Nicholas Wade: Origin of Covid – Following the Clues | Hacker News Reader

Nicholas Wade: Origin of Covid – Following the Clues

nicholaswade.medium.com

54 pointsthemgt18 comments

>It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Dr. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Dr. Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary, the letter concluded, “We declare no competing interests.”

This is the first I'm hearing of Mr. Daszak, and I think the Lancet has some explaining to do for why they would declare something like this. There's a lot to unpack in this essay, but perhaps at a higher level we have a major problem with how mainstream publications report on science. I get it that a pandemic has stressed all these institutions to their breaking point, but it's now pretty clear to me that what I was reading in March of 2020 about the origins of the virus was not only not verifiably true, but was possibly intentionally misleading, or a coordinated misdirection campaign. It's possible the journalists writing these stories didn't know it at the time, but in hindsight it feels like they got used.

Excellent article, no doubt in my mind it was a lab escape and the fact is that Dr Fauci helped fund this appalling irresponsible “gain of function research”, so he’s partly responsible for this historical calamity.

Why is it irresponsible research?

I think there's incredible research value of learning how pathogens become more dangerous, and this kind of research seems like a methodical way to go about getting that kind of information. I'm not an expert in the field, so maybe you know of better ways to gather the data.

Are 3 million dead not a good enough reason to call this kind of research irresponsible ?!?

One, you're assuming that this research is the cause of the pandemic, and that's not a given.

Two, even if the pandemic were caused by this research, that doesn't make the research itself irresponsible.

> that doesn't make the research itself irresponsible

This seems like an absurd conclusion. If research isn't done responsibly in practice, and results in disaster, then the risks aren't worth it.

That’s an absurd conclusion.

We’ve had nuclear accidents before. Should we abandon all nuclear research, since in practice there are accidents?

Not only is it absurd, there has been no documented value that we derived from this research. Totally useless and totally destructive.

Here's a question I have:

Given a pandemic (past, present, or future, doesn't matter) won't the causal pathogen always look like it's been impossibly "well tuned" to infect humans?

I suspect in most cases it would. Otherwise a pandemic would never have occurred to begin with, right?

I think that's probably at least somewhat true, although from the article it seems like the argument against that selection bias is that a) COVID-19 seems to be substantially more "tuned" than its cousins SARS and MERS, and b) there is as-yet no strong evidence of pre-pandemic strains of a COVID-19 progenitor (either in humans or animals).

I'm not sure if you read the article, but it has some convincing arguments about that. The gist of it is that just like the "fossil records", we'd find the "intermediary steps" or something resembling those in the nature, and we sure did with the previous problematic coronaviruses within months. No such luck with this one. Also there are arguments about how the genome of this variant was already "attuned" to the human biology in very unique ways right from the beginning which is unexpected in the "natural" scenario, but would be perfectly ok with the lab escape scenario because they either use human tissues or humanized mice. So this particular virus looks like a giant step from its predecessors (not a couple mutations here and there) but the intermediate steps are missing. It was also demonstrated, prior to the pandemic that the scientists working in the lab most likely to create this virus worked in safety settings no better than a dentist's office. There is a lot more to unpack there in the article.

This post (whether intentionally or not) is misinterpreting some of the evidence it presents.

For example it gives this example research grant as evidence for chimeric viruses being made in the Wuhan lab. https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...

This is actually pretty standard virology grant. Nowhere does it say that they are making chimeric viruses. Note that "S protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments" is not even close to "Creating chimeric viruses". This is not the same thing and it would not be rational to compare the two.

The posts claim that: "What this means, in non-technical language, is that Dr. Shi set out to create novel coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity for human cells. ". That is simply false, they are collecting and testing viruses. They were not creating new ones.

This post also tries to claim that these researches had been doing genetic engineering in past work because of this paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

Note that Nature added an editors note here: "30 March 2020 Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus."

Also note that the Wuhan lab is actually 5th author on this paper. In big publications like this order of authors is very important. 5th author usually means that they had a very minor role in the work. I.e a consulting role. This is compounded by the fact that only 2 people from the Wuhan lab worked on this paper.

It is actually more likely that the "genetic engineering" took place at the University of North Carolina and not in Wuhan. The paper lists a 9 people on the project in the US. Usually the people who do the actual lab work get first author.

Even further what about the 9 other virology labs that are on list? They have about the same amount of contributions to this paper? Why are they not suspect?

In my opinion these are some pretty key details to leave out, especially from a science journalist who should not be hiding some of the key facts here.

Per the project grant:

> 3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice. [emphasis mine]

I'm just asking as someone with not even a modicum of knowledge in this field, but this experimental testing on emergence potential, does that imply gain-of-function?

> It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence.

No, it doesn't, and that is the whole point. Natural propagation of viruses should have delivered something like this to us long ago and will keep doing that. If Chinese labs were involved then they may stay involved and no amount of tut tut from other nations will change that. We need to adapt to a world with dangerous viruses either way.

https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-propos...

This blog post from last year was also persuasive to me.

Excellent write up. Have yet to read an actual rebuttal of this argument.

It all started with a slight wording error.

"Clearly not manipulated" should have been 'Not clearly manipulated"

Very carefully researched but sensational article. Has this been shadowbanned from homepage?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com