Divisive Covid ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers | Hacker News Reader

Divisive Covid ‘lab leak’ debate prompts dire warnings from researchers

nature.com

Imagine being a scientist and advocating the position that the truth should not be sought in order to protect people’s feelings.

Is anyone here doing that? They are simply saying the whole argument has gotten toxic and pointing out that the rhetoric is fuelling hate crimes. No one is against investigating the origins, quite the opposite really.

> For instance, a neuroscientist belonging to a group that claims to independently investigate COVID-19 tweeted that the letter is a diluted version of ideas his group posted online last year. The same week, on Twitter, the neuroscientist also lashed out at Rasmussen, who has tried to explain studies suggesting a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 to the public. He called her fat, and then posted a derogatory comment about her sexual anatomy. Rasmussen says, “This debate has moved so far from the evidence that I don’t know if we can dial it back.”

The article is doing exactly that. The biggest theory now is not a lab leak theory but simply that the virus was created in a lab. Any connection to a lab leak is some logical conclusions after finding out it a lab is the most likely source. Tensions always get high for a few days after new information is found and then those tensions fade away. Looking to Twitter for your scientific research and a healthy debate is like going to the bathroom to learn how to cook food. It’s simply not equipped to help further a debate, it mostly only lets people post what they believe themselves. We can’t judge a theory by its supporters. We all understand the mean guys in movies are always the ones wrong but in the real world you always get mean guys on the right and wrong side, and they are easy to find on social media websites but that doesn’t interfere with actual research, not that there aren’t mean researchers as well.

After reading the article this was what I wanted to say. The article says that some researchers are worried an investigation will cause tensions. Tensions are a constant between nations and working through them is one of the major responsibilities of leaders. The other problem with the article is it already discounting the “lab leak theory” as founded on “unsubstantiated claims” and instead refers to a report released by WHO in March of 2020, over a year old that basically set up the wet market theory. That report is completely outdated and no evidence of a wet market animal or even that the disease is contagious in bats has been found since then. I’m disappointed in nature on this one. In this article they blame journalists, republicans and talk show hosts for promoting a theory, obviously using the source of their news as a reason the theory is not sound, rather to reviewing the theory itself.

It may hurt your feelings to know this, but The investigation isn't scientifically important. It is motivated by politics. Gotta find a way to finger China.

Yes because discussions about safety protocols at laboratories like these aren't worth having or trying to improve.

No, because the investigation isn't motivated by that, obviously. You're being deliberately disingenuous, because it isn't science you're interested in. You're interested in fingering China.

You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how wrong another is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do it, and we've had to warn you more than once in the past. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful. I realize it's not easy when it feels like you're in a minority position, but actually it isn't easy to begin with, and we all need to make the effort.

Are you in turn assuming that those discussions aren't happening already? It seems like you are, and thus your sarcasm is ill warranted.

They are no more visibly happening than discussions about shutting down wet markets.

That has nothing to do with what I said. Maybe those discussions aren't "visible" to you because they don't exactly make headlines and you're disinclined to look any harder. Unless you're in a position to be sure you'd be privy to any such discussions in the places where they'd matter then it's an assumption that they're not happening. Getting all caustic at someone for not sharing your own unfounded assumption is pretty poor form, to put it politely.

It's important to know what the risks of gain-of-function research are, independent of whether China or US was ultimately responsible. Deciding what or if something should be studied is decided politically, not a scientifically.

Perhaps this can serve as a wake up call for the scientific community to develop its "metascience" practices.

That's an inaccurate and incendiary paraphrase. It would be just as accurate to say "the truth" should not be sought only to hurt people's feelings, and I think that applies to more people than your formulation, but neither is really the point. The fact is that we're never going to get a definitive answer. If it was a lab leak, there have been too many opportunities to destroy the evidence necessary for a firm conclusion. If it wasn't, then no such evidence ever existed. The most conclusive evidence we could find for any theory is an intermediate host, but even that would show it could have happened that way and not that it did.

Pursuing the lab-leak theory more aggressively will not improve the state of scientific knowledge. It might improve the state of scientific practice (e.g. lab safety protocol or advisability of gain-of-function research), but given how much the spotlight has already been on these issues regardless of virus origin I'm skeptical of that too. The only thing driving this is politics, either classic geopolitics or the politics that exist between pathological contrarians and any kind of established experts. It's the latter we're seeing here, day after day after day, and TBH it's a very ugly thing.

Leadership and researchers have already destroyed their credibility by repeatedly lying to the public about their intentions. Last year they consciously lied that masks were ineffective to preserve them for health workers. This year they lied about the motivation for dropping mask mandates: it was to motivate vaccination, not because it was just a new scientific finding. Not to mention the failure to acknowledge Taiwan as its own country to appease the CCP. The only rational argument is to not conclude anything unless solid evidence emerges. Anybody who wants you to conclude something prematurely is pushing an agenda

> Leadership and researchers have already destroyed their credibility by repeatedly lying to the public about their intentions.

Published March 18, before the obvious became mainstream consensus: "Covid is science's Chernobyl" https://graymirror.substack.com/p/covid-is-sciences-chernoby...

But they seem to be blissfully unaware of this. My respect for my governments covid guidelines is quite... low. There's a limit to how many lies, policy reversals and guesswork i'm willing to swallow. And it was at least 85% guesswork in the early stages. The "experts" were clueless!

What could you expect, it was a new virus strain not previously seen. There were mixed and missing reports from China, and requirement to act fast on something unknown not previously seen before. Leadership didn't melt everywhere though. In smaller regions, response could quickly meet the challenge and did so phenomenally in several places. Also in regions with mixed ownership of media, reporting were pretty nuanced too.

I expected them to confess their ignorance more honestly. Which they didn't.

That would maybe require a culture of trust, or very strong leaders. In some places, weak leaders even rose to the occasion, though may melt afterwards.

>Last year they consciously lied that masks were ineffective to preserve them for health workers.

I'm tired of hearing this meme. A lie implies they were hiding their intentions, but leadership was transparent about saving masks for healthcare workers from the start. It's just that nobody bothered to listen, and now people want someone to blame for not listening. Here is a video from Fauci from early March:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=PRa6t_e7dgI

In it Fauci says that masks are primarily ineffective at preventing you from contracting disease and effective at preventing its spread. At the time, it made sense to save the masks for healthcare workers and sick people.

The apologism is pretty remarkable here. Yes, the attempt was to save masks for healthcare workers, but the message was clear that masks didn’t make that much difference. Fauci should own that, not twist words to claim he never said it.

He's right. Masks don't make much of a difference at preventing you from contracting covid. It's easy for you to say criticize Fauci's words when you don't get blamed if half the doctors quit or get covid because they don't have enough masks.

It’s politics: If one party says it, the other MUST disagree, no matter the evidence. For the left it seems the person making the claim is more important than the claim itself. It’s a naked power play and has stripped all credibility from biden and everyone else in Congress.

"some scientists have put forward unsubstantiated claims linking the coronavirus to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV),"

Indeed, but zoonotic origin is also unsubstantiated at this point. In fact this itself is surprising, since in most other cases, with far fewer resources dedicated to the search, the origins are reliably indicated fairly quickly.

So it's a case of balance of probability, based on circumstantial evidence.

Demands to investigate a potential lab leak more fully may well be politically uncomfortable, 'unhelpful' in ending the pandemic, etc, etc, but should be made anyway to get to the truth. That is what science is about, after all.

Perhaps some virologists complain too much.

> In most other cases, with far fewer resources dedicated to the search, the origins are reliably indicated fairly quickly.

Is this true? I've seen claims, including in the most recent TWIV podcast, that it took over a dozen years to reliably indicate the origins of SARS-COV-1 (which seems to be supported by this 2017 paper[0]), and that we are still working on identifying the origins of last decade's Ebola outbreaks.

Although I suppose it may depend on what precisely is meant by "origins" and "reliably".

[0] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171130141222.h...

True, it takes time to follow the leads and pin things down to something plausible. But in this case there appear to be no leads, at all. Except for maybe frozen food imports. Seriously?

> Indeed, but zoonotic origin is also unsubstantiated at this point. In fact this itself is surprising, since in most other cases, with far fewer resources dedicated to the search, the origins are reliably indicated fairly quickly.

It took five years for SARS. The origin of the 2013 Ebola outbreak is still unknown. Years to never is the norm for tracing the origins of new viruses. Even for known viruses where we already know what species it lives in normally it usually takes years to find where a particular major outbreak started. It took until 2016 to find out where, other than "probably somewhere in Mexico", that the H1N1 strain that gave us the 2009 swine flu pandemic came from.

But progress was made in months on eg SARS1 and MERS, identifying intermediary species, etc.

What do we have for COVID19? Nothing at all. After more than a year of surely much more intense search.

"Lab leak" and "zoonotic" are not mutually exclusive. The pandemic could have been triggered by simply collecting samples from a remote cave and culturing them in a lab in the middle of a 10M people metropolis. A routine lab accident then led to the uncontrolled replication of the virus. Similarly, uranium sitting in the ground at low density is largely inoffensive, but increase its density up to the critical point and you end up with an uncontrolled chain reaction.

Fundamental question: Under which circumstances is it ethical to culture dangerous viruses in a lab? This is obviously a conversation that some influential virology researchers don't want to have, therefore the disgraceful political circus created to deflect it.

I think 'lab leak' has been 'conspiricised' as 'developed in the lab, possibly as a secret bioweapon, and released accidentally (or not)'

To me, it simply means they had it in the lab (posssibly collected, as you say), and that's where the initial human infection occurred.

> Similarly, uranium sitting in the ground at low density is largely inoffensive, but increase its density up to the critical point and you end up with an uncontrolled chain reaction.

This is not going to happen. What is going to happen is that you're going to accidentally add a neutron moderator to uranium. Because water is a neutron moderator. Any amount of uranium denser than 1.2% will suddenly fission. It won't be a runaway reaction, so no explosion BUT anyone standing nearby or unprotected by a quite a few feet of rocks will be irradiated by slow neutrons, the worst possible way to get irradiated, and die painfully.

During the discovery of fission one of the fuckups was that it was just noticed that uranium heats up when you put several pieces next to eachother. When the experiment was done it was decided it is prudent to store the samples in water.

Well, that turned out to be anything but prudent. The container (a big metal vat) was gone and replaced by a deep hole in the ground the next day. Luckily there was no-one present for more than a few minutes. Still that researcher died of cancer (decades later, so very low dose)

Who really knows the details? It's very difficult to get reliable information from the CCP and they have already been caught trying to cover things up. My guess is no one really knows outside of China and the people claiming to know either way are lying

The problem, as I see it stated in the article and elsewhere, is that people who suggest a serious investigation so that we can "know the details" are promptly shouted down by certain elements of the Western media.

Meanwhile, China's ruling Communist Party is pushing a theory that the virus arrived on frozen food imports.

You mean it wasn’t from a US military operation, as the Chinese government was claiming?

Of course virologists would play down the lab leak hypothesis. They are the ones doing controversial research to make Coronaviruses more infectious. They would like the public not to pay attention to the dangers of their work, but to keep funding it.

Nature should put the conflict of interest front and center in any discussion fo this kind.

Yeah I have heard both sides of the debate.

Strongest argument for lab leak seems to sourced here:

https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...

Scientists should never be afraid to speak to truth and speak their mind. Whether it’s a lab leak, gender, or climate change, scientific fact should be immune to political comfort.

https://archive.is/xPBEF

Americans are so desperate for the narrative they've been conditioned to believe is true.

Divisive? How? And what's wrong with divisive debates?

Do we need more Faucism? Let the people see whatever evidence hasn't been destroyed and make up their mind. I don't need a government Czar to make informed conclusions.

That kind of reasoning is very common today.

Don't talk about that or don't question the conclusion we came up to because it could create some discomfort.

Very similar to fascism/authoritarianism but with beautiful words.

We need effective planners to make public health decisions. If you can cough on me and indirectly kill my elderly parents, then you should be subject to some kind of government regulation. We ought to use experts to help establish and modulate those rules.

I honestly believe that Fauci did a great service to his country and it was a capstone in his truly productive career. It's OK to appreciate good work. Think about his work environment, the risks involved, and the pace at which all the facts were unfolding. It is our good fortune that someone with deep subject knowledge and skill at communication was available at all.

Don't take this as an argument against your main point. I agree that we should have the guts to engage with good faith in divisive debates. The "good faith" part is important because it keeps us united as people despite the potential immiscibility of our ideas.

If I was the president and I knew it was a lab leak, I would probably yell at Xi Xinping in private but then claim it was a bat in public. To allow them to save face.

In fact let’s game this out:

Option 1) say it was a bat

Option 2) say it was a lab leak

If option 2, then xinping has to either acknowledge and apologize, or deny it.

Option 1) acknowledge it. But then he gets removed as leader since the Chinese people will see him as weak.

Option 2) deny it. This is what he would do.

If he denies it, then probably the USA will apply some kind of sanctions on China, which again stirs up tensions. But China can’t do anything about it because of US military superiority.

So how does that end? China is humiliated at having sanctions and in their view, false accusations leveled against them. They respond with a huge arms buildup and this results in a reciprocal buildup in the USA.

Better to just let them save face.

Edit: I’m not saying that I am going to lie about this. I’m not the president and this is all hypothetical musing. More to the point I don’t know if it really was a bat or if it was actually a lab leak. I’m just trying to imagine what the president might possibly be thinking right now.

It's dangerous to engage in higher-order thinking, lest you fail to achieve the highest order:

First-order: "The evidence points to a lab leak."

Second-order: "We can't say it's a lab leak, it'll cause mayhem. Let's say it was a bat."

Third-order: "We can't lie to people about something this important. When the truth comes out eventually, it'll be mayhem squared and they won't trust us next time."

Your Third-order fails to account for the passage of time: When the truth comes out, enough time will have passed and the current leadership will be the former leadership. The next generation of leaders will vow to be better and carry on, saving face. See Gulf of Tonkin, first and second Iraq-US-war, etc.

I think the conclusion will always be to lie to the public, because the higher-order-effects almost always have long delays.

Nah. You should tell the truth on this topic, not only for normative reasons but also because it's going to come out anyway. The whole world is watching this virus.

The next hegemonic rivalry in the world is already unfolding between China and the USA, and much of its battleground is found in the third world. Those countries are all evaluating the costs and benefits of aligning with China versus aligning with the United States.

China and the USA are going to build up arms anyway, so why tell lies that benefit China?

I agree. A confrontation between the US and China, as well as China and its neighbors, is inevitable. There are just too many factors forcing this, Taiwan, the South China Sea, China's economic slowdown, USs' economic slowdown, the race for influence and resources in Africa and South America. Maybe (hopefully) it will just be another cold war.

But being able to present China as the bad guy early on would be more valuable to the US than having China save face. The only exception to this would be if the US were of the opinion that more time was needed before a higher level of confrontation could be entered: in that case, appeasement and face-saving would buy time. However, I don't see how this could be the case, the US is bringing military resources back home within a few months, probably not to decomission them. US military strength and availability is currently at a peak. And China is still in the process of building up military strength, which will take time since their problem is old equipment to be replaced and new equipment to be built. So for the US, an early confrontation would be advantageous.

No, it’s not inevitable. That’s poisonous thinking. We can always de-escalate. That’s the kind of stupidity that led to the First World War, and the First World War led to the Second World War. None of it had to happen. There were always other options.

Edit: We should immediately attack China because they’re a bunch of godless communists! The CCP is a murderous regime trying to develop biological weapons to murder everyone! Better to just have at it now while we still have the bigger army! Why not just use nukes!

Every time anyone mentions China for any reason we just end up in the dumbest flame wars imaginable.

No, we can't. Appeasement didn't help against Hitler, deescalation just gave him the Sudentenland and Austria "for free", strengthening Germany and prolonging the coming war.

Deescalation only works if all sides actually do not want a conflict. But China still wants to incorporate Taiwan and the South China sea. I don't see how one could deescalate those. And deescalating by allowing China to annex, well, see above.

The fact that war exists at all is psychotic and utterly baffling. Any member of the human race that ever argues for increasing a military budget needs years of intensive therapy. Militaries just shouldn’t exist. If they had never been invented nobody would see the need for them. Hitler and his whole horrible movement was the product of war. Ugh I just don’t know what’s wrong with people.

That's politics, not science. Politicians absolutely have to play the game with China, or they lose face, and are themselves cornered into extreme measures. Playing the game badly could have worse reprecusions for all of us. Political skill and understanding of culture is crucial in this context.

There's a saying, there's a time for everything. This pandemic is absolutely a Chernobyl moment, and all nations unprepared despite multiple warnings.

Then it now need to become a moment for humbleness, not petty blame games.

If you think that allowing an adversary to get away with a lie if it avoids a war is unacceptable because you are angry and want revenge, let me gently suggest to you that you are not the adult in the room in this situation.

A planet covered with rival armies all bickering with each other and a city full of gangs all running around shooting at each other are no different. Or the hatfields and McCoys engaging in tit for tat shootings. We really do as a species act like stupid children. If it was a lab leak, nobody ought to be doing these insanely stupid experiments in the first place. Including us. That’s the takeaway lesson. Not “I’m angry and I can’t control my feelings! Let’s have a war!”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com