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Comment by djaque | Hacker News Reader

The author affiliations are listed as "Rule of Law Society". A quick google search shows that it is a political non-profit dedicated to "investigating Chinese corruption" and is led by Steve Bannon of all people [1].

Given the extraordinary nature of the claims, the fact that this didn't see any peer review and isn't published in a real journal as well as the clear political motivations of the money behind the study, my BS meter is going off the charts. Even the name of the document "The Yan Report" makes it sound like a political hit piece cosplaying as a scientific article.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/steve-bannon-guo-wen...

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An aside though: ^^This comment crystallizes the best of hn.

Within 30s I was able to learn so much — The gist of the paper, about how nefarious activities masquerade as academic research, politics and money in funding, and hardcore commitment of folks like Steve Bannon in pushing the overton window on trade relations, geopolitics etc. Phew!

The author Li Meng Yan is also a regular on Bannon's 4-hour daily YouTube-show "War Room Pandemic" which is absolutely crazy.

However they have a lot of money from some curious Chinese groups and you shouldn't underestimate how much influence they have over the current US administration.

Your statement implies that “Hacker News” is primarily talking about people. Is that what “Hackers” do now?

Hackers talk about tech. Tech can't be separated from people and politics anymore than anything else can.

Nice job uncovering the link to Bannon. In the abstract, aside from the claim of ‘censorship by the scientific community’, I thought this line was a red flag: * In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence...*

If they had decent scientific evidence, they’d be pounding on it. Instead it sounds like they’re trying to cobble together a story from bits of cherry-picked analysis.

If not censorship, there is self-censorship in the scientific community. Who wants to sacrifice its carrier, funding, link with chinese labs?

Even if not told aloud or published, entire teams are intimately convinced the virus was released by the Wuhan BSL4, although not necessarily intentionally.

I am not surprised only "politically motivated" scientists try to break that out.

I am absolutely not in favor of Bannon either.

In the current environment, why would Western scientists be worried about funding issues if they prove the virus was manufactured in a Chinese lab? The US government would probably bombard them with money.

Simply because:

- they cannot formally prove there has been human manipulation of the virus, just like the proponents of natural selection cannot formally prove this is what happened. So as scientists, why argue publicly about that.

- as your politically inclined comment suggests, they would be at the center of a political battle. Today every western lab is dependent on China for reagents. There's a big risk getting short on them.

But the fact that only papers in favor of natural selection are being published in well-known scientific journals does not mean there is consensus.

Maybe the scientific journals also suffer from "the Disney bias".

Mainstream scientists regularly write papers about things they cannot "formally prove". For example here is a Nature paper suggesting, but not proving, that SARS-Cov-2 had a natural origin. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

> Today every western lab is dependent on China for reagents. There's a big risk getting short on them.

So Chinese companies can ship reagents to labs around the world and ensure that none of them reach some specific Western lab? How could they possibly prevent them being resold?

> Maybe the scientific journals also suffer from "the Disney bias".

Disney is afraid of the CCP because they make a lot of money in China. I suppose it's possible that some journals are afraid of a CCP-led boycott, but there are quality open-access journals that would not be financially impacted by a boycott.

If a journal did publish a peer-reviewed article promoting the idea that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese lab, and the CCP responded by boycotting the journal, that would be a big deal and I think would rebound badly on the CCP.

First, I think you meant evolution. Natural selection is regularly, directly witnessed in all levels of life.

Towards the more general argument -- in the absence of formal proof, we are left with selecting the most likely scenario. In this case, what is the reason to believe it was created in a lab as opposed through natural mechanisms? The latter is more likely unless some evidence suggests otherwise. If the only evidence thus far is from a non-reviewed journal w/ very obvious political motivations, then it likely continues to be the less likely scenario.

What makes you think the natural selection/evolution is more likely?

Of course at the scale of China, having a virus outbreak due to a natural virus mutation is not a rare event. According to Wikipedia, there have been 3 virus outbreaks in "wet markets" in the last 20 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market). That makes about 1 outbreak in 7 years.

Now China is big! There are 108 towns with more than 1m population (https://all-populations.com/en/cn/list-of-cities-in-china-by...). What is the probability for an outbreak to occur in a given city? Again that is going to be a very rough estimate. Let's say there are 100 "wet markets", about one per city >1m. That make the probability for a natural virus outbreak in a given "wet market" to be 1 in 700 years.

Now if you want to argue what is the most likely event:

- a natural outbreak in Wuhan: probability is about 1 in 700 years

- a virus leak from the Wuhan BSL4 lab. Note the Wuhan's lab is the ONLY BSL4 lab in China.

Have you any kind of information that makes you believe the probability for a virus leak to be significantly LESS than 1 in 700 years?

Why is the latter more likely? Gain of function experiments are performed regularly in labs, also on coronaviruses. Lab escapes have occured numerous times.

Shi Zhengli herself suspected at first that it came from one of their labs, because Wuhan is so far from the bats that are the suspected original host.

Actually, after going through the paper, most concerns seem to me like cherry picked data, except for the fact that Shi theoretically found the RaTG13 (the "origin" of SARS-CoV-2) in 2013.

Even though it displayed potential for human infection and literally her job was to analyse bat coronaviruses with human infection potential, the virus was shelved for 7 years, and there's NO scientific literature, produced by her or otherwise, about this virus.

Not until the pandemic arrived, at least, then she's the first to say "nCoV-2019 actually comes from the bat coronavirus RaTG13, look how similar they are, it's zoonotic, teeheehee".

Not that shocking. After nCoV-2019 was sequenced, the first thing they would do is compare it to all previously sequenced virus samples.

The shocking part is that her lab never published that sequence contrary, to my knowledge, to common practice. Also the little research associated to it.

Let's gloss over the whole thing:

1- In 2012 6 mine workers get infected with a SARS-like disease, test positive for SARS-specific antibodies, 3 die.

2- Shi is literally sent to that cave to research the bat coronaviruses there that might have had caused the illness.

3- Her team finds a plethora of viral samples of potentially zoonotic diseases.

4- Her team describes generic findings, no full sequences published whatsoever, no mention of the actual reason that motivated the study of that shaft.

Fast forward to 2020

5- SARS-like disease arises, sequence matches 96% with one that potentially killed 3 miners that somehow wasn't really researched past basic findings.

How true is this? I was under the impression that all of the coronaviruses were published in a public repository even before the outbreak started.

It was only published along with her paper.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN996532 (2020)

Some quick google fu shows no hits before her paper, either for the virus name (RaTG13) or for chains of nucleotides.

Then another point that seems suspicious to me is that, in her interview with Nature, she states that RaTG13 was only found in 1 (one) bat poop sample, as in, ever, and that all of the sample was used, so there's no virus isolate available, which is too convenient.

Edit:

It was previously called RaBtCoV/4991, and only a single gene was published in 2016.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042

You obviously haven't interacted with many scientists. As a highly liberal group, they tend towards social justice. Telling them to cover something up is more likely to make them speak louder about it than actually stay quiet. Also, the vast majority of scientists get funding from their own country's government, not from China.

> Even if not told aloud or published, entire teams are intimately convinced the virus was released by the Wuhan BSL4, although not necessarily intentionally.

Let's have some actual evidence of this please.

I was reading half through the paper and it was kinda sketchy but I'm not an expert so I kept going, only to check the comments and wow, thanks for pointing these out.

Putting the Bannon label aside, this paper seems to be well written and proofread. The claims fell into the range of educated guess and reasonable doubts.

EDIT:

You may like or dislike Bannon and/or Trump, but I judged this paper using my only knowledge in biochemistry/molecular cloning from when I was trained during undergraduate.

I think knowing that this comes from people with a long and well established track record of intentional deception, propagating misinformation and exaggeration is useful background knowledge.

As for knowledge of biochemistry, there is no new research here. None. It's pasted together from other sources. For example the discussion of the proteins ZXC21 and ZC45 comes form this article [1], which also presents evidence that the virus can infect and therefore could have passed to humans from mammals other than bats. In other words it's closest viral relatives might be in a mammal species other than bats, so in focusing on bats for the virus's nearest relative we might be looking in the wrong place. That blows a hole in this paper's thesis that the virus not being almost identical to the bat viruses means it must be engineered, so of course it isn't mentioned in the article at all. Nice cherries they're picking!

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6135831/

In the words of Thomas Sowell, “virtually any belief, about almost anything, can be shown to be wrong if stated in a sufficiently simple-minded way.”

You’ve stated the paper’s thesis in a very simple-minded way, so your argument means little.

Yet somehow, it's a very close match (96%) for a bat coronavirus.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7

Magically, that virus was allegedly discovered in 2013, but despite their claim that it killed 3 out of 6 infected people, they somehow "forgot" to mention it to anyone anywhere or enter the genome into any public databases.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/seven-year-covid-trail-re...

Even when you move away from politically-funded research, the story still stinks (well, CCP-sponsored research is still political).

These viruses circulate between mammal species. I said it's nearest relative might not be in bats, not that it has no relatives in bats.

> Putting the Bannon label aside,

No. The Bannon label is the problem here. White collar way to start dumpster fires.

This is malice. Knowingly and actively undermining public trust in the scientific method. Whatever works to make two stones fight.

You are committing the genetic fallacy[0] by stating your argument in this way. A paper like this should be judged on its merits, not its origin.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy

Ideally, yes, but practically no. We are in the midst of a massive disinformation campaign aimed to undermine public trust in public institutions. It takes time to properly evaluate a paper in the manner you describe - and that's a key element of their game. Keep you distracted so they can control the narrative. No. We have to collectively decide to stop playing their game and shut it off at the source. Therefore our strategy must be to ignore papers from known bad actors.

That would be absolutely true for those with unlimited mental bandwidth and time, large nations' intelligence services for example.

If one wants my attention for something that looks like scientific writing, except for rare exceptions at my personal discretion, one will have to go through peer review - the main filter of the scientific method.

Otherwise, the bin.

What does your limited undergraduate knowledge have to do with anything? It's really just one step away from a high schooler citing their biology homework as a source of authority.

You also seem to think that proofreading a paper increases the chances that it's correct which (in my opinion) shreds your credibility.

To claim that an undergraduate degree is just one step away from highschool biology homework is disingenuous.

"Proofreading" a paper does, in some amount, increase the chances that it's correct. It's called peer review.

Proofreading a paper is absolutely not peer review, at least if we're using the commonly accepted meaning of the term 'peer review'.

Proof reading means reading the text and pointing out errors in wording, spelling and punctuation. Peer-reviewing would using the same fundamental data and redo the experiment/mathematics and hopefully come to the same conclusion as the original author.

In other words, unique features of this study indicate it was constructed in a political laboratory and does not emerge from scientific practice.

It has references for each claim, in the very end. Lot's of completely neutral scientists (such as inhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/340924249_Is_consid...) have voiced concerns about the dominant hypothesis of natural origin.

With tongue firmly in cheek I have to ask you for evidence of the existence of such an entity as a "completely neutral scientist" :p

I mean neutral in a sense that there is no obvious gain for them to fabricate the data.

Considering how egregious the funding source is for this, I felt justified in flagging it.

But you probably should read the paper first.

I've been following this mess for a while. Banon/Guo has been playing up Yan since she fled HK in late April. She's been doing media circuits on usual alternative media properties. HKU, her previous employer released a statement characterizing some of her claims as "hearsay" and rejected her assertion that she worked on covid19 early in the outbreak [0].

Brief timeline:

mid April - China indicates they will hammer National Security Law to HK*

late April - Yan defects

Early May - rumors spread of alleged Chinese virologist defection, western rag media misattributed to Shi Zhengli "bat woman" who worked at Wuhan institute of Virology. She's 56, renown in her field.

Late May - Chinese media confirms it was Yan MengLi, she's in her 30s, and basically a labtech. They traced her to Guo's villa in NY, alleging that she paid her to defect [1].

July - Now - Yan starts her wave of interviews on western alt media. HKU disavows her claims.

Late August - Banon/Guo is being probed by FBI.

Now - Banon/Guo doubles down on Yan and lab modification narrative.

*NSL law timing is significant, the fact that she bailed HK so fast after NSL announcement is (conjecture) because she was already in contact with Guo prior. Guo is at the very top of CCP fugitive shitlist. CCP doesn't do much social media manipulation on western platforms, but when they do, he's almost always targeted. She would have been 100% dead if they found out she was coordinating with him regardless of the credibility of her claims. Personally, I think she's digging for a US VISA and at least being paid well by Guo, Banon/Guo digging for good graces with Trump for FBI probe.

[0]https://www.hku.hk/press/press-releases/detail/21274.html

[1]http://www.nextdigital.cc/index.php/2020/05/22/%E4%B8%AD%E5%...

Not really buying the visa angle.

She is young, highly skilled and in an industry which most countries have high demand for.

Could easily get into UK, EU, AU/NZ etc.

That's why NSL timing is significant. Proposal to ram through NSL in mid April meant NSL could be reality sometime in June. She have ~2-3 months to resituate herself abroad as a Chinese national. That's not super easy.

No doubt all paid for by Bannon's Chinese billionaire yacht friend Guo Wengui that is wanted by Beijing for corruption and now wants "asylum" in the US.

Since the Chinese govt don't bother with gulags in Siberia for corruption charges , they rather shoot you in the back of the head.

I can't really blame the guy.

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