Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CoffeeDregs | Hacker News Reader

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This is a good, balanced article. I've been of a similar mind for over a year now.

The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly. But an accident involving a well-intentioned gain-of-function experiment seems quite possible and was something that the US was concerned about with its own gain-of-function research.

In any case, this, like so much of this other nonsense around Covid [lockdowns in Contra Costa County when the major hospitals were empty-ish; no gradual escalation of lockdown given mid-January knowledge of Covid], seems pretty amenable to a calm, clear analysis...

    Hypothesis                    | Evidence                               | Likelihood
    ------------------------------+----------------------------------------+-----------------
    CCP Virus                     | [That'd be 360 degree dumb of the CCP] | *low*
    Gain of function lab accident | [Existing concerns and experience]     | *moderate*
    Zoonotic transfer             | [No likely vector for extant virus]    | *moderate-low*

Doesn't seem too difficult...

The "likely vector" would be the millions of peasants living near bat caves in rural China (who actually have already been shown to have antibodies to bat viruses). And some of whom traveled to the market.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/23/8417296...

So I would upgrade that quite a bit from "moderate-low." (One of the researchers in this NPR article seems to rate it as an obvious suspect, so I'd call that "high likelihood.")

Those millions of peasants living near bat caves would have traveled to thousands of markets all over China, but the virus originated at the one market in China that is basically across the street from a virus lab? It's not impossible, but my money is on the lab.

The lab was not "across the street." It was a full seven miles away.

https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/04/01/covid-19-bioweapon/

A whole 7 miles away? Wow It's almost as far as i go to my office every day. Or to some shops in the town centre. Or various other "everyday activities".

If Wikipedia is to be trusted [1]:

"AIDS was first clinically reported on June 5, 1981, with five cases in the United States"

"Both HIV-1 and HIV-2 are believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa and were transferred to humans in the early 20th century."

If HIV, a relatively less infectious virus, can make its way across the Atlantic Ocean to land on America shores, I wouldn't be surprised SARS-CoV-2 could do the same. Another explanation could be that SARS-CoV-2 is a lot more common than we think --- many people might have caught it before but it didn't manage to spread, but this time the virus just hit the jackpot.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS#History

According to the article, the bat caves are nearly a thousand miles away. It seems unlikely peasants were traveling a thousand miles for the purpose of visting the market.

It also presents some reasons why bat viruses on their own were unlikely to become as contagious as COVID, citing the example of RaTG13's discovery.

So the "zoonotic transfer from bats" theory requires an extraordinary new strain (possible!) to travel a thousand miles before spreading enough to be detected.

It’s too late to edit, but I’d like to ask downvoters to respond instead of downvoting. The submission references and contradicts the information provided in the GPs link and discusses how the politicization of the origin led to these organizations making much stronger statements than the evidence warranted. I cited some of the information the OP mentions that contradicts assertions made by the GP.

If I am wrong or misinformed, I would like to know it. The submission is an excellent article. I have no dog in this fight but it did shift the needle of uncertainty for me, particularly when I learned about prior leaks and the suppression of investigations in China. It’s a long article but worth the read.

Also not mentioned in the article but bats are in hibernation at the time of year when the spread started, making it even less likely.

Many people over estimate our capabilities regarding manipulation of biological systems. A gain function is extremely difficult to get right. It is more likely that zoonotic transfer occurred. Either within a wet market or people operating in that industry or a lab worker accidentally exposing him/herself.

Sequence analysis show a unique mutation that increased receptor binding affinity that was not predicted by previous models. It just shows, nature knows best.

I find this debate extremely stupid. We always known that as natural habitats are being encroached upon, the more likely diseases like this will emerge. By focusing on our human conspiracies, I am afraid we will ignore Nature's conspiracy to get us.

Then can you explain how this virus became (instantly) better adapted to humans than it is to bats?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06199

Yet another hypothesis being pushed by the CCP party-state is the seafood imports hypothesis. Although the motivation behind CCP's push is questionable, this hypothesis shall be treated seriously, given that in the early investigation before the ban, signs of the virus were detected at stores selling seafood instead of stores selling illegal games.

The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge. This is where people have firearms, are trained in using them, but some circumstance led to the firearm being discharged without intent and injuring or killing someone.

There’s every reason to believe that a country attempting to develop bio weapons may accidentally release that bio weapon against its own people for the same reason: mistakes were made.

It may also be the case that the bio weapon was successfully deployed in the USA months before some unsuspecting American went on their tour of China thinking they will get over that mild flu in the clean air of Wuhan.

The USA health care system is basically designed to ensure that a pandemic will spread as quickly as possible, since the expense of medical care means people will actively avoid seeing a doctor unless they are literally dying.

So engineer a virus that affects wet membranes, limit its symptoms to “mild flu” and you will get maximal transmission even without propaganda suggesting that no action needs to be taken to control the disease because it’s not really that bad.

So in this hypothetical scenario it is not “360 dumb of the CCP” at all. They know how dangerous it is and how to contain it when it inevitably arrives on their shores. They have a vaccine but they won’t use it until a believable amount of time has passed. The future of warfare isn’t drones circling in the skies with guns pointed at the people on the ground.

COVID is a terrible bioweapon. It's fragile, with an outer lipid membrane that has to be preserved. It's not very lethal to people of military age, and spreads readily between people making collateral damage inevitable.

Still, it appears to be very good at disrupting the enemy's economy.

Not that I think it was engineered as a bioweapon, but it does show that bioweapons don't have to be deadly to be effective.

One of the best bioweapons is Tularemia, and part of that reason is its general lack of lethality. It temporarily renders the exposed population incapable of putting up a good fight, but it kills relatively few. Escape isn't that big a deal (because again, it's not very lethal), and it's easy enough to inoculate one's own troops against the particular flavor being used.

It was great at making everyone forget about Hong Kong though.

> The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge.

What is the fourth most common death from firearms in the USA?

I'm not sure what the second would be. The first is presumably "deliberate discharge," and then...?

Yeah, I just found that statement so weird that I had to reply.

If I had to guess first and second are deliberate suicide and deliberate homicide. But I suspect there's a huge fall from those numbers to what is the third and presumably last rank.

Many of the "accidental discharge" deaths are actually intentional suicides or homicides but the investigators just couldn't prove what happened. And unfortunately it's common for people with no real training to possess firearms.

Not disagreeing with your Likelihoods but I'm not sure your evidence really makes sense. It does not really follow that a self-harm would always be avoided, the game of chess is all about sacrifice. Perhaps China thinks the West is short-sighted and would be politically bound to act against its long term interest, so why not? Maybe there are other reasons why you think the "CCP Virus" hypothesis is 360 stupid besides "self-harm"?

Wouldn't it be way easier and more logical to start the infection on a foreign soil? All the previous similar epidemics were successfully contained before reaching Europe, and if there was not for quite serious fuck ups in the beginning (Italian dude not even showing up on the meetings, etc.) perhaps even this one could have been stopped early on. So if it was China wanting to hurt US, then they'd have to be seriously stupid to first infect themselves and hope it will somehow reach US over Europe. It'd be like a terrorist who sends a bomb to their own address in hope that it will somehow eventually reach their enemies. It makes zero sense.

Not really wanting to play devil's advocate too much longer ... but if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector? I'm not sure if these things can be fingerprinted, would intelligence anyway trace it to China? Perhaps (to China) a clear oops backstory is more preferable to a murky "this thing definitely came from China but how?" backstory.

So the solution to that is to make it extremely suspicious by releasing the virus in Wuhan, city far away from the bat caves where they have a virus lab and which isn't really well known for outside travel?

Wouldn't it be much more logical to release it in one of the southern cities, Hong Kong or Macau. Hong Kong would be a perfect candidate as it would allow China to institute strict lockdown in the city which had decent amount of protests in the past years.

> if this virus popped up in let's say Spain rather than China

It may well have:

Coronavirus traces found in March 2019 sewage sample, Spanish study shows: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-...

Sentinel surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater anticipates the occurrence of COVID-19 cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v...

(SARS-CoV-2 was also detected in blood samples taken in Italy in September 2019: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03008916209747... )

> wouldn't we wonder how the fuck it got there, what's the vector?

Apparently we wouldn't.

There are two possibilities: either the virus really was circulating in Spain in March 2019, or the result is a false positive. I'm still waiting for either confirmation, or a retraction of the paper. Why the lack of curiosity?

Given that it took a year for the virus to have any effect in Spain, then all of a sudden it was very intense, wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

There are a lot of false positives with PCR (0.8 - 4% according to this article https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2...), so that makes a lot more sense than the virus being more or less dormant for a year then going wild.

> wouldn't it be more likely that the test was botched?

That's what I want to find out. From what you just wrote, the probability the test result is correct is at least 96%. But, as the result is so surprising and the tests aren't 100% reliable, it should still be checked.

You shouldn't assume it's a false positive simply because it doesn't fit in with our current understanding. Maybe our current understanding is wrong.

"Then they ran tests on samples taken between January 2018 and December 2019 and found the presence of the virus genome in one of them, collected on March 12, 2019."

If they did 100 samples you would expect between 1 and 4 false positives. (It doesn't go into detail about how many, but it's clearly more than one).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZoKM7zOUnU

This is not my literal belief; it is only a logical extension of the discussion so . . .

If covid mostly kills old or otherwise compromised individuals then a socialist country could see it in their interest to release a virus that eliminates the least productive part of the population. It would not be as much self harm as an exercise to increase the strength of the whole.

> then a socialist country [..] eliminates the least productive part of the population

I swear I heard some of my left leaning friends argue that a capitalist country would reason that way (and I'm pretty sure they would point historical anectodetes to prove their point)

Could it be, perhaps, that such conclusions about how appealing the opposite political belief is just the product of sectarian thinking and fear mongering? Humans are generally decent people who care about each other; and also often ruthless people who couldn't care less about the well-being of the fellow citizens. The only correlation I see between these two behavioral traits and the political doctrine, is the circumstance where a person is born and the environment where events unfold.

Where the hell was the research on who it mostly kills conducted? You don't look at the DNA sequence and go "ah yes, this will get everyone over 65..."

Was there any evidence of say, the interment camps operating as biosecure facilities while they experimented on finding out mortalities?

> The chances of the CCP releasing a self-harming bioweapon in order to harm the US seems silly.

But to harm someone else?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/health/coronavirus-neande...

]] Dr. Paabo said the DNA segment may account in part for why people of Bangladeshi descent are dying at a high rate of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-09/oios-tan0930...

]] IMAGE: THESE GENETIC VARIANTS ARE ALMOST COMPLETELY ABSENT IN AFRICA AND OCCUR IN THE HIGHEST FREQUENCY IN BANGLADESH.

https://media.eurekalert.org/multimedia_prod/pub/web/244496_...

But, uh, Bangladesh itself has a lower rate, by far, than the U.K. While I greatly admire Dr. Paabo's work, this part seems pretty speculative.

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