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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

I have seen a number of climate activists rushing to claim that the present crisis is a result of the same anthropogenic activities behind climate change. However, I feel that it is still too early to make such a claim. If Covid-19 did escape from a Wuhan lab (which remains a reasonable hypothesis, see [0] and feel free to follow up on its citations yourself), then it is not a case of human activists encroaching on a species and causing bats to migrate, but rather the result of human beings intentionally going out to catch bats in order to study them. I think that we can advocate for ways to reduce carbon output and habitat loss, while still holding off on claiming that this virus ties into that concern until its origin is better understood.

[0] https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-china-tra...

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The argument posted in your link seems best summarized as: "China had virologists and biologists studying coronaviruses and that is suspicious." It even admits in the first paragraph it has no evidence of a causal relationship. We'd expect a country that is appropriately prioritizing domestic viral threats to be profiling things like coronaviruses in animals, so it seems odd to count this as evidence.

Unless I missed some key evidence in the text, it seems like the entire animus of this argument was that the Chinese government would be inclined to lie if the virus did escape from a lab, and since they said it didn't happen, that must be true.

Doesn't that make it a simple conspiracy theory? I get that Americans are inclined to believe governments lie about these things, (after all, the US covered up its H1N1 strain outbreak by calling it "Spanish") but if we're trying to evaluate things in terms of evidence and probability, this argument seems contrived.

The claim last month was that the virus was created in a Chinese lab, not merely that it was accidentally released from one, so I guess this counts as some kind of improvement, at least.

The theory about the virus being accidentally released from a Chinese lab was actually the original, dating back to January - the claim that it was created in a Chinese lab seems to have sort of metamorphised out of that as it spread.

While I'm on the fence re: China's potential Nefarious actions ..there's no doubt China's economy which now has a head start will benefit from Corona.

If China does have any benefits from coming out of their disasterous outbreak, it's miniscule compared to the squandered benefits of European and American governments that willfully ignored and minimized the risk.

Ummm the liberal media is now publishing reports that itd not from a wet market but from a laboratory. Oops a highly and deadly infectious disease mistakenly is released hmmmm...

Freaking China we are talking about..a society closed up all even its people ...

>still holding off on claiming that this virus ties into that concern...

But that claim is not being made here.

>then it is not a case of human activists encroaching...

...nor is that claim being made. Did you really mean to say activists? Even if it’s a typo and you meant activities, that still is not at all what’s being said. The idea is more about climate patterns and the plausibility that changes in them (regardless of cause) could change migration ranges.

BTW when it comes to China, National Review is a pretty biased source.

> BTW when it comes to China, National Review is a pretty biased source.

What I find disgusting is this is a global emergency and those guys are busy pushing their usual propaganda.

>I have seen a number of climate activists rushing to claim..

Can you link to even just one article where there was a strong claim of causality, not merely a claim of plausibility?

I would like to see this for myself.

First sentence of the linked article: "There’s no proof the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a laboratory"

Enough said.

I made it slightly further, to the beginning of the second sentence:

> Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos,

I think the "escaped from a lab" hypothesis is unlikely but there's little proof of anything related to its origins at this point, other than a general geographic area where it first entered the human population.

It doesn't even pass the sniff test. Why assume that a virus originating in wild animals which interact with humans reached humans by escaping BSL-3 containment, rather than by wild animals interacting with humans?

Especially given the prior form of this conspiracy theory having held that the virus didn't merely escape from a lab but was created in one, I'm suspicious that what we're seeing here is an attempt to sneak that original, stronger claim in on the back of this weaker version.

SARS had escaped no less than 4 times from Chinese labs[1]. It’s not implausible at all that coronaviruses have a history of escaping Chinese labs.

Meanwhile, this[2] is a terrible source but some of the info can easily be verified. We know that China was researching exactly this type of virus and gain of function in Wuhan after the U.S. stopped due to “biosafety and biosecurity risks” exceeding benefits. [3]. The US explicitly ended that line of research due to the risks; China continued it.

[1]: https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/how-dangerous-viruses-c...

[2] https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/exclusive-dr-shi-zh...

[3] https://www.phe.gov/s3/dualuse/documents/gain-of-function.pd...

That's too much stew from one oyster, and the oyster turns out in any case to be a clam.

The claim is that research involving gain-of-function techniques was stopped in the US - which is true - but continued in China without the involvement of US researchers - which is not substantiated by the sources at hand - and that the late 2019 papers and job postings were related to the same research - which is false. That work was a study of how native coronaviruses spread in wild bat populations, and involved US researchers including Dr. Jonna Mazet, who actually touched on the same project in the interview I linked elsewhere in this thread (0). Her description of that project seems fairly authoritative, given that, until her team was defunded last September, she was one of the people running it.

Speaking of GoF work - one would expect an honest reporter to note that the funding pause which makes up such an important part of this conspiracy theory was lifted in December 2017. (1) NIH belongs to the executive branch - if that kind of work is really as dangerous as is claimed in the Gateway Pundit article, how come the Trump administration's been funding it again for over two years?

(0) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22848637

(1) https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...

It's no vast surprise to see the National Review pushing a conspiracy theory; that's been the primary play for neoconservatives since the Iraq war started with one. Maybe don't be so uncritical about what you take seriously, especially when it's based on a Youtube rando's misunderstanding of how biological research works.

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