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Comment by farmerstan | Hacker News Reader

It’s weird how people are trying so hard to convince others that the virus came from nature sources when it’s obvious now it didn’t. The amount of propaganda is really scary.

All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak. It’s been almost 2 years now and the closest they could find is thousands of miles away and kind of sort of similar.

Let’s not look for a zebra when all we have is a horse.

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> All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak.

It took a long time to find the animal source for HIV and if memory serves, swine flu took some time to be tracked down.

> obvious now it didn’t

I’m open to the lab leak origin as a possibility, but it seems far from obvious either way. The evidence is still pretty circumstantial. It’s worth further investigation, but I don’t think we should rush to a conclusion.

HIV was a very different context and isn't remotely comparable to SARS2. It took many decades for HIV to spread to a consequential base of infected persons, from which it was then able to explode across the globe (due in part to the difference in travel then vs now of course). The reason it took so long to find the animal source, was because it wasn't perceived to be a critically important virus to deal with - it wasn't a priority - in the early decades due to the very low number of cases and related deaths. Depending on which origin theory you believe, it took anywhere from ~20 years to ~60 years, for HIV to go from a small number of cases to being globally threatening. SARS2 did that in a matter of months, so the priority is far different. SARS2 has killed 5+ million people in under two years, it took many decades for HIV/AIDS to do that. The US is still seeing more annualized Covid deaths than the world had total HIV/AIDS deaths annually circa 1990/1991, and that's with 64% of the US population having taken at least one vaccine dose.

The reason we haven't tracked SARS2 back to a starting animal source, is likely because there isn't one in that it didn't spread directly from an animal to humans without modification (they sampled it from bats, then they modified the virus, from which it was able to more easily infect humans); and if there were one, China aggressively blocked all efforts to discover the origins there (including destroying vital early data about the virus), which is beyond incriminating.

> All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak.

You assertion is still wrong. It took about 4 years to nail down MERS as coming from camels, and the link from bats to camels to people is still fuzzy. There are several hemorrhagic fever causing viruses believed to come from animals, but with. no known source. We still don't know where Ebola comes from.

People have been looking for the animal reservoir for Ebola for decades, and we haven't found it yet.

A lab leak could be the source for COVID-19, but the lack of an animal source so far isn't evidence of that. It's precisely a lack of evidence.

> It’s weird how people are trying so hard to convince others that the virus came from nature sources when it’s obvious now it didn’t.

It's not weird at all, as the host of the biggest virology podcast (TWiV) said, "lab leak confirmation would be the biggest scandal in the history of science".

The field of virology would be decimated by the fallout. No wonder almost all the virologists are circling the wagons and are desperate for any shred of evidence pointing away from WIV.

And bear in mind, TWIV is also very tightly connected to two of the principles in this story - Beric and Dasak. I say this as a long time listener - but a lot of their basic statements have been incorrect. They still insist that Delta is not more contagious or virulent then alpha. They insisted that masks were not needed at the start of the outbreak, and clearly didn't think it would be a big deal.

But I think the story is starting to become clear. EcoHealth wanted to do gain of function research. DARPA shut them down. (Can you imagine the story if DARPA hadn't and it came out? US research scientists deliberately release virus in bats to infect all of china?).

EcoHealth also has a partnership w/ WIV in china, which was also doing this type of research (which is notably dual-use - so something the Chinese government might be very interested in doing).

I've been very skeptical on the idea of a human modified virus being at the heart of covid. I think it's still far more likely that this was a escape/mutation of a virus from the Wuhan CDC which is next-door to the wet market.

But this certainly raises the specter that we (as in humanity) may have just created the biggest pandemic in a effort to figure out how to avoid a pandemic.

WCDC stores viruses? Why would they?

Isn’t WIV the only BSL-4 lab in that city, and WCDC mostly paperwork/admin?

From what I have read, there is a growing belief that the "bat video" was shot at the WCDC, not the BSL-4 lab, or alternatively, something less then BSL-4 at WIV.

Of course, this is another question that is unanswered.

I've had someone who seemed competent in virology/biology explain your point of view to me (it was very convincing), but after doing a bit of research on my side, i have one point i want to discuss:

Ebola's outbreaks in the 90s/early 00s.

We have had outbreaks near campains labs, where no patient 0 or progenitor viruses were found. But Ebola kills a lot more, compared to Covid, so an Ebola progenitor in a small village would be way easier to find than a SRAS progenitor, yes?

I don't know how Africa was 20 years ago, but i know deep China, I think its even more enclaved than any village in Africa ever will be.

Do you think it's likely that all those Ebola outbreaks where no progenitor viruses were found are also lab-leaks? I mean, campaign labs are a lot less secure, so it is even more likely than covid lab-break, yes?

What’s a campaign lab? Like a vaccination campaign? Those don’t have a live virus afaik?

> All other viruses from animals were found very soon after an outbreak.

It usually takes several years.

"thousand miles away" in Yunnan (right on the border with Laos) is where the "Bat Woman" was sent to investigate an pneumonia oubreak with case fatality rate of 50% in 2012.

At the very minimum samples would've been brought back to WIV.

Were they manipulated/gain-of-function enhanced since?

I do not have enough back ground in bio to say, but what are the odds they'd just let samples sit and do nothing with them for years in a research lab? is that something they normally do?

"Lethal Pneumonia Cases in Mojiang Miners (2012)" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.7021...

Shi Zheng-Li's research, 2017:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bat-cave-solves-m...

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