Comment by createdapril24 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by createdapril24 | Hacker News Reader

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The specific claims here that are most compelling to me are:

"The grant proposal very specifically is concerned with using the WIV1 and SHC014 backbones, nothing related to SARS-CoV-2." The counterargument is "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." The takeaway is that it is not likely this specific proposal was funded elsewhere, leading to SARS-CoV-2.

"If they actually carried out the research in this grant proposal you don't get from there to SARS-CoV-2, those are all SARS-1-like." I do not personally know how to evaluate the accuracy of this claim, but if true, it resonates with the first claim: this proposal funded elsewhere would not lead to SARS-CoV-2.

The argument claims about it being hard/expensive I think are less compelling, as there is a lead time of several years with experts in field performing research. A more compelling version of this argument would look like (completely making up numbers): "On average, it takes 4.5 years to develop the first samples of a novel virus using a selected backbone, CRISPR technology, and gain-of-function culturing. Therefore, even if this research was funded in 2018 we would not expect it to have led to SARS-CoV-2". I'm not saying that argument is accurate at all, just saying it's more specific than "it's difficult".

The argument claims about the evidence being missing I think isn't going to be motivating for a person who has a reasonable expectation that secret research is done and does not have trust in government transparency (either US, China, or otherwise). I'm not making a point here that evidence isn't needed (far from it, evidence IS needed). I'm evaluating from a polemic perspective what kinds of claims and arguments are useful for advancing the conversation with someone who holding a dissonant viewpoint.

Thank you by the way for making specific claims that can be fact checked such as the two referenced at the top of this comment.

> "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere."

It isn't as simple as altering the proposal. You're speculating a very large and hidden process using sequences that were kept perfectly secret and have not been leaked, with virus backbones that would take considerable effort to create but which were never shared publicly (and kept perfectly secret before SARS-CoV-2 happened before there was any need for perfect secrecy). We have this leaked information from 2018 about the proposal with the WIV1/SHC014 backbones which leaked because it was not kept with perfect secrecy. Yet they managed to do all that work in perfect secrecy without any leaks. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory. It requires a bit of a time machine because Daszak would have to have known in 2018 to tighten up his "OpSec" in response to the pandemic that hadn't happened yet and leaks that hadn't yet occurred.

Things are also getting worse for the lab leak theory on other fronts, I just stumbled across this a few minutes ago:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02519-1

If there's multiple lineages from multiple zoonotic spillover events that makes the lab leak theory a poor fit and will require a lot more mental gymnastics.

... but then you'd have to explain the infection geography in humans with two events. Not saying it's not possible, but lining it up with what's known epidemiologically speaking is different.

Also, I'm not sure why the lab leak hypothesis is suddenly trickier. They had all sorts of samples.

Labeling this all as "mental gymnastics" as in the article, or "a dagger in the heart of the lab leak hypothesis" is just the sort of motivated analysis confirmatory bias that caused all this in the first place. I'm not sure how arguing that SARS-CoV-2 involved two spillover events with crossover from multiple species is less mental gymnastics than "a lab had multiple samples".

Honestly I'd like to see more dispassionate discussion of this. That Nature piece is shameful.

At some level I don't care if it was a lab leak or not but I wish there wasn't this level of motivation behind both sides.

In any event, the grant proposal should raise a lot of red flags regardless. What bothers me often is this implied assumption that if the lab leak hypothesis is false, everything else is fine. It's all fine that a plausible biosecurity failure scenario was ridiculed, that major research groups clearly lied about and tried to cover up conflicts of interest, that we can trust these (GoF) lines of research are safe, that we can just trust the authority figures to not cause another pandemic, etc. etc. etc.

Just wanted to chime in and thank you both for an extremely interesting discussion. Carry on. Being a fly on the wall is fascinating here.

Really? I find it halfway interesting, as it is a discussion between someone who clearly understands the science and bureaucracy that surrounds that type of work, and someone who is chaining speculation and "what if's" like their life depended on it.

Definitely. Because companies need both types of people to succeed. I’ve also been on both sides of the table. It’s easy to underestimate the what-iffer and to overestimate the established senior —- and vice versa.

Better than TV.

Jaysus, I just wanted to say thanks for a convo. To confess my sins, I didn’t read it too closely on either side. I’m currently trying to fall asleep. The idea that people did know a thing or two about biology on HN was appealing.

I have to say though, the flagged reply was thoroughly entertaining. Thank you sir or ma’am for the high praise; I aim to please.

You should def care if it was a lab leak or not, because as we have learned the only way we are going to address these risks properly if it was. The way to see this is obvious is that we are not acting as if it was a lab leak, and we should be.

>Yet they managed to do all that work in perfect secrecy without any leaks. That is the hallmark of a conspiracy theory.

But nobody is alleging that they did all the work in perfect secrecy. Clearly we know about a lot of the work: you'd use the same equipment, location, and so forth. Only a few things are left that need to be secret; namely, the origin of the viral sequences that preceded SARS-CoV-2. And if those were present in the wild it seems not entirely surprising that WIV could have simply obtained them.

Furthermore, it is not really that surprising that research which potentially develops weapons of mass destruction is kept secret, pandemic or no. Whether it caused the pandemic or not, people are still generally concerned that this kind of thing was occurring.

You seem to be suggesting that because this 2018 grant was recently "leaked", we now have... perfect info on all other grants & projects, including any that are part of the 'black budgets' of the US or China.

But maybe some things just haven't leaked yet? Or were kept secret by others even more skilled at secrecy & misdirection than Daszak?

First, it really doesn't take major effort to make a viral backbone. You'd like to make a protocol that generates them in high multiplex (thousands, millions, billions) and then selects on that background to find functional ones. The current virus could descend from a recombinant generated with such an approach. It might never have been sequenced or observed directly because it was one of innumerable examples that were competitively cultured.

But, this nature piece is really problematic. When removing likely sequencing errors, the independent "spillover events" appear to fit perfectly into a single phylogeny with each node separated by a single mutation. And the A clade descends cleanly from the B clade. There are not enough mutations between them to support a complex explanation like multiple spillovers. This is linked but not explained properly by the nature piece https://virological.org/t/evidence-against-the-veracity-of-s...

That and a coupe authors already arrived at contrary conclusions before this nature piece was even released. It fails to even acknowledge their work, compare, or comment why there should be favor in their own claims above others with different approaches that might be better suited (biostatistical methods to model a progenitor and the probable evolution of the lineages).

I guess all the stuff the NSA kept perfectly secret before the Snowden leaks were the hallmark of a conspiracy theory, too.

That is a good example to consider: the conspiracy theories were around things like magic crypto-breaking boxes, men in black getting crypto keys, or deeply-hidden backdoors in Windows. What they actually kept secret was that they were tapping cables covertly using the same tactics against American companies that they’d used throughout the Cold War — the secret being that they were using them domestically.

Applying Occam, I’m going to bet that the origins of the virus will turn out to be entirely zoonotic or that someone got infected doing fieldwork rather than the lab engineering claims.

> The counterargument is "Well, they could have altered the proposal when they pursued funding elsewhere." The takeaway is that it is not likely this specific proposal was funded elsewhere, leading to SARS-CoV-2.

That sounds like a very tenuous line of reasoning to me. Almost like saying "We know that Mr. A proposed shooting Mr. B, so let's reconsider that Mr C. may have stabbed Mr. D."

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