.
The thing is, we do not know. But there is some evidence apparently that it was a natural origin because a) it looks like a natural progression from previously known strains and b) because there are no hallmark indicators for direct manipulation. Not entirely conclusive evidence, but sound argumentation making a case for the possibility of natural occurrence. And the theories you recapped arguing it cannot be natural just do not use a sound argumentation in my opinion as even I myself - not a domain expert and thinking about it for a few minutes - can poke gigantic holes in it.
Frankly, the "no natural source" argument as you presented it immediately reminded me of the pro-Creationist "missing link" argument.
All the while the evidence you mentioned is that there probably was a lab in Wuhan which probably did stuff with Corona viruses... which is rather vague argumentative. Sure, it's a clue furthering the lab theory a little, but it's hardly conclusive. Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
We don't know. That's the point. Very strange that the science establishment is adamant that they do know, specifically they do know it was zoonotic, even if they also admit they have no scientific evidence for such statements. What is a scientist supposed do, absent scientific evidence? Seek for evidence.
OTOH, there is the furin cleavage site issue. Have your read the OA?!
> Since the genetic code of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was first sequenced, scientists have puzzled over the “furin cleavage site.” This strange feature on the spike protein of the virus had never been seen in SARS-related betacoronaviruses, the class to which SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the respiratory illness Covid-19, belongs.
> Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
* None of the known coronaviruses closely related to covid have such a feature. There is a lot of FUD in this space, which amounts to saying: Horses and seals are mammals, seals have flippers, therefore that horse with flippers you just saw has occurred naturally. Those stallions might have been quite horny.
* The OA 2018 grant proposes to perform gain of function work and create a FCS in SARS viruses at WIH. This research proposal has not been publicly disclosed by scientists that supposedly are investigating covid origin. WTF?
The closer relatives of covid without a FCS at the S1/S2 junction we find, the more damning for the WIH and their American friends. And perhaps we'll find the genetic ancestors of covid in the wild, and the WIH (proposed) work might have been a bizzarre coincidence. We don't know. But the stonewalling and the sneering at the public asking legitimate questions must stop.
>Horses and seals are mammals, seals have flippers, therefore that horse with flippers you just saw has occurred naturally.
I raise you a platypus.
Your analogy doesn't really work in my opinion; a horse with flippers would be far more unexpected than that cleavage site. The cleavage site might be novel - as far as we know - but it's not jar-dropping surprising either, and something that can occur naturally in a reasonable time frame.
>But the stonewalling and the sneering at the public asking legitimate questions must stop.
I can agree with this sentiment. In fact, I think I was asking a legitimate question when I asked for sources to the assertion that there is evidence it was lab-made.
I already conceded it is entire possible it's lab made. However, with what I read thus far, personally I still think signs point to natural occurrence than lab.
Chances are we will never know. If it was naturally occurring, then we may never find the "natural source" even if we tried. And it's not like we dispatched an army of scientists to look for such a source. It's more or less the same few people who did the collection of samples before the pandemic who are the ones still doing it now, probably even less so with travel restrictions still in place in a lot of locations.
If it was a lab escape - or worse a deliberate unleashing of a lab made virus - then whoever is responsible will try to keep it calm and seems to be doing a good enough job plugging any leaks as there have been none.
I also have to admit that I confused you with the person to whom my original reply was made, who seemed far more adamant that there is actual evidence (a proposal is circumstantial evidence at best, and certainly not scientific evidence), and ended with
>There’s too much damn smoke in this whole thing for there to be no fire.
Yes, I remember this being a big point of contention with scientists going both ways. I saved this link [1] with the quote:
>“I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,” Andersen added.
Although that was from Jan 2020 and I'm sure more evidence has come in since then to shed more light.
Not how probability works. What's the probability the entire universes atoms are arranged the way they are? The number is so finitely minute it's "impossible", because you're trying to make predictions on specific order out of chaos. The probability of any viruses currently existing would be equally infinitely tiny.
Research is not equivalent. Just because two people make an argument does not make them equally valid. Unless you are a medical researcher you're not meant to somehow know how medical research papers work and what their results are on your own. It's not black and white. It's the same as trying to take electrical engineering papers and base opinions on it without any knowledge of the math or how it works.
It's not the probability of any specific configuration, but the probability of a specific configuration over any other particular configuration.
All configurations could have an infinitesimal chance of occurring, but one configuration could still have a billion to one chance of occurring over another particular configuration.
Which is especially relevant if we have a relatively recent basepoint of comparison.
An infinite number of monkeys with typewriters might eventually reproduce Shakespeare, but 10000 monkeys doing it on their first try points to causation beyond "chance".
> There’s also evidence it cannot possibly (...) have occured naturally.
I feel this claim is simply not believable nor possible to take at face value, given that in order for a proof of impossibility to even be considered you need supporting evidence and a falsifiable model, which you have none.
Given this, do you have any reference that supports your assertion? I'd like to hear your rationale to claim that something like this is outright impossible.
You cut off the critical part of the parent's comment: "(or well, with such a low chance it may as well be)".
If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific theories can't put a "very low probability" on certain things being observed ... what? That's exactly what a scientific theory -- or indeed, any well-posed belief -- should do!
Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation.
> If you're objecting to the idea that well-accepted scientific theories (...)
I object to the idea of random people on the internet knowingly spreading disinformation with baseless claims that fly on the face of critical thinking, and then resorting to vague appeals to authority, inversions of the burden of truth, and outright bullying to force-fed their disinformation.
If there is any proof whatsoever supporting the claim that such thing is impossible then just support your claim and present the evidence or source. Don't expect everyone to just take your word for it, specially after you tried desperately to invert the burden of proof.
>No, I left out the weasel words from the original claim.
It's not a "weasel word", "Scientific theories placing a low enough probability to match lay usage of 'impossible', and clarifying that you mean as much" isn't a weasel word; it's being precise, and scientific theories do classify things that way.
>Either GP's claim is factual and indeed he is aware of proof of impossibility, or he is not and he's just knowingly spreading disinformation.
There's a third possibility: OP is aware that some scientists think the mainstream scientific theory places a low probability on the claim in question, but does not rise to the level of an impossibility theorem.
>I object to the idea of random people on the internet knowingly spreading disinformation with baseless claims that fly on the face of critical thinking, and then resorting to vague appeals to authority, inversions of the burden of truth, and outright bullying to force-fed their disinformation.
I don't see how the parent did any of that, just how another commenter is overreacting to ideas they don't like.
Are you seriously telling me that if I look through your posting history, I won't find a single case of you suggesting something without posting links to rigorous proof?
If you're going to scream bloody murder at the idea that any unsupported idea would ever be uttered here, you could maybe glance at the sibling comments in the thread, like mine:
They would have had to be very quick though. Submission was end of march 2018, there would have been a review process and I think it's unrealistic to put that at under six weeks. So that takes us to mid may 2018. Then they would have to have got some money and ask someone else - again that's going to take three months or so unless they had the money in their account. Then the project would have to be stood up - lab space sorted and so on so that takes us to 2019 even on an express train. I think that the Darpa projects in this call were aimed at start in 2019 btw.
So then the work would have to have happened and the virus escape happened in 10 months. In the proposal they are looking at q5 of the project for the genetic engineering to happen.
I don't think that the time lines work - also the genetic engineering was slated to happen in North Carolina...
> also the genetic engineering was slated to happen in North Carolina...
This is honestly the most damning part of evidence.
China has shown over and over their current strategy is to snap up resources, countries and partnerships that the West, and specifically the United States, refuse or ignore.
China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country.
So we have a country with strong motivation, lots of money and a repeated willingness to ignore ethical & safety concerns... I don't see how it isn't a big question mark. Especially considering how quickly and forcefully China shut down the conversation and refuse to allow in investigators.
> This is honestly the most damning part of evidence.
What evidence? There was a grant proposal, and the proposal was rejected. Why do you feel that the fact that the rejected proposal referred to North Carolina is supposed to be "damning" at all, or even remotely relevant?
> China would have strong motivation to have SARS related research considering SARS originates in their country.
It has. They fund their own lab at Wuhan. Why is this damning in light of a failed grant proposal that never went off the ground?
You don't get it. just because tge grant was denied, does not mean the work was not done. The fact it was even written at all is evidence someone thought it'd work.
You're willfully blinding yourself to how the world actually works.
> You don't get it. just because tge grant was denied, does not mean the work was not done. The fact it was even written at all is evidence someone thought it'd work.
You should really pay attention to what you're claiming, specially as there is absolutely zero substance or evidence supporting your claim. Your accusation boils down to the same exact witch hunt logic that led angry mobs to burn innocent people at the stake: claim you believe someone happened without zero evidence at all, proceed to allege someone of having the means to do it, from a massive logical leap start to accuse someone who you alleged is capable of something of actually doing it in spite, again, of having zero evidence at all, and proceed to throw that victim to the fire.
I suppose our witch hunting days are behind us, but you're dragging them back to the present by repeating the same logical mistakes and in the process throw innocents into the fire.
Do the world a favor and cut out all the baseless accusations and unsubstantiated claims. It's one thing to argue that some bits should be investigated, but it's an entirely different thing to screw up logical and rational thinking so badly to the point that you make the same completely baseless and unsubstantiated claims you're making.
This novel virus started spreading pretty close to a lab that studies viruses. I think that counts as "actual evidence" that it came out of a lab. Of course, evidence != proof. And even if it did come from the lab, that in itself does not imply malice.
How does that follow? Where did the virus come from? Viruses don’t spontaneously come into existence in labs.
If it wasn’t made in the lab, then it was already naturally occurring. Which means it didn’t need to escape anything, on account of it existing in the wild before it ever got near a lab.
If something were naturally occurring in a remote location where not many humans were around to cause mass spread, and the virus was being studied (but not engineered or modified) and the virus escaped, that could be an example of a naturally occurring, non-manmade, virus which escaped a lab.
did you not read anything about the article, it talk about novel modification in a lab that is unlikely to occur in nature, not creation out of whole cloth
Let me correct that for you. Novel virus start spreading near a lab setup specifically to study those viruses, in an area where they’re known to be naturally occurring, and where it was suspected they could make the jump to humans.
The lab in Wuhan was studying Coronaviruses because of the threat they potentially posed to humans, and because the nearby bat populations were know to carry them.
Saying that the existence of a lab studying novel viruses in their natural habitat is evidence that I can from a lab, is like saying the existence of fire stations in a cities is evidence that fire fighters start fires.
"Came from a lab" in this context means "engineered in a lab".
There is only circumstancial evidence for it, but it is reasonable to suspect COVID-19 is the result of a researcher getting infected, not noticing, and introducing the virus to the human population. There is no evidence for, and it is very unreasonable to believe it was created in a lab.
That is not evidence! It is at best a coincidence. An even stronger coincidence would be that this lab had a genotypically similar virus stored prior to its detection. But even that is not evidence of release; it is just a stronger hypothesis.
If I was near a bank robbery at the time of occurrence, it does not count as evidence that I did it. Not even if I have a history of robbing banks. It must be combined with other, stronger evidence (I was inside the bank, my fingerprints were there, I was caught on camera) to build a case.
Lack of evidence usually means something didn’t happen.
We don’t imprison people for crimes on the basis we couldn’t find any strong evidence, thus what ever shitty “evidence” we did find must be an acceptable basis for punishment.
I've seen enough police/crime/legal dramas to know that's 'circumstantial evidence'..! Of course that doesn't preclude it being a coincidence. (Hence the phrases 'that's just circumstantial' and 'that's one hell of a coincidence').
(I'm only commenting on the words, I don't think I care where it came from at this point, not sure I could ever really believe it, whatever was concluded. Unless perhaps a bunch of countries/labs agreed, including the blamed one if applicable.)
Friendly suggestion to all that Bayes Theorem is the right way to deal with this kind of weak evidence. We should not adhere to arbitrary legal standards in our own thinking about the truth.
At best a coincidence and at worst what? Evidence? I think being near or at a bank at the time it was robbed totally does count as evidence that you may have done it. Forgive me for pointing out little details in your post, but
> It must be combined with other, stronger evidence ...
This sounds like you agree. It's just weak evidence, and that's for darn sure.
I don’t agree that the virus appearing near a lab is evidence that it was released from a lab, no. Just like I don’t believe being near a bank robbery at the time of a robbery is evidence I did it.
The comment mentioning Bayes Theorem has the right idea. Your priors are exceptionally different from my own, so we do not see this the same way and maybe never will.
The novichok poisoning in Salisbury happened next to the UK's chemical weapon capabilities in Porton Down. This is evidence that it got out from Porton Down.
The Russian agents videoed wandering about with bottles of poison are evidence of another mechanism of introduction. Perhaps the presence of a market full of various wild animals known to carry coronavirus's is also worth considering.
You’re conflating came from a lab and created in a lab. It is very possible that the virus was leaked from a lab without being created there. Maybe not your intention, but your post comes across this way.
You’re saying that a research proposal that combines corona viruses and the very specific advantage from the virus that makes it so effective in spreading in humans is not a strong evidence?
> "This did not happen!"
It did not happen, with DARPA money, upon this particular proposal. There are many other ways for that research, or similar, to have happened. This tells us there were researchers actively seeking to.
Daszak should be compelled to reveal everything he knows and all relevant evidence --- all proposals, all emails, all files, any other documentation.
I'm mystified why this hasn't already happened. I mean, his career depends on government largesse so it shouldn't even require coercion. Full cooperation or no cash.
I've been extremely wary of how some of the evidence of Covid-19 origins have come about, particular because so much of it has been presented as "Well, we've never seen this before, so it must have lab origins."
That said, I think the context around this is extremely damning for Daszak. I didn't realize this until reading the Wikipedia article on Daszak, but he was the one that organized the Feb 2020 letter in the Lancet condemning suggestions of a lab origin for Covid-19 as conspiracy theories. But how could he do this while conveniently leaving out that his own organization was involved in highly risky coronavirus research?
Again, I don't think this news puts us much closer to uncovering the origins of Covid-19, but it does show how some of these folks leading the charge of "it had to be natural" were at the very least being duplicitous in their communications.
This whole narrative was revealed ages ago by internet reporters, particularly by Dr. Chris Martenson of peakprosperity.com.
What's not being reported even in this Intercept article is that Fauci and the Eco Health Alliance are heavily involved with each other. One week before Daszak et al released their ridiculous "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" Lancet article, as revealed in Fauci's emails (which supposedly revealed nothing), Fauci had a conference call with Daszak and other Eco Health folks, after discussing the fact that the lab leak hypothesis was gaining traction.
They have a big conference call, the Lancet article is posted a week later.
I know "Bro, just watch this youtube video" is lame-ass evidence in general, but Dr. Martenson has been incredibly data-driven and level-headed throughout the pandemic, is a pro-masker, and his views have evolved over time with new data.
I've never heard of peakprosperity.com, but it seems to be a site geared towards preppers/libertarians/those who are already predisposed to a lack of institutional trust. You can claim he's data driven and level headed, but the context that he's operating in--and the audience that he's speaking to--tells me that he's probably not being unbiased in his analysis.
Eh, regardless of what you think of the source, it's backed by hard, verifiable evidence.
Peak Prosperity was not about prepping much at all until Covid, as far as I know. Dr. Martenson started pushing home gardening and stocking up when covid hit--in fact, he started saying such things in like February 2020--pretty prescient.
The extraordinary claim is that the virus was man-made.
Edit to say: I don't think saying the virus came from nature requires any additional proof. The claim that requires extraordinary, indisputable proof is the claim that it was man-made. And I have yet to see it, from this or any source. Just a big compilation of weak, circumstantial evidence.
It's no longer an extraordinary circumstantial claim. It might never have been because this kind of research that very well could cause a COVID pandemic was being concealed by the very people that decided very early that there was no question the origin was natural. They were performing risky and highly similar research and they made huge contradictory statements that conflict with this leaked evidence, and they are very well connected to each other. You are going to need extraordinary reasons why these people don't deserve an investigation into what they had been doing and what they did know that wasn't being shared.
Well while this is not indisputable proof there is a very relevant discussion on virological.org related to both Furin cleavage sites and orgins of SARS-COV-2. The damning part of the leaked research proposal is that they ALREADY had partner researchers located near caves in three different parts of Yunnan Province.
They also discuss that the base virus was mostly likely linked to bats in Yunnan province. How it got from Yunnan to Wuhan is a matter of question.
However, if the research was being conducted in the US and accidentally leaked into the population it may have been in circulation for sometime (months) before causing serious illness or disease (mutations).
The original cable was published in the meantime [1]. I don't see any mention of "dangerous research taking place in unsafe conditions". Why don't you read it for yourself? It's only three pages.
To my eyes, this cable confirms what the Politico article said. It says there is a "serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory". This is on Page 2, in the last paragraph. As for what's dangerous, Page 3 specifically mentions research undertaken with funding from NIH/NIAID studying SARS-like coronaviruses that can interact with ACE2 (transmittable to humans). Handling such viruses, particularly ones whose infectiousness has been increased (gain of function), in a lab without properly trained staff, seems pretty alarming to me.
>I didn't realize this until reading the Wikipedia article on Daszak, but he was the one that organized the Feb 2020 letter in the Lancet condemning suggestions of a lab origin for Covid-19 as conspiracy theories.
Tangent, but if it takes this long to learn a fact like that, consider a critical audit of your regular news sources.
Yeah, I'm always curious about this -- what would a good recommendation be to get a broad base of news while also relying on credible information?
E.g. I want to know the different reasonable perspectives on issues/events without entertaining every kooky idea. In this case, I feel like I lumped what seems a plausible concern in with kooky ideas, and so missed the entire non-kooky narrative.
It helps to be up to date with what the kooks think. Majority of conspiracy theories start with a factually-correct, compelling premise and only then go overboard with speculation.
You should stop outsourcing credibility evaluation to others and see what you think of the kooks. The kooks called the coronavirus sooo much better than everyone else, from the jump.
You'll get a lot more "noise", sure, but the signal you do get can be incredibly useful. You learn to place less trust on any individual thing you hear, and get a better bullshit detector as you go. It's well worthwhile, and you'll be surprisingly well informed all without some large entity telling you "what's really happening".
You've mischaracterized what I meant. When I was reading the Intercept article, and it first started talking about EcoHealth and Daszak, the names were familiar but I couldn't remember where I heard them, so I searched and found the Wikipedia article on him, and it was then that I was like "Oh yeah, it's this guy." It's not like some news sources were keeping this information from me.
Good call out; People should re-evaluate their sources. I had a similar epiphany 10 years ago, since then I'veve expanded my sources considerably, and if it's something I am interested in, then I will look for at least one counter view point
> while conveniently leaving out that his own organization was involved in highly risky coronavirus research?
Don't get me wrong, but in online discussions, all too often telling the whole truth makes people ignore your message. That's probably also why dishonest politicians can get populist votes from many people. Whenever you include the material to dig your grave with, people just take that by the horns and stop looking at the rest of your argument even if that disclosure is the reason why you are a qualified expert that should be weighing into the discussion on a given topic.
I don't know the details about this Daszak guy, I only know what you wrote and the comments above yours. Perhaps this does not apply in this situation; that's not for me to say. But I can see why they might not have dug their own grave while trying to communicate a message with honest intentions. It is extremely easy to have subtly wrong wording or just bad luck and get people to ignore everything you said before or after "my lab worked on coronaviruses".
Umm, wouldn't "I worked on coronaviruses, hence I know a lot about them" make his argument stronger?
Anyway, this was in Lancet, a scientific publisher, not a mass medium, disclosures of interest are mandatory. I know that in today's age it looks like science papers are just mass media because they're so easy to consume and distribute, but they are not. They're supposed to be rigurous, otherwise people would lose trust in them. Which is exactly what happened in this pandemic: it's a worldwide lack of trust in science, scientists, leaders, governments.
It ought to make the argument stronger, yes, but not everyone reads the full text. Especially if it will get third-party media coverage, you're dependent on what part the media will report or in which proportions because they always make a selection. With honest intentions the vast majority of the time I'm sure, but still a selection of what they think is the message their readers should be getting.
I agree I think it is partisan. My take is that Democrats and the media built up Fauci’s credibility during the 2020 election and don’t want to see it be demolished by what could obviously be a massive scandal. If Daszak goes down it would ruin the credibility of the entire government on the subject of pandemics.
It’s not just Daszak. The NIH itself has refused to cooperate with members of Congress who’ve called for transparency. I’m not sure why the Biden administration is OK with agencies being secretive about something that like this that clearly deserves public scrutiny:
https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-nih-transparency-wuhan-res...
Right now it looks like the U.S. might have been working with Wuhan on a vaccine. And Wuhan had an oopsies. We just have a confirmation statement from DARPA that they weren't working with WIV. I bet someone knows the rest of the details why we've been watching a circus act for a couple years now.
Because all of the major players, the Chinese Communist Party, the US government (DARPA & the NIH), and several universities and their IRB boards (UNC-Chapel Hill, WIV, and others), all had a hand in this, and the second they give legitimacy to this theory--that the hubris and recklessness of scientists and bureaucrats led to the deaths and suffering of millions--then they'll never be able to put the cat back in the bag.
They also know that if it was their fault, the CCP did a good enough job of scrubbing the evidence that we'll never meet the standard of evidence that would satisfy many of those who choose to take the authority at their word. We're seeing this first-hand in this thread.
Well, the good news is that either way we are still exposed to a lab leak of an airborne highly contagious coronavirus as much as we were before. Oh wait did I say good news?
Not either way. Investigations to find out whether this virus was in fact made in lab has tremendous utility. First it would seek reparation from all parties involved in creating this chaos. Second it will dissuade other lunatic research group or companies getting funny ideas in the future.
The stridency with which people attempt to shut down discussion of a lab origin points in the direction of a coverup.
An example of this happening is on Wikipedia where one editor in particular seems to have declared it to be a “conspiracy theory” and scrubs every mention of it. The editor in question scrubs talk pages and their own talk page, thus effectively preventing any kind of consensus forming, which is out of the ordinary for Wikipedia. They have remarkable stamina, and thus can our out-wait other editors.
Wikipedia seems to be one example of a much bigger effort to suppress discussion of a potential lab leak.
Wikipedia Talk pages are an underrated venue for restrained flame wars. If you’re looking for your two minutes of hate today, just go to any Talk page for a controversial subject that’s been “debunked” in the last year or so.
>> Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, was adamant that the proposal did not change his opinion that the pandemic was caused by a natural spillover from animals to humans. “There are zero data to support a lab origin ‘notion,’” Racaniello wrote in an email.
There seems to be zero data to support his spillover idea too. But now we have documentation of people wanting to do the exact experiments that could lead to this, and he's still sticking to his fantasy.
I dont think the point here is to definitively determine the origin of this virus, it's to point to the fact that unchecked scientists are wanting to do exactly the kind of experiments that could kill us all. IIRC an Ebola gene was successfully put in a flu virus years ago but contained - hemorrhagic influenza anyone?
The question is if it is possible to stop this kind of research at all, given the potential military applications. Will it not just push research from publicly known and inspected (like Wuhan) into secret military labs?
Interviewer: You say these are diverse coronaviruses and you can’t vaccinate against them, and no anti-virals — so what do we do?
Daszak: Well I think…coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So you can get more predictive when you find a sequence. You’ve got this diversity. Now the logical progression for vaccines is, if you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS, people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s insert some of these other things and get a better vaccine.
At the very minimum we should not be funding this type of research. Just the act of going into a cave and looking for specimens is dangerous. Ideally there would be a worldwide ban on it. We should take the money and effort and redouble out efforts to create antiviral therapies.
I have no clue what actually happened but this sequence looks weird to me:
* Event occurs
* Access to investigate is limited
* A deep independent investigation is blocked
*Internet is flooded with msging that unless there are hard facts uncovered by independent investigation some of the origin theories are def conspiracy theories
Unless there are hard facts and proven evidence claiming you are not a quack and a conspiracy theorist, you sir, are a conspiracy theorist. /sarcasm (I am mocking the contradictory perspective people take on anyone even thinking differently about things)
There is a live stream right now by Dr. Kevin McCairn (neuroscientist) commenting on this paper, a grant application from EcoHealth Alliance (Peter Daszak) detailing what they were going to do in Wuhan: https://youtu.be/ayNMSFp7pOE
"Video removed by uploader." Is there anything about this virus that isn't suspicious!? Like, can't even a YouTube video stay up when it's supposed to?
It would be nice if they could be left up in YouTube, but it’s either removing them right after the stream ends, or YouTube takes it down and blocks his account, which has happened multiple times in the last 18 months.
In addition there was some controversy as they were behind the Lancet open letter that first renounced the idea of a lab origin. They got a bunch of scientists associated with their organisation to sign it, without mentioning EcoHealth by name or stating competing interest.
My spidey sense is certainly tingling, though of course no smoking guns. But the jigsaw pieces fit. Can’t get the funding in North Carolina? Let’s try Wuhan.
> We will conduct in vitro pseudovirus binding assays, using established techniques, and live virus binding assays (at WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] to prevent delays and unnecessary dissemination of viral cultures)
My opinion is the same reason other topics of discussion in society become culture wars. Why do they really?
- Gay vs straight: religious and political beliefs
- Abortion: same reasons IMO
- Left vs right: politics that self propagate and stay in power with division
What what some other examples that we can try to isolate the causes for and extrapolate to here.
My opinion on the reasons for this theory being a culture war is the government and its predominate scientists have pushed a “hero” or “patriot” perspective onto one class of its citizens that if you’re not devoting your energy towards increased vaccine engagement or government policies towards containment of this virus you are doing something wrong. Everyone else is a villain or bad guy or extremist conspiracy theorist.
Not an expert, but this has more or less already been done [1] and led to a temporary moratorium on this research.
To your last question, releasing such a thing would basically assure your (and your people's) own destruction in addition to your target's, as we've seen by how difficult it has been to control COVID. So you'd have to want everyone dead, and generally speaking the people who would be willing to actually do something like that don't have the resources and knowledge to make it happen.
„And scientists interviewed for this article agreed that often researchers do some of the science they describe in proposals before or after they submit them.“
I don’t think there is ever going to be any satisfaction on this issue. A lab leak is pretty unlikely, has nonzero probability and will never be falsified or proven. The pandemic has happened. The seeming weirdness from virologists is understandable because they don’t want to be stigmatised/regulated more/defunded/have their labs moved to the dark side of the moon. If you doubt this explanation then you must not hang out with academics very much, their capacity for self-interest is astounding. In fact they see the pandemic as a huge opportunity to get a lot more funding, and wouldn’t be so foolish to derail that by engaging with the lab leak issue in the slightest.
"That organization - the US-based EcoHealth Alliance - was awarded grants strating 2014 to look into possible coronaviruses from bats.
EcoHealth received $3.7m from the NIH, $600,000 of which was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
So, in early 2018 they propose specific modifications to the virus, and in the end of 2019 such a modified virus emerges right near their lab...
Btw, in their first $666K (with Wuhan getting $160K) 2014 tranche of the $3.3M grant award, the "Are Human Subjects Involved" is already "Yes" with IRB review already pending - see p.13 here https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21055989-understandi...
I don’t buy this. This proposal had been reviewed by someone (probably multiple someones) in 2018, and when a year later we get a human transmission coronavirus that sweeps the entire globe nobody remembers this thing immediately (even vaguely)?
I can’t say if it’s a setup, but I’d be very sceptical of this proposals origins.
Check out this prescient article from 2017, when the ban was lifted:
Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic...
Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.”
Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”
Therefore, he said, he hoped the panels would turn down such work.
Prescient how? This article is about a rejected proposal. Not only did the research not happen, we have no reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
A rejected proposal does not mean research does not happen. It means they were unable to get funding from DARPA. It does not necessarily mean they were unable to get funding from "somebody".
And yes we do have reason to believe this type of research caused the pandemic.
As an academic, ain’t no way research from an unfunded grant proposal is happening…
The problem with your second statement is that we all of these posts and articles are attempts to throw evidence to support something you have already decided is true. More bad/non evidence does not make an argument and continually citing bad evidence that doesn’t prove your point reduces the credibility of the argument you are making.
Ok, as another academic: this happens all the time. People use funds from one grant to subsidize other research. I've heard a colleague refer to it "as using one project to pay the bills of another project."
It's all also a moot point in that just because the grant wasn't funded from DARPA doesn't mean it wasn't funded. And if it was funded, it doesn't mean we would know who funded it.
Not trying to be conspiratorial, just trying to point out the funding on this grant or lack thereof doesn't mean anything about it happening or not happening. It just means the researchers were interested in it happening.
The claim wasn't that the research was unfunded, just unfunded by DARPA.
To your second point, bad/non-evidence of essentially __everything__ is why the internet is the way it is today. You're saying "fake news is fake" which isn't really saying anything at all.
We already know the NIH partially funded field survey work that appears to be very similar to this. It's pretty obvious to see that they continued applying elsewhere and may have been successful in getting the funding the requested. It just might be from several grants.
If you were doing research that led to a global pandemic that killed millions of people, would you then publish your results? I have a feeling that might not have the effect of showing you're "good for the next one."
Obviously the lack of evidence isn't proof that this happened, but I also don't think it's safe to say that it's proof it didn't.
There's some evidence this kind of research happens. There's not really evidence it was happening in Wuhan nor evidence that the virus we have is the result of experimentation. Historically lab leaks are vanishingly rare and acquisition from animals is extremely common. For lab leak to be even a plausible story the evidence would have to be very strong and it is nowhere near convincing right now.
Looks like a pretty probable lead to me to continue investigating, especially since this leak evidence directly conflicts with many previous statements from Daszak and associates.
Continue investigating what though? The research this team has done is all public knowledge. A rejected proposal doesn't shed much light. Lab leak remains remotely possible, but not supported by any direct evidence. Meanwhile, evidence for animal source is getting stronger: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02519-1
The USA might need to come out and say "we were working on a vaccine with Wuhan." EHA and WIV might need to say "we had an oopsies." I doubt China will admit anything though. So this is the circus we must deal with until people wake up and demand for answers.
Exactly. The evidence for this scenario is incredibly compelling and it deserves more investigation.
I haven't seen any refutations of these claims apart from "those involved say no". There's a nonzero chance that these people are lying to cover things up or protect their reputations. Millions of deaths being attributed to a lab accident would be pretty damning.
Why do people on HN want this to not be the case? (As evidenced by all the downvotes?) The truth could be anything, and we should be looking for it. This is one possibility that carries a lot of weight and demands our attention.
There's nothing wrong in stating that the evidence is substantial and that we should investigate more. Why put your head in the sand?
Lab leaks are not rare the actual thing is that lab leaks that turn into pandemics are an anomaly but only because pandemics are an anomaly statistically speaking
I don't want to diminish the work of "epidemiologist"'s but they aren't virologists. They're ultimately specialised statisticians and shouldn't have any say in how or what research is carried out.
What? I’m no virologist or epidemiologist and yet I definitely want to have a say. And when physicists start creating black holes, and AI researchers start creating thinking killer robots, and generals go to war, etc.
I value expert opinions but oversight is necessary.
Epidemiologists study the spread of diseases and their impact on communities. That's an important factor to consider when judging the potential impact of risky research, and it's not something virologists are trained in.
Sorry, but epidemiologists have no ability to make these predictions. Epidemiologists generally work in the field of "who, when, and where" based on historical data evidence.
Mathematical disease modelling is also part of epidemiology. You may have seen their work discussed in the press early in the COVID epidemic when they predicted the possible death count and the likely impact of various interventions.
Speaking from experience, last year we had an outbreak in Melbourne, Australia. The local government's response was guided by modelling from epidemiologists (and others), and went on to match the peak and length of the outbreak to the model's estimations almost down to the day[0].
Sure, they could provide anecdotal input based on past outbreaks, but they don't have the biological expertise to decide solely on what research should or could be carried out.
Anecdotally, that's not my experience with epi people. A fair few come from a bio/medicine background with a sufficient amount of experience in wet lab and theory to be considered a 'double threat'. Choose your own team.
That was a reference to your previous comment. Does anecdotal count for nothing? Fine, run a survey of virologists and epidemiologists and report the intersection of set. It will not be arbitrarily small.
I don't find this evidence compelling. Also did any of you read the leaked proposal? [0] It would have been super useful to fund this! The intercept has done a massive disservice to the grant proposal here with their poor portrayal of it.
Reading the introduction, it looks like it would have been incredibly useful data to have for the origins of COVID-19 since much of the work looks like it would have been surveillance for bat coronaviruses. I note that the second work program would be research on effectively vaccinating bats to prevent spread of coronaviruses. Australia did something similar by vaccinating horses against Hendra virus.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter in the end what evidence is put forth. People are going to believe the lab escape hypothesis because there are powerful interests intent on pushing that narrative. The arguments in favour of lab escape seem plausible, even if they conflict with the molecular evidence. Most people don't know enough about the arcanery of molecular biology to trust it over the hearsay of documents and politicians.
I really hate the way everything around the coronavirus has been politicized. It is a very important question to investigate the lab leak hypothesis thoroughly. However, the hypothesis seems to have gone from "the virus leaked from a lab" to "the virus has leaked from a lab and thus the chinese communist party is responsible for any and all consequences", which drives people into their political camps depending on who they want to assign blame to, which is a total mind killer.
I could be missing something but this isn't exactly the smoking gun the title makes it seem. I'm sure there are proposals, plans and applications for all types of things. What I'm waiting for, perhaps naively, is strong evidence, revelated an independent investigation, that there was some foul business going on here. Until I see that, I'm more inclined to rely on the word of experts who have no connection to any of this. A novel aspect of a viral genome isn't enough for me to leap to the conclusion that it's human made.
The submitted title ("New Leaked Documents Point to Engineered Lab Origin for SARS‑CoV‑2") broke the site guidelines badly by editorializing. Submitters: please don't do that—it will eventually cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. Instead, follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
Fetching them in a way that information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted from is a lot harder than it sounds - we've worked on it in the past and got bogged down in lots of details and corner cases etc. An easier way might be to rely on one of the archiving services, e.g. archive.org. If a snapshot could be taken at submission time than it would be there to refer to later.
On the other hand, titles changing on the fly isn't that big a headache as far as sanity-affecting headaches go. NYT does it all the time, or used to. The main thing I don't like to do is scold someone for breaking the title guideline and then finding out later that it was the site, not the submitter, that changed it.
Sure, and I agree that this problem isn't worth spending a lot of resources on if the level of toil is acceptable.
But most paywall sites do display the title so that you know what great journalism you're being asked to pay for. I suspect that the typical SPA shows titles as well. So greping should work in those cases.
But my point was while title extraction is a hard problem requiring you to solve lots of corner cases, title greping is simple and handles the vast majority of cases. The corner cases are then handled by humans (as, IIUC, all cases are currently).
Accepting a user-generated title and comparing it to the text gives you a boolean. If they don't match you can just ask the user to affirm that what they submitted is really the title. Then, if you like, you can have a "this title may be dodgy" icon on posts that don't match.
I really don't understand why a site that wants people to actually read the article and discuss the contents promotes articles that at least 90% of readers won't be able to (easily) access.
The truly irritating thing is that even that wouldn't necessarily be enough, because so many sites actually do live A/B/C/[n] title tests simultaneously to randomized sets of users then choose whichever one gets the most clicks or whatever metric first. Even without any manual shenanigans. So there's a window where merely refreshing or browsing from a different IP will yield a different title. Sometimes evidence is left in the URL or interactions with older systems on the a site but that's all baroque. So so so many edge cases in grabbing titles.
Probably not worth the effort on HN to try to automate vs just treating it case by case. It doesn't usually seem to be a problem. "Pre-optimization is the root of all evil" and all that.
Edit: or archive.org as dang says, but I don't know if even they see all versions of a page if there is a simultest situation. Regrettably seems pretty SOP on even reputable places.
I think the chain of evidence is suspicious to say the least.
1. In 2018 EcoHealth Alliance(Peter Dazsak and team) apply to a grant to darpa for viral modification research and highlight a change in "furin cleavage site" at the same location as covid-19's change, this change has never been seen before in nature.
2. In the darpa proposal is listed "Wuhan institute of virology" as a team member, this was a year before the covid-19 outbreak in wuhan in 2019.
3. Rather damning for Peter Dazsak is he publicly denied any plausibility in the idea of a lab created source for covid-19, while behind the scenes at the same time telling his two students to distance themselves from this darpa proposal as the virus was rapidly spreading through cities in the world.
4. Even more unusual is that Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it until now.
This is rather damning for other reasons that people may not even realize. DARPA is a rather fast moving agency, and DARPA grants can be fairly short term with a fast turnaround in comparison to say NIH or NSF. Thus for DARPA grants (and others, but especially DARPA), it's extremely common have already started some aspects of the research in order to make the timelines in the grant achievable. Thus as someone in a nearby field (not something with such hefty security issues, but bio-related), when I see it say that they wrote down they wanted to insert this site into the virus, that is a public admission that someone in some lab has already started gathering preliminary data showing that it could work.
I agree with your characterisation of the evidence, except I think "Points to" is not synonymous with "smoking gun" so I don't think the criticism of the title is valid. In terms of how important this evidence is, it isn't just "a novel aspect of a viral genome", it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin. And it is an aspect that scientists involved in this research explicitly proposed inserting into coronaviruses. From the article:
"Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses."
And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect.
I guess "smoking gun" is too strong. Maybe what I should have said is something like "there's been a new development which completely changes the characterization of the sequence of events leading up to the pandemic."
What you're saying is worth looking deeper into, but it's not enough to start making claims yet, imo. There are probably hundreds or thousands of proposals and papers floating around now that talk about different things one can do with genetic engineering. If something should arise that is related to the concepts in some of those papers you wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that there's a causal connection. Not without more information, anyway.
"it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin"
This doesn't tell me it's artificially created. The most this tells me is it's not well understood.
"The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect."
It could be related. Or it could be unrelated and there maybe some other explanation. My point is, when you want to charge someone with a serious crime, which I think this falls under, you need to come with some pretty strong evidence that directly ties whoever is involved to the events of the crime. This evidence may very well exist and it's not been shared publicly.
I'm going to take a wild guess that when you first heard Trump call it the "China virus" you were as utterly horrified and revolted as I was. You had every right to be.
Like me, you probably viewed it as a deliberate attempt to distract from his administration's incompetence. Like me, you probably decided right then and there that it was a natural virus and recognized that a bulk of the people saying otherwise just HAPPENED to be people who wanted Trump re-elected.
There comes a point where you have to recognize that you have made decisions with incomplete information and emotional biases, and that those decisions sometimes need to be completely cast out, with an objective, reasoned look at the latest facts.
At this point, the evidence that you reasonably state needs to be found has long been eradicated by the second most powerful nation state the world has ever seen. An authoritarian one, with the ability to make any critic disappear. There will never be an actual smoking gun, because the CCP had months of knowledge of what they had accidentally released before the rest of the planet knew it existed. All of the evidence was within their borders. The eradication of this evidence is itself an incredibly strong indication of guilt, particularly combined with the mountains of circumstantial evidence that point to this being a lab leak. If a detective walks into a suspected murderers bedroom, and finds that all of the surfaces have been bleached and the carpet has been ripped up, he doesn't have definitive evidence that the suspect is a murderer. But he does have evidence that they are trying to hide something.
"Leaked DARPA proposals adds weight to lab-engineered sars-cov-2 hypothesis"
...or something along those lines. The problem is that "points to" is a pretty strong direct relationship. But these docs aren't directly related apparently (since the research was rejected by DARPA). It just shows that labs were potentially interested in creating such viruses. But that does hint that such a scenario could have been possible.
The leaks reveal the confidence of a proposal and path to accomplish the genetic manipulation that Daszak and his associates have been aggressively refuting. This information contradicts those previous statements. It appears Daszak may have conflicts of interest that need more investigation.
"And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect."
They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to lab-leak origins as conspiracy theorists and bigots. They did so in an article in The Lancet journal where they also stated they had no conflicts of interest.
Reading this statement, knowing what you know now, and it becomes very clear how sinister and calculated the misdirection was:
And look at the end of the letter, at the sentence: "We declare no competing interests." That's a blatant lie, as we now know.
Those of us who have been seeing this for a long time were attacked, bullied, and tarred as bigots because of these irresponsible scientists desperately trying to cling to their grant funding. My comment history on HN has numerous comments, from months and months ago, where I was attacked, downvoted, and called an anti-Asian bigot for saying what is now obvious. Talking about this before the 2020 election resulted in immediate accusations of being a Trump sycophant/white nationalist, along with banning and deletions from social media. As a lifelong heterodox thinker, I always sort of shrugged my shoulders at being surrounded by people who predominantly just go with the herd on things. But this entire situation has now made me actively despise the "herd". After being a lifelong liberal Democrat who got demonized, bullied, and yes, beaten up for opposing the Iraq war in the conservative area I grew up in, I was shocked to realize that the other side isn't any different. Just a little more sophisticated. They don't physically assault you, but they'll try to get you fired, and equate you with a Nazi in a heartbeat.
As a result of this pandemic, my mother-in-law and aunt are dead, a friend took his own life when his charter fishing business went under, and my wife's mental health has been crushed. I myself was infected a month before I was eligible for the vaccine. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still don't have my sense of smell. Billions around the world had it worse than me, and it is unforgivable that the media, big tech, and the scientific community have colluded to obfuscate the true origins of this manmade disaster. The Soviets would have dreamed of having this kind of cover as Chernobyl spewed radiation into the atmosphere.
Hey JPKab, just wanted to post that I empathize with you and I’ve experienced the same criticism. You aren’t alone, and even if it may feel the entire country hates and condemns you for questioning that not everyone is that way.
I’ve found some hope among opponents with disagreeing beliefs, and I think remaining optimistic (reasonably) is an important piece of retaining the power to drive forward change in this area. Let’s remain supportive and hopeful in ultimately the same goal as our opponents: caring for and providing safety, love and compassion for all humans.
This is very interesting and I would love to test out the theory.
I have access to both LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and I'd be curious to see if I could alleviate my anosmia. At this point it's been 7 months and although I have some sense of smell restored there are massive parts of my spectrum that I have not recovered.
I recently accidentally drank spoiled orange juice because I couldn't tell at all that it was spoiled from the smell and even the taste.
The leaks reveal the confidence of a proposal and path to accomplish the genetic manipulation that Daszak and his associates have been aggressively refuting. This information contradicts those previous statements. It appears Daszak may have conflicts of interest that need more investigation.
There must have been something about the title that changed, so I'm responding to something that's maybe a bit different with context. However...
Some other sites' coverage of this highlighted some of the grant content a bit more prominently. I agree it's not quite a smoking gun, but the content of the grant that was discussed was eerily similar to what's been put together by investigating organizations. It's akin to if you were trying to solve a burglary and concluded "if this happened, the suspects would have done A, B, D, and H", and then later you found some emails sent back and forth by the suspects saying "hey how about we do A, B, D, and H?" It's not proof they actually did it but it's about as close as you can get to a smoking gun without it being a smoking gun.
The timing is also uncanny.
I don't want to miscommunicate the extent to which I think the grant proposal proves anything, as I don't think it does, but it blurs the moral difference so much that I start to find myself wondering why as a society we shouldn't react with some things as if it did. That is, I don't think it rises to some level where I would say it definitely proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone did anything, but I do think it compels some deep reflection about the scientific-media-authority-academic-funding complex.
Professors never make proposals that they’re not sure would work nowadays. It’s too risky with an already uncertain grant system so most (especially successful) labs only write in proposals things they have already proven but not fully disclosed. They’ll then use the money they get to test and finish half of the next project and then write the next proposal with that knowledge. Thus it’s very likely they already did this research a good way through when this proposal was submitted.
While this doesn’t prove they made and leaked the virus, it doesn’t exonerate them either. A proper investigation is needed. When you say you rely on experts, you should definitely listen to them but unfortunately when people are defending their colleagues it’s much harder to do this. Further, many scientists would take any questioning of this persons ethics as castigation of the whole scientific establishment and become defensive. Even otherwise, it looks like the tide is changing among experts now, more and more are agreeing the lab leak is a viable hypothesis.
This is correct. China delayed a site visit for more than a year. And then when it happened they controlled what was said. And on top of that the only US representative was Daszak, since the WHO rejected a few other candidates from the Trump administration and picked someone who was seemingly favorable to the outcome they (or perhaps China?) desired. It is incredible that all these countries around the world didn’t immediately implement sanctions and a maritime blockade after such obviously untrustworthy actions in an incident that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
There is a long chain of improbable coincidences required to believe that the virus came directly to humans from animal reservoirs in nature.
Coincidence 1.) Wuhan is roughly 1800 KM away from the caves in Yunnan province where previous bat-borne coronaviruses jumped to humans harvesting bat guano in earlier SARS outbreaks. It is a massive metropolitan area, and far more cosmopolitan than many westerners believe. They don't eat bats in Wuhan, and bats were never present at wet markets. Possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans here, but unlikely based on priors and the realities of horseshoe bats being highly unlikely to come into contact with urbanized humans at a level to transmit a virus that isn't adapted to human lung receptors.
Coincidence 2.) Wuhan has 2 different facilities where bat-borne coronavirus research took place. There are only a few of these labs in the entire world, and none others in all of China.
Coincidence 3. ) Unlike both SARS-1 and MERS, where animal reservoirs for both were found within months, almost 2 years later, no animal reservoir has been identified for SARS-2. Unlike both MERS and SARS-1, SARS-2 has never been particularly infectious to other animal species. SARS-1 in its early stages was still highly transmissible between bats. SARS-2 never exhibited this characteristic.
Coincidence 4. ) The evidence that would have easily exonerated the labs was deliberately destroyed by the CCP early in the pandemic, with extensive blocking of access to any and all foreign investigators.
Coincidence 5.) The same city where this outbreak occurred was a known location, based on other grants to EcoHealth Alliance, of researching bat coronavirus experiments involving the use of "humanized mice". No, "humanized" isn't some novel, sci-fi or conspiracy theory idea. They are genetically modified mice which are routinely used in research. The variety used in the lab were engineered to have human ACE-2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. Sounds crazy, I know, but here's the grant summary (it was awarded) for the research, and notice the "humanized mice" at the very end of the text: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
All of this evidence is circumstantial, but every day that goes by where no zoonotic reservoir is identified (the CCP isn't looking at all, because they know the answer) increasingly points to this being a lab accident and a subsequent coverup by a paranoid authoritarian regime, along with a scientific community desperate to prevent virology from being impacted the way nuclear energy research was by Chernobyl.
short biology explanation as I do not know how much the HN readers has.
We did not have the tools to do genetic manipulation as far s the physical techniques until recently...ie they were not around when I took biochem in 1990s.
HOWEVER, we still do not have enough concrete knowledge about this domain to reliably design anything on purpose including viruses organs ,etc.
Anybody that states otherwise is a danger to themselves and others. Blunt as I can put that.
I mean, even in the case that occurs, what is the endgame? Fine China? Sanction China? Demand accountability from China? Not happening, not when they make everyone's chips among other things.
Can someone enlighten me about the value of this theory? It just seems like another vector of anti-establishment distrust discourse with a more intelligent veneer; easy to profit off of (clicks, book sales, etc) and doesn't require a conclusion.
This was a proposal to DARPA from a US-based group so the "if it came from the Wuhan lab we need to deal with China" part of the common reaction to the lab-origins idea seems wildly unfounded.
If it came from a lab - hell, even if it DIDN'T come from a lab, but could have - then we need to globally think about what sort of things we're doing and how safely we can do them.
Perhaps if we have zero recourse against China in this sort of situation, then the first step would be to work to remove the conditions that lead to that lack of recourse.
I'm not sure I'm following: are you saying that the current president should be believed, or the former one? Similarly, are you saying that either president has cited classified information that directly contradicts the media's reporting on COVID-19?
To my recollection, neither president has forcefully declassified any evidence that supports the more egregious claims made about COVID (that it was intentionally leaked). In the mean time, there seems to be ample & bipartisan willingness among the general public to at least entertain more benign "accidental leak" theories.
The leaks reveal the confidence of a proposal and path to accomplish the genetic manipulation that Daszak and his associates have been aggressively refuting. This information contradicts those previous statements. It appears Daszak may have conflicts of interest that need more investigation.
That's not even close to true. The opposite is closer to true.
You may be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias (you're more likely to notice and put weight on the things you dislike), which leads to false feelings of generality.
I can assure you with high confidence—since I'm the person making these calls—that this has nothing to do with how we moderate HN.
I mean, it's possible that you know more about my unconscious than I do - but I think the odds are low. I'm pretty sure we're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck and don't give a shit about the "globalist game".
Re "I don't doubt that there are bots or Chinese nationals that also downvote/flag these posts as well" - would you mind reviewing the site guidelines, which specifically ask you not to post like that?
What arguments? I didn't see any. But perhaps the following will help:
> HN (Y Combinator) has an incentive to curb posts that could potentially make China angry.
We have no such incentive and people post such things all the time (if by China you mean the Chinese government).
> Being a forefront Silicon Valley investment company, they have to play the globalist game.
Short answer: no we don't. Longer answer: whatever "globalist game" means, I've never encountered the slightest reference to this kind of thing in the years I've worked for YC.
> Therefore, I suspect there may be policies in place, whether spoken or unspoken to
suppress these types of posts.
There are no such policies, as anyone can easily see for themselves by looking through what actually gets posted here:
> I don't doubt that there are bots or Chinese nationals that also downvote/flag these posts as well.
As explained above, it's against the site guidelines to post like this when you
have zero evidence. This is an important rule, for reasons I've explained many times over many years:
"“Some kind of threshold has been crossed,” said Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and co-author of the upcoming book “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” Chan has been vocal about the need to thoroughly investigate the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a lab while remaining open to both possible theories of its development. For Chan, the revelation from the proposal was the description of the insertion of a novel furin cleavage site into bat coronaviruses — something people previously speculated, but had no evidence, may have happened.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
Martin Wikelski, a director at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany, whose work tracking bats and other animals was referenced in the grant application without his knowledge, also said it made him more open to the idea that the pandemic may have its roots in a lab. “The information in the proposal certainly changes my thoughts about a possible origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Wikelski told The Intercept. “In fact, a possible transmission chain is now logically consistent — which it was not before I read the proposal.”
But others insisted that the research posed little or no threat and pointed out that the proposal called for most of the genetic engineering work to be done in North Carolina rather than China. “Given that the work wasn’t funded and wasn’t proposed to take place in Wuhan anyway it’s hard to assess any bearing on the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Stephen Goldstein, a scientist who studies the evolution of viral genes at the University of Utah, and an author of the recent Cell article, wrote in an email to The Intercept."
I was. I can tell you that all of those quotes require a great deal of inspection and you cannot take them at face value.
At the very least, most scientists speak ultra-confidently about this beliefs (beyond their own internal level of confidence) because they've learned to use narrative techniques to make their beliefs sound true.
Any scientist who is actively speculating that this funding is "strong evidence" rather than saying "it's logically consistent and seems more than coincidental" is just wrong. That's a big mistake a lot of the early folks who claiimed it was human engineered made. The evidence is not strong, but not strong enough to convince a rational person.
No need for sinister explanations—your comment broke the site guidelines egregiously, so users flagged it, entirely appropriately. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.
... Egregiously? Really? Shit, what would a _mildly bad_ comment look like?
It's also weird that you'd take issue with my comment and not the one I'm replying to. Did you read it? It's got literally 7 kinds of deliberately crafted misinformation.
Your comment consisted of nothing other than calling someone full of shit. (Doing it euphemistically doesn't change this.) That's obviously against the site guidelines and correctly flagged. Then you made sinister insinuations as if the flags weren't an obvious consequence of what you'd posted.
Please read the site guidelines and don't post anything like that to HN again - you actually already did it again downthread ("Smell the air: smells like smoke - and something else"). Flouting the rules like that, after we specifically asked you to stop, will get you banned here.
Pointing the finger at someone else isn't a very tasteful way to respond about your own behavior, but as it happens, I don't see how the other comment broke the guidelines. The commenter may be 100% wrong, but there's no rule against being wrong on HN. If someone else is wrong and you know the truth, the thing to do is patiently and respectfully provide correct information and better arguments. Name-calling is definitely not ok, and please stop posting in the flamewar style. It's the opposite of what we want here.
What we want is described well in this sentence pg wrote years ago: Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.
First "egregious violations" and now "sinister insinuations"... You are a trip. Literally that guy and you downvoted me, it's doubtful anyone else even saw the thread.
And I stand by those "sinister insinuations", for the record. There is no way, none, that multiple commenters found this old dead thread, moved to the second page, and flagged my comment within minutes of its posting. Occam's razor would suggest that OP has the power to flag people single handed.
I notice that you say "we" asked you. Is this the 'royal' we? Are there multiple people behind this account?
Dang, feel free to take this the wrong way, but I think you could use a perspective check. I've heard that acting as a gatekeeper too long can inflate one's ego. Ask yourself if you're doing as much good here as you used to.
While we're chatting all friendly; do you ever wonder what the real life consequences of removing that story about Gina Haspel all those times are? I think about it a lot. I wonder if you give even a tiny little shit about helping cover for such a ghoul. My nightmare is that you rationalised that ghastly act so well, you don't even remember doing it.
Don't take that as pointing the finger to deflect from my own horrific actions, lol. I genuinely wonder how you live with doing that all the time, and now seems a good time to ask you - you must have a great view up there on that moral high ground.
By "sinister insinuations" I just mean that you're imagining manipulations that didn't actually happen. The flags on your comment were perfectly ordinary, from quite a few legit HN users, none of whom (other than me) have been posting in this thread. Similarly, "that guy" did not downvote you, other users did; and plenty of users have seen this thread—HN has a lot of readers. Whatever concept of HN you have that suggests these things couldn't happen, it must be false, since they did happen.
Half a million stories get submitted to HN every year. Plenty get moderated in some way; plenty are in some way ghoulish. I'm afraid I don't remember them all; I hardly remember any of them. It feels like you may be putting too much weight on one data point, if you're asking "how you live with doing that" about a specific story from years ago. The answer is that the moderation principles here are clear and we try our hardest to apply them even-handedly.
Incidentally, you can't derive any political agreement or disagreement from the way we moderate HN - we moderate stories and comments all the time that we personally agree with and/or consider important. If you scroll back through moderation comments on HN you'll find that commenters from every political and ideological angle get moderated, because people on all sides break the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I'm not claiming that we have no bias, but certainly we work hard at this and have a lot of practice at it.
If you would please start doing a better job of adhering to those guidelines now, I'd appreciate it.
You know, if not adhering to your interpretation of the guidelines results in rate-limiting and threats to ban, then they're not actually guidelines, they are rules. It would be nice if you were honest about that.
And no, there is absolutely no way that my second comment was flagged by multiple users within minutes. This thread was long dead by then, and this is on the second page. What you say about the first comment is highly doubtful too, considering it was flagged within one single minute, with one single downvote - and was already also on the second page.
If repeatedly removing the story of an infamous torturer who destroyed congressional evidence taking one of the most powerful technical positions in the country - against loud and polite protestations - is really not remembered by you then you have two big problems. 1, your humanity, and 2, you need more moderators here because clearly you are being stretched too thin. Ask PG for a bit more budget, for the sake of your soul and the people here creating this content.
Unless the Intercept changed the page the submission also breaks the guidelines about editorializing submission titles. TFA headline reads: Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research (I didn't flag it, just voicing a possible reason for the submission to be flagged)
"Suggesting this as a possibility" is a pretty weak statement. But it's actually good to criticize someone for claiming that it happened without having any evidence, even if there happens to later be evidence that it happened.
Evidence is a method of confirmation. Motives, incentives and suspicious evasions can help us form hypotheses to evaluate. Dismissing a hypothesis as something unworthy of examination may fall under the 'suspicious evasion' subheading.
You’re assuming that because you were unaware of that evidence, that others were as well.
But we’ve known since the COVID outbreak that there was experiments making novel corona viruses infect humanized mice in Wuhan just before two of the WIV researchers got sick and a nearby military event also got sick. We’ve further known that COVID-19 has a DNA structure unlike natural viruses — matching a bat virus except for a single protein that appears to be from a pangolin virus.
It was always clear the preponderance of evidence pointed towards a lab leak — and that claims of a natural virus were special pleading by interested parties or a political stunt by media parties.
You were always irrational and acting based on propaganda to question a lab leak — it was the only reasonable and supported-by-evidence hypothesis the entire time.
Ok, but to play in this space for a second: toward the beginning of the pandemic when these theories were flying left and right, where exactly was the "sufficient and meaningfully qualified evidence" to assert that it had natural origins?
Is the default to simply assert that, because it is biological, it naturally evolved? In the modern era we're in, I'm not convinced that is a sensible default.
The most sensible default is to say we don't know, and all reasonable possibilities are being explored. That is not the same as saying that its reasonable and responsible to downplay a completely reasonable theory; for all that's holy, the virus was first discovered in the same city as China's only L4 biohazard lab studying human pathogens, literally that evidence alone is enough to say the lab-leak theory is "reasonable". Not a smoking gun! But REASONABLE and not worthy of downplay.
The evidence is that every other coronavirus ever studied was zoonotic. It's still the most reasonable explanation. This story doesn't really move the needle.
Except there was no bat coverup. The american media bought into that theory without any evidence while simultaneously castigating and ridiculing the lab leak one. The coverup of the lab leak theory in the press was thus in plain sight.
I mean, if it's a random comment on the Internet that makes a claim without presenting evidence, yet evidence does exist and is readily available, I don't have much of a problem with that. After all, you just made the claim that the theory is often present without evidence without actually presenting evidence of that claim. The real question is what evidence exists, not what evidence may or may not be presented with every online comment you may come across.
there is a lab called "Wuhan Coronavirus Research Lab" in the epicenter of coronavirus pandemic ground zero, and there is evidence of lab members seeking (and getting) grants in the US for dangerous gain-of-function research in the last few years, doesn't it make you stop and think?
Then your comment would make more sense as a response to the OP.
If anything it seems like you would agree that in the absence of evidence humility is appropriate. People who acted like only fringe conspiracy theorists would even consider lab origins should reflect on their overconfidence and arrogance. It’s not a slam dunk either way and probably never will be, if i had to guess.
My problem with people saying "but it was engineered!" is that it the origin does not change what our reaction should be. The virus is here and now we have to face it. Whether it's a natural mutation, part of a big masterplan, or an accidental release is a matter of international politics, in which most of us have very little, if anything to contribute.
yes, but if this research continues we are all at risk of another highly contagious human adapted virus escaping again. The goal should be to try and ban this type of research worldwide. While zoonotic viruses are always a risk, they are far easier to contain due to the time it takes for a virus to gain enough mutations to be easily infectious to other humans such as what happened with SARs1 and MERS. Researchers developing viruses to be highly adapted for humans just creates viruses that are impossible to contain like COVID.
> While zoonotic viruses are always a risk, they are far easier to contain
Coronaviruses have never been easy to contain. Not this one, nor any of the many other coronaviruses that have been endemic in humans for thousands of years.
If we go back to business as usual, covid will be far from the last allegedly engineered virus to kill millions. The health sciences establishment is in dire need of a reality check, their actions have consequences reaching well beyond petty grant politicking.
Its unlikely the virus was engineered expressly to kill millions - it seems increasingly likely that the virus was engineered to drive mRNA vaccine sales, as well as to disrupt the 2020 American election (by forcing an unprecedent switch to mail-in paper ballots and upending a vibrant US economy - at the same time as China was struggling under international tariffs).
Just look at what an investment in BioNTech would have done if you bought in October 2019:
The chief innovation of mRNA vaccines is that instead of using expensive egg cultures, you can reproduce viral proteins inside the vaccinated patient themselves. This presumably means much cheaper manufacturing.
Additionally, you can drive long-term vaccine sales, since antibodies based on a single protein (spike) are more likely to fail compared to immunity based on the complete protein structure. We're already seeing this now with the 'need' for booster shots in response to variants driven by these leaky vaccines.
It is unlikely the virus was engineered specifically for some goal that would involve an intentional release.
The most likely explanation is that the lab was engaging in risky scientific research, because they wanted to do ground-breaking science and were asking themselves whether they could, not whether they should.
Then they made a mistake, had a gap in the protocols, didn't follow them out of laziness, or some other accident, and infected themselves.
As attractive as such theories sound, pandemics are unpredictable enough that noone sane would start one to further some specific goal. At a large scale, there are rarely true winners in a pandemic (or war).
I've asked people to explain to me why I should care one way or another, beyond curiosity, and no one has been able to answer yet.
That is to say, is there an actual person who is perfectly fine with all the terrible things the CCP plainly does, but finding out that they've been incompetently handling research will suddenly make them change their views?
One real great reason to care one way or the other is that the lab leak vs. natural origins debate heavily informs whether or not GoF research makes sense at all, as in, whether it should be pursued or globally & aggressively banned.
The basis for GoF research (at least, the publicly-espoused thesis, bioweapons research being a likely secondary interest) is that such research can help us stop or reduce the impact of a pandemic. If the natural origin theory turns out to be the truth, then this adds lots of weight to the idea that we SHOULD be aggressively pursuing GoF research in order to fix the next naturally-occuring viral pandemic. However, if sars-cov-2 actually came from a lab leak, then we have evidence that such research is both far more risky than we thought and as well that natural pandemics are less likely than we think, so we should probably not do it at all.
The reason why you need to care is because this isn't a CCP problem; its a global problem.
Sure, maybe the CCP screwed up containment, and that mistake cost millions of lives. Every single major government around the planet has facilities like the one we're discussing. Every single one has made mistakes like the CCP possibly did. The CCP were just unlucky in that their mistake wasn't confined to one person or the welcome lobby.
Knowing it was engineered in a lab would put a bigger spotlight on facilities like these. Unfortunately, its most likely to only result in sanctions against China, but if the people in charge could summon an ounce of sense, it could also mean more of these facilities being shut down, their research suspended, and the live cultures of humanity-destroying plagues in their vaults destroyed.
> it could also mean more of these facilities being shut down
... which is a critical thing to consider when reading virologists' opinions claiming that it couldn't be a lab leak. There is a very obvious conflict of interest here.
I don't have a good answer how to deal with this conflict, since it is hard for non-virologist to judge the arguments, but ignoring the conflict of interest entirely is not the solution.
Yes... Many people claim 'global warming' or 'globalization' make pandemics more frequent and more likely and want us to spend lots of money preparing for pandemics. However, if this pandemic turned out to be engineered or modified, then there is a political solution to this enhanced likelihood of pandemics from rogue nations.
The leaks reveal the confidence of a proposal and path to accomplish the genetic manipulation that Daszak and his associates have been aggressively refuting. This information contradicts those previous statements. It appears Daszak may have conflicts of interest that need more investigation.
The article has been previously submitted with and has languished without interest, I think that the Intercept's headline alone is underplaying it a little and is not suited to this forum. I think if you read the article, the HN headline above is accurate. What specifically do you think is inaccurate? Even in tone?
That's a reasonable question. First - my understanding is that we're expected to repost headlines verbatim, even if they kind of suck. It's not some unbreakable rule but it's an objective we should commit to.
Past that, I offer that headlines that will lead the public we have toward thoughtful, measured, conclusions (that reflect where we actually are) - this would seem to be our best goal.
They are reasonably reliable. I am by no means a regular or even occasional reader, but it is very difficult to find left biased news sources covering this lab leak story with any degree of honesty and professionalism. You can verify the claims in this particular article by visiting the Twitter feed of the Professor they mention.
The difference is that I'm guessing 99% of people reading this (myself include) have no idea what a duck is, let alone how it quacks.
Merely the amount of "gotcha!"-ing that happens as the news-pendulum swings from each side of this debate suggests to me that this in large part driven by emotions and tribalism rather than solely an honest desire for the truth.
Yes, because the type of research that would have led to covid-19 was public health research, not weapons research. Gain-of-function research is done to help learn about pandemics so we can prevent them.
>our abject failure to deal with this novel pathogen
the response during the initial critical phase could have been been different if it wasn't led by the people with obvious conflict of interests like Fauci and was looking more like coverup than an actual response.
The EcoHealth NIH grants for coronavirus/Wuhan included "Human Subjects", so who knows how much of the initial spread was the part of it.
Actually given people like you seem insistent that such lab leaks cannot happen, having it proven as such would help us prepare for the next because it would force us to listen to the people who have been warning us it will happen for years.
1. We can do two things at a time. Investigation of origins does not block anyone from making and following policies to stop the spread.
2. I don't know about you but I have lost more than 1.5 years of my life to this. World around me has changed fundamentally in many ways. Just for closures sake I would like to know why this happened to me.
2. It has more to do with your country’s government than the source of the virus, hence my comment
Even if you knew would anything change? I’m not advocating for ignorance, rather that it’s impossible to know conclusively without full cooperation and it’s in the interest of all parties to deflect
Yes. Closure. I know it's a vague human need, but it is a need at least I have. It will definitely be good for my mental health. And why do you want people to cease just because something is hard? All criminal cases are hard. Some are solved. Let's try to solve this one.
- Only with accountability can there be some deterrence. Especially if there were actors outside of China that were involved.
- The details of the post-mortem will give us valuable insights that we can't get by simply imagining up a worst case from our armchair. If a plane crashes, we want to figure out why it crashed and make specific improvements, rather than just assuming what happened and acting based on a loose and inaccurate mental model.
- If it did leak, there needs to be a cultural reckoning and introspection as to how this was allowed to be so taboo for so long.
- If it did leak, public knowledge of that may be what causes there to be sufficient political will to get regulatory safeguards implemented
Yes absolutely. If someone engineered something so deadly in a lab, in a non war political climate, and can be so irresponsible as to leak it and cause all this death then yes. They are absolutely responsible.
well how about establishing safety procedures, research guidelines and international regulation body governing dangerous GoF research so that such outbreak doesn't happen again.
you've gotta know the details, kind of like those 19th and 20th century epidemiologists who went to the ground zero of say cholera outbreak* and investigated how it started and what was its source, and how exactly it originated and spread, and such investigations were helpful to bring about vaccines and preventive measures (and more recently see Ebola response for example).
Now while we do have effective Covid vaccines (at least for some variants of the virus), knowing the exact origin of a major pandemic, either it came from a natural source or a lab, is of major importance for science, medicine and public health.
Arguably we're lucky COVID was not as deadly as some other viral pandemics of the past** and we have to gather as much info as possible on its origin and distribution in order to prevent something like this (or worse) happening in the future.
China was going to do bioweapon research and there was nothing we or anyone else could do about it.
Quietly funding research in Wuhan was a way for the US IC to keep an eye on what China was doing.
Something from that lab escaped. It's not clear or particularly relevant to me whether what escaped was directly involved in the particular experiments we funded. In my mind if the US funded 50 experiments and China funded 50 other experiments of categorically the same type, and one of those 100 escaped, both are culpable regardless of whether it was on of our 50 or their 50.
Fauci and other officials can't just come out and say "This is part of a top secret weapons/intelligence program where we were using this funding to spy on China." And so they will lie in public. They will lie under oath. And there will be no consequence because the people (Congress/Presidents/etc) with the classified truth are all similarly culpable (they probably okayed/funded it).
This train of thought is entirely too charitable. The US has the NSA, CIA, NRO, etc. for a reason and it's not to combat domestic terrorism. We don't have to be sponsoring their work to find out what they were doing. But I can understand the need to rationalize this somehow.
- any other viruses/bacteria under study(almost undoubtedly, "Yes")?
- if so, where and what is planned?
China makes plans(written plans) for everything. Even if the release was an accident, there were reasons for doing the studies. What were/are they?
-What other viruses and/or bacteria are undergoing similar study in China? Are there any bacteriological production facilities in place now (as are present yet in Russia IIRC)?
- Can we count on Russia's past actions, facilities and quite clear warnings to provide a sufficient counterweight to China's fiddling in the lab? Or should we return to full scale biological warfare research ourselves? We can undoubtedly outpace both given time but at this point I see a need for some reasonable planning or we're likely to worsen the situation.
We still haven't considered non-governmental entities that may have an interest in biological warfare, ranging from the MIT grad student with a gene lab in his basement to the environmental organization that believes reducing the world's human population is a necessity.
The wuhan and eco-health researchers had already started work on the furin cleavage sites and why would they stop when DARPA blocked it? Funding can’t only come from the US. Did CCP also block this research?
> there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China.