Scientists who signed Lancet letter about origins of Covid-19, have 2nd thoughts | Hacker News Reader

Scientists who signed Lancet letter about origins of Covid-19, have 2nd thoughts

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A lot of people have tried to ascribe the reluctance of many scientists to admit the possibility of a lab leak to some conspiracy from the top or even political leanings. But it seems more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk. Not to mention those that may not have funding at risk but believe that gain of function research is important regardless of the risk.

>more likely to me that many scientists in the field, especially those that work specifically with gain of function, are going to be reluctant to blame a lab leak because they know that if it is found that covid was from a lab, then their funding is at risk.

This would be easy to find out given that their names are public and so are the projects/papers/publications. What does the data indicate?

im quite certain lots of information is not at all public.

Seems it takes a high-ranking defector to suddenly get everyone sweating and carefully walking back written statements.

>im quite certain lots of information is not at all public.

What information are you referring to that's not public? Most scientists' research areas, publications are public knowledge. Science relies on this to make progress.

OP claimed people signing the letter had a conflict of interest and/or were somehow complicit. Rather than getting into an argument, why not put forth the data. I'd suggest OP to look up their names, papers, labs, funding sources, etc and put forth a real argument.

I think it was just a dangerous cocktail of bad information pushed deliberately by a lot of different actors. A lot of people didn't like Trump, sure, but there were a lot of other people that were completely naive about Chinese propaganda.

The amount of gaslighting, propaganda, changing narrative during this pandemic was honestly shocking. Trump was bad but it’s amazing to watch how suddenly things can be reversed. Which, is not an issue by itself, you adapt as you get more information, but claiming a position as absolute then changing after a month is. Not to mention all the political flaming and disinformation as propaganda for your “side”.

In hindsight, this makes me wonder. What if similar Trump-related controversies had suffered a similar fate? Can we reliably say that would have looked very different to what we've actually experienced with our own eyes? And if not, is it reasonable to think that this mentality only started en-masse exactly with COVID, or could it possibly have been there for some time?

(Just kidding. Orange man is obviously evil.)

The media and many members of the scientific community, wrapped in their "Trump is evil" orthodoxy, denounced everything that came out of his mouth, including the occasional truth.

Their reputation now irreparably damaged.

Vox called COVID overblown and then stealth edited those articles, only marking them as edited after being called out for it.

New York Times has called lab leak theory "racist", repeatedly, including by their chief COVID reporter as recently as two weeks ago(!!!).

Dr Fauci knowingly lied about the efficacy of masks, then railed against border closures from COVID embattled China, then knowingly lied about US funding of gain-of-function research to Congress.

WHO has spent the last 18 months running crisis management for the Chinese Government ("no sign of person-to-person transmission" in late January), which has spent the same amount of time destroying evidence and covering up as much as possible.

Facebook and Google until months ago was censoring lab leak theory left and right.

Public and news media institutions collectively have revealed their complacency, political bias and ineptitude.

Robert Malone, the inventor of mRNA technology used for the current COVID vaccines, has been censored by YouTube for sharing his concerns about the safety of the vaccines. Informed concerns, not outright proclamations on them being unsafe, and this is a vaccine that has less than 8 months of doses, and yet they're telling everyone it is entirely safe even for young, still-growing humans. Natural immunity is not even being considered for letting people attend public events. There is data that the vaccine and its parts have larger bio-distribution than they should. There's a lot that doesn't smell right about the whole thing.

Once you've a few people in control of who can be heard, you're back to serfdom days. The internet was supposed to bring a voice to everyone, now there's massive gatekeepers at a scale never known to man. Anyone can be cancelled, only FB, Twitter n Google know what the 'truth' is. End of day it's the equivalent of CCP, which people in the west dread so much. Orwell, would be having nightmares right now.

I knew this was going to happen. Scientists, especially prominent ones, have huge egos and love to make strong statements ("proof", "smoking gun") even when they talk out of their ass. Combine that with the virulent anti-Trumpism and it's not hard to see how the media could report what they did.

So they all signed a letter stating they were political actors and jokes of scientists and now have second thoughts. Too bad.

This is exactly how science is supposed to work. People learn some new things and they update their opinions based on that new data. That's a good thing.

The idea that people aren't allowed 'second thoughts' is probably the worst thing to happen to general discourse.

What new things were learned here?

Only they can answer that. The general point is that people should be able to change their mind; and the argument that 'you used to believe something different therefore you must be wrong/acting in bad faith' is nonsense.

It's still possible that they are wrong/bad actors; but that can't be determined based simply on a single change of opinion.

There’s a difference between being wrong and being an asshole. An apology is needed, not a change of mind.

Categorically dismissing an opposing view as false, and then reversing course, is not necessarily acting in bad faith, but I think any reasonable observer would question their trustworthiness.

The fact that people still believe "scientists" after all those flip-flops is astounding. It's like those "scientists" believe their reputation (individual and as a group) is invincible and they can get away with making unsubstantiated claims without being called out -- and surprisingly that's exactly what happens, mostly.

I'm not "anti-science" by any means and I don't believe in "conspiracy theories" but I can see why people are starting to view the scientific establishment with suspicion.

These scientists didn't believe X, and later change their minds to believe Y based on new evidence—they believed X, vocally smeared everyone who dared to believe Y as liars and cranks, and later changed their minds to believe Y based on new evidence.

Updating opinions based on evidence is good. Insulting and slandering people because they have different opinions is bad.

I haven't followed every scientist in that list so I have no idea how much any one of them might or might not have actively and aggressively smeared people. If that's the case, then obviously, that's awful. But they're still allowed to change their mind, and OP's comment seemed to take primary issue with the mind-changing. (That could be me mis-interpreting though.)

Edit: I've definitely seen people on Twitter and people in the media be overzealous when denying the lab-leak theory; but that's not the same as the scientists themselves doing it (which again, I don't know about either way).

I am specifically referring to the Lancet letter that is the subject of the article (full text: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...).

Relevant excerpts:

> The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.

> Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus. We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.

> OP's comment seemed to take primary issue with the mind-changing. I think the OP was more accurate than you (or even they) thought.

Scientists confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence (i.e. "we don't have evidence of lab leaks, so anyone claiming it's a lab leak is definitely wrong") -> joke of a scientist

Scientists making a statement not from scientific evidence but due to political expediency (see sibling post, i.e. "conspiracy theories are making China unhappy and they might not share data with us") -> political actors

I was exactly as accurate as I thought :D and as you point out the meanings thanks for making it clearer.

They updated their opinion from "no" to yes" it is possible it was a lab leak. That's complete change of mind; first they said "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin" and now they are saying something like "ok maybe it is possible." I mean c'mon are they updating their mind according to Microsoft Patch Tuesday schedule?!

Why are people not allowed a complete change of mind? If I have an opinion, but then find evidence that totally contradicts my prior opinion, surely I should be allowed a 'complete' change of mind?

If we're only ever allowed to change our minds by a little bit we'd all be struck in the neighbourhood of whatever (silly) opinions we had as five year olds.

Also, who's in charge of deciding what constitutes a 'complete' mind change vs the apparently-ok minor mind change?

You can’t stay on a high horse like that if your opinion is that some other opinion is a dumb, ridiculous conspiracy theory and then you change your opinion to that theory.

If you want a fair discussion of theories you can’t label the other one a conspiracy theory.

I agree that using the phrase 'conspiracy theory' in the original Lancet letter was too much. And I'm totally fine with people taking issue with that. And, in hindsight, they really should've waited for more information before forming and strongly expressing such an opinion. They're definitely not free from blame. But I still think people should be able to change their mind by any amount based on new information. Why would you possibly argue that people should have to stick with ideas they no longer believe in just because they previously argued against them?

So, should they be able to change their mind? Sure. Should they be less dismissive of opposing views? Also yes. There's no contradiction there.

Of course they can change their opinion. But if you express your opinion by questioning the credibility of others and then change your mind then what should that do to your credibility?

If you're a prominent indivudal who takes to the public sphere to insist something must be absolutely true, without epistemic humility, then changing your mind afterwards makes you look like an unreliable hypocrite.

Science is not supposed to be signing your name to condemn anyone who raises a question as a conspiracy theorist.

This letter would be appropriate if people were proposing some terrible danger. It was always a stupid thing to do and the people who signed it never should. They will likely be thought of by their peers as idiots for the rest of their careers.

The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction. If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus, they are distributed randomly across the genome. If you were to genetically engineer a virus, those mutations would not be random, there would be a discrete chunk of edited base pairs that had been spliced in from somewhere else but that isn’t present. It seems unlikely that in this day and age a virology lab would be doing gain of function experiments without crispr since it’s far easier than the alternative.

Genetic engineering is not the only way there could have been a lab leak. Did you read the whole post? It makes a different claim.

They are not. They are predominately in the part of the sequence that codes for the spike proteins.

There are other evolutionary mutations spread across the genome, but they are minor by comparison.

> If you compare where the mutations of sars-cov-2 are, relative to a wild type bat coronavirus,

How many distinct samples do we have of the wild-type variants from that region?

Nothing about the lab leak theory requires that what leaked was engineered. Just mis-handling a field sample so that somebody in the lab catches and passes it on can be (and, possibly, was) wholly as bad as an engineered sample leaking.

Here, there are hints that the leak was of, explicitly, samples cultured from the 2013 clinical cases.

all of your claims are entirely speculative and not informed, biologically speaking.

> The lab leak theory is nonsense and a distraction.

I strongly agree. I am not sure why, but there seems to be a terrific bias towards any explanation that requires a conspiracy.

Every pandemic and epidemic since the dawn of history was caused by humans living and working in close proximity to animals. Here is a list of epidemics [1]. None of them were caused by a lab breach. There have been plenty of leaks from biolabs in the last 120 years [2], and some pretty nasty stuff has escaped. Nothing came of those breaches, no epidemics, no global pandemics. One stands out as the worst of the lot [3], a major release of weaponized anthrax, yet it still pales in comparison to the deaths and illnesses caused by SARS-CoV-2. If anything is learned by examining a list of lab breaches, it is that any particular person is far more likely to get struck by lightning a dozen times before they'd be infected or die from a contagion inadvertently released from a biolab.

Are the conspiracy theorists banking on the law of averages? "It's never happened before, so that must be what happened this time."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

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