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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

There’s only a spec of difference. I don’t know anyone suggesting that the lab leak was of a natural origin. The theory is that the lab created the virus and it leaked.

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I think there’s some nuance here. The virus could have a perfectly natural origin in bats, but not be able to infect humans in its original form. There are many ways the virus could have come to infect humans, such as by manipulating it directly, via gain of function research, or even just by a random mutation that managed to infect a lab worker (seems unlikely since it’s alleged there may have needed to be an intermediate species). Whether you could consider the virus “lab created” or “man-made” at that point is maybe a matter of debate. Even the Guardian article on Facebook’s policy changes seemed to conflate these scenarios, so I’m not entirely sure what the changes were.

But they’re all a far cry from the more extreme narrative of “this was deliberately engineered to infect humans and/or as a bioweapon”, which is not what is being suggested here (nor, it seems, was that ever what Tom Cotton suggested).

I know I got downvotes already but I guess that’s what I meant, that in a lab setting human researchers would have been manipulating the virus. I meant that I don’t think anyone is saying that researchers captured a novel COVID variant in nature and just held it in a lab until it leaked.

If the lab theory holds any water, it’s almost certain that humans were manipulating the virus in some form.

That’s why I don’t see much of a distinction between a lab leak theory and a human-made or human-manipulated virus.

Well, I report the opposite. I guess the data is useless.

I think there's a genuine spectrum between man-made bio-weapon (not very believable IMO), through gain of function research (I've read enough that - if true - the RNA evidence suggests that it probably wasn't this), through to leak from animal studies.

Gain of function, if it isn't ruled out by RNA or other approaches, isn't quite man-made and is at least somewhat plausible. Gain of function research on the flu is (as I understand it) how the flu vaccine is created ahead of the season.

https://jme.bmj.com/content/41/11/901

Evans NG, Lipsitch M, Levinson M The ethics of biosafety considerations in gain-of-function research resulting in the creation of potential pandemic pathogens

Journal of Medical Ethics 2015;41:901-908.

This paper proposes an ethical framework for evaluating biosafety risks of gain-of-function (GOF) experiments that create novel strains of influenza expected to be virulent and transmissible in humans, so-called potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs). Such research raises ethical concerns because of the risk that accidental release from a laboratory could lead to extensive or even global spread of a virulent pathogen.

Some techniques of manipulating the virus would leave "fingerprints". Others would not. My understanding is that the sweeping assertions that COVID-19 would show clear signs of being manipulated have been largely debunked. Many ultimately traced back to a letter written by a group of virologists led by Kristian Andersen and published in Nature, but all that letter did was assert that some techniques (not all!) were unlikely (but even then, not impossible).

I'm unaware of any reputable experts who are willing to assert that manipulation via, eg, serial passaging, can be ruled out. The closest you'll get is assertions that a natural zoonotic origin is, in their estimation, more likely.

See, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca... and https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th....

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