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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins, but this did not get mentioned in any reports. Instead he warns other not to discuss it. He does not include notes that research was done on modifying bat viruses to make them infectious to human cells. These behaviors look like a guilty person, do they not?

The wuhan and eco-health researchers had already started work on the furin cleavage sites and why would they stop when DARPA blocked it? Funding can’t only come from the US. Did CCP also block this research?

> there is published evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was already engaged in some of the genetic engineering work described in the proposal and that viruses designed in North Carolina could easily be used in China.

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Peter Daszak was also one of the people organizing the letter in the lancet back in 2020 denying that it came from a lab.

Original letter: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Lancet responding to criticism: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Yeah, turns out 26 of the 27 scientists all had some conflict of interest related to the Wuhan lab:

>All but one scientist who penned a letter in The Lancet dismissing the possibility that coronavirus could have come from a lab in Wuhan were linked to its Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders, a Telegraph investigation can reveal.

Source: https://archive.ph/dXc0n

Think about what you're actually saying: most of the world's coronavirus experts have some kind of link to one of the world's leading laboratories' researchers, colleagues, or funders. Would you expect anything else?

Suppose something strange happened and there were suspicions that it was CERN that was involved. Now a letter gets penned by the world's top particle physicists saying it's highly unlikely that the experiments at CERN would be involved. What do you suppose the likelihood would be that those particle physicists would have links to the researchers, colleagues or funders of CERN?

Do also note that damn near every lab today would not propose a new approach or project without already secretly having gone half the way in it with prior funds. No one proposes a potential novel idea without already being fully sure it will work.

100% true for theoretical/computational physics, solid state physics, optics, catalysis research, and many more. You use existing grants to explore completely different topics and once you have something promising where you are 50-80% there, you write the next grant. Rinse, repeat.

Particle physics (or gravitational wave research for example) is the odd one out here. Maybe because it is 100% fundamental research, where it is known to not produce applicable results.

Not true where you have to get ethics consent. You can't do this because you're lab will be shut if you are found to be doing experiments in secret. Yes - in some labs for maths, physics and so on you are right, but not medicine & biology.

If you don't believe this then look at the failure rate of the projects.

The other thing is that the funding agencies really, really, really don't like this - they want high risk research not handle turning. So if you get caught out you will get blacklisted - it's misconduct.

> You can't do this because you're lab will be shut if you are found to be doing experiments in secret.

It's almost like if you move your research to a country who has no regards for safety or ethical concerns, that suddenly isn't a problem.

This is something I wish more people understood about academia with regards to this grant.

Certainly not true in the area of particle accelerator experiments. Every single step there is done in public so to say. And it's not that it's a niche, literally thousands of scientists and engineers work on this stuff. (Also I know people that had to change thesis topics half-way through, although I cannot fully recall the reasoning for that.)

It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe. Actually there are even documentaries from before the pandemic, not sure why this has to be double-emphasized.

> It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe.

Not to me.

>Actually there are even documentaries from before the pandemic, not sure why this has to be double-emphasized.

Got any names/years so I watch them?

There's one documentary from ARTE.tv, a french-german state-owned TV station that I watched in Spring 2020 but which was from around 5 years ago at that time. I cannot find it but I'd add a link here if I do eventually. (Not easy since so much similar content has popped up since then)

One particular reference (point) the documentary was revolving around was the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies which has been pointing out the problem with zoonotic epidemics/pandemics vs. populations and wild ecosystems intertwining too much. (AIDS, SARS, MERS)

Maybe that's interesting enough:

"Thus, it is highly likely that future SARS- or MERS-like coronavirus outbreaks will originate from bats, and there is an increased probability that this will occur in China. Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent issue for the detection of early warning signs ..."

Bat Coronaviruses in China, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6466186/ from March 2019

That said, all this conspiracy discussion is giving the research a bad taste. I mean they cannot build up a lab in a bat cave or ignore the whole issue. And this is not the first epidemic/pandemic of this sort.

> It's well-known that there has been high-risk coronavirus research across the globe.

It's the first time I heard of anything of the sort.

Do you have any reference pointing out, or is this just Facebook hearsay?

Corona virus and gain of function was done in the US and when a leaked accident occurred it got banned and outsourced to the world. The research labs and stories was famous during MERS outbreak. India, Pakistan and China is the best known countries with advance research labs for it.

Not necessarily guilt but a HUGE conflict of interest…

As much credibility as the executive team at Philip Morris releasing an open letter outlining how smoking doesn’t cause cancer.

This 'looks guilty' thing is akin to witch hunting.

If millions of people died and you were right there when it happened, a likely suspect, you might want to deflect blame as well.

Populism and Politics have little to do with the truth. If the masses are fired up over one theory, or if the highly politicized academic community is fired up over one of their own sensitivities, it can be destructive for many involved.

Refusing legitimate investigation - now that's a bad sign because people should want to clear their names.

We don't know what the answers are but it warrants further investigation.

Systemic failure perhaps, certainly when regards to the soul-crushing CCP (not the Chinese).

He proudly proclaims his research in this video, he is not hiding anything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w

He absolutely did try to hide things. He tried to hide his relationship to the original Lancet article denouncing the lab leak theory, because he knew it was a staggering conflict of interest:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

Person organizing PR statement takes actions to make that PR statement as effective as possible? Not exactly a cover up. I don’t “like” my own instagram posts for the same reason.

It’s expected that conflicts of interest be disclosed in journalism and things like this. Instead he actively worked to hide his conflict of interest.

Exactly, and it looks like almost all of them did:

Source: https://archive.ph/dXc0n

Scientists have to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard than PR flacks.

Scientists absolutely need to investigate themselves as well, to avoid biases and blind spots. Just because someone is smart, doesn't make them arbiter of truth. So we need to examine ourselves AND facts.

> Daczak serves on the WHO team to investigate the virus origins (...)

As a reference never hurts, specially in a topic prone to disinformation, here's a link to the WHO's page on its official list of members of their "Global Study of the Origins of SARS-COV2".

Dr. Peter Daszak, Ph.D (EcoHealth Alliance, USA) is listed as a member.

https://www.who.int/health-topics/coronavirus/origins-of-the...

> why would they stop when DARPA blocked it

Because the Trump administration decided that along with a bunch of other offshore collaboration funding decided to pull the money (America First!). There's a Vincent Racaniello episode on Microbe TV that explained what happened there. I don't remember the episode but here's his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/VincentRacaniello/videos

I think if folks would listen more to virologists than the press they'd find out that it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses (that's actually in his coursework - also on his channel), but it's also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function" (for weaponising) which has been suggested as the source of SARS2 and that whole Wuhan conspiracy theory thing.

But why would one denial from one particularly finicky funding source (Trump-era US agencies) make researchers – who thought they were doing essential work – stop such essential work? Why wouldn't they use other funding, possibly from overhead funding or prior grants, or from other less-finicky funders? And in a jurisdiction – China – where many of the same limits or reporting-requirements might not exist?

Are virologists the only humans who, thwarted by one jurisdiction's limits, give up without considering doing their career-making, essential-to-humanity work elsewhere?

> …it's incredibly difficult to engineer new viruses… [and] …also incredibly difficult to create stable "gain of function"…

Indeed, but humans do incredibly difficult things all the time. In fact, they're often attracted to the challenge, and seek funding to help them do it, and often don't let a 'no' from any one funder stop them from bootstrapping work in other ways.

It's also incredibly difficult to engineer & get approval for vaccines to a brand-new disease, but that got done, recently, faster than ever before.

It was incredibly difficult to create nuclear weapons, but a lot of countries have done it independently.

Given the significant number of dangerous pathogen escapes from disease labs, it's also "incredibly difficult" to keep dangerous contagions safely contained. It's comparatively easy to accidently let them out!

Covid wasn't a brand new disease. They had most of the research necessary to create a vaccine completed two years before the outbreak. We would likely have had the Johnson and Johnson vaccine by July of 2020 if Trump hadn't shut down the pandemic response team purely because it was created by Obama. They were the ones already preparing the ground work necessary for a vaccine to existing SARS Corona virus diseases that had already emerged as far back as 2011. Project Warp Speed wasn't so successful because it provided funding or cut red tape, most of the vaccines we got didn't even participate. We got vaccines so fast because nearly a decade of related research had already been completed.

My point is it would have required a virtual miracle for the proposed gain of function research to have produced something that could have escaped in the time framed that is possible regarding the rejected grant request. Additionally, good research has proven that Covid couldn't have been due to gain of function research either.

All 3 vaccines used in the US received funding through Operation Warp Speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed

Most of your points about coronavirus vaccine research also apply to coronavirus gain-of-function research: scientists have been studying these viruses for decades. They've also been proposing – & sometimes doing! – gain-of-function-like work on these same viruses for years.

And why would it take a "virtual miracle" to accomplish via purposeful lab work the same thing that a 'wholly natural origin' explanation would suggest happened by dumb luck in natural recombinations?

What if it was both 'natural origin' and a 'lab leak'? For example, perhaps a wholly natural zoonotic event created the novelty, but it wasn't circulating in humans until after researchers found that crossover-ready virus in the wild – doing research similar to that in this just-revealed proposal – & brought it to Wuhan for study. Then, either with or without further 'gain-of-function' tinkering, inadvertently let it loose into an urban population?

If that is the case why did Peter himself say a covid vaccine was impossible at the Nipah conference in 2019?

The 2019 nipah conference was December 09-10. The first COVID patients with symptoms had only entered the hospital the previous day and the epidemic was still unrecognized. Why was anyone talking about a vaccine for a disease no one knew existed at an unrelated virus conference? Can you source anything to that effect?

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