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Comment by generatorguy | Hacker News Reader

I saw posts on Reddit months ago pointing out the virology labs in wuhan studying this exact virus and wasn’t it a coincidence. I am actually quite surprised that US scientists that twice visited the lab sent strongly worded official communications back to the US government stating concerns over safety and the competence of the personnel working at the lab and saying that they needed more assistance.

Now that China has disappeared people who were speaking out, shut down the Shanghai lab that originally published the virus’ genome, and is back to tightly controlling information out of the country, I doubt we’ll ever know for sure if this pandemic was a preventable accident. Either way it is a major black eye for China.

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For what it's worth, I saw posts on Reddit saying the opposite: that Bat coronaviruses are BSL-2, not BSL-4, and so it wouldn't make sense to restrict yourself as a researcher by studying them in the most stringent lab.

(I'm not saying this to argue that the lab escape theory is wrong, just to argue that Reddit posts are difficult to appraise.)

As far I know a BSL-4 lab is simply a BSL-3 lab that includes a BSL-2 lab that includes a BSL-1 lab plus some extras.

Research papers, posted in comments on HN just days ago, show that the lab made hybrid bat-human cells in which to grow viruses. This was BSL-4. Both HIV and coronaviruses were grown. The idea was to breed the viruses until they would replicate well in ordinary human cells.

That's some diabolical research.

To put it in DnD terms: The researchers have high intelligence, low wisdom, and probably low dexterity.

Want to share some links to them?

OK.

Here is China making a coronavirus like the one causing the pandemic, even acting on the ACE2 receptor and testing it in human cells, publishing it in early 2008: https://jvi.asm.org/content/82/4/1899

Here they are again, years later, still playing with extremely hazardous coronaviruses that act on the ACE2 receptor in humans:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711

This one gene-edits the host cells to have both human and bat traits, making it easier to breed bat viruses into becoming human viruses:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00705-010-0729-6

There are more. The ASM's virology journal published more of generally the same kind of stuff. I can't find the link right now.

One summary of the overall findings of those articles is something like: there sure are a lot of SARS-like bat coronaviruses in natural reservoirs, and a bunch of them are alarmingly able to spread well in human tissue too, either unmodified or with tiny edits. That doesn't rule out the theory that a lab escape was the source, but it also suggests another SARS-like zoonotic transfer was pretty much a ticking time bomb, and it wouldn't be surprising for it to have happened through that route either.

If there is a known reservoir of pandemic causing virus it should be managed in such a way so as to avoid pandemics.

Seems like not enough lessons were learned from SARS. How many pandemics are going to come from this reservoir before the world gets fed up with the mismanagement of it?

It's not OK to be actively trying to make those edits, especially after a history of lab containment failures.

After the USA banned this research because of the danger, some of it moved out of the country. At least one of the researchers moved from the USA to Wuhan, China. The ban should have been a clear message: such research is unacceptably dangerous.

The intent of my comment was that I am surprised to now be seeing that there may have been some substance to the comments on Reddit.

> studying this exact virus

They didn't. This virus was unknown when it first showed up in patients. The closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 is 96% similar, which translates to a decade or so of evolution.

> US scientists that twice visited the lab.

Do the cables say that "scientists" voiced concerns? I thought they were diplomats. The Wuhan Institute of Virology works closely with US, French and Australian national labs. A lot of the Wuhan personnel is trained at those foreign labs. The lab has lots of scientific collaborators in the US, and receives grant money from the NIH.

Everything I've been able to find about the lab in Wuhan indicates that it operates at the same stringent technical level as foreign BSL-4 labs, and that there's a lot of exchange with foreign scientists.

Bad food prep will get you blood-borne disease. So if they chopped bats and reused the surface area, all bets are kinda off.

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