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Comment by xqcgrek2 | Hacker News Reader

Snopes and Reddit are not credible.

The source isn't Reddit, it's a published virologist, and he himself cites over a hundred academic sources. Reddit is the medium.

I am very confident that SARS-CoV-2 has no connection to the Wuhan Institute of Virology or any other laboratory. Not genetic engineering, not intentional evolution, not an accidental release. The most plausible scenario, by a landslide, is that SARS-CoV-2 jumped from a bat (or other species) into a human, in the wild.

A year later and we are yet to see a zoonotic link, but of course it’s the “most plausible scenario”.

The reality is that we will likely never know because it’s not in chinas best interest to allow any real investigation into this.

SARS's zoonotic link was only established in 2017. You can't expect it to be find. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And it's going to be harder for this virus than SARS.

Right now, over a year later, reality is conforming exactly to what you would expect to happen starting from that hypothesis a year ago. So I don't even understand why you're mentioning it, it's not a logical argument.

According to this

> Sep 9, 2003 (CIDRAP News) – Chinese scientists found that animals sold at street markets in Guangdong, China, carried a coronavirus nearly identical to the SARS coronavirus, according to a report published recently in Science.

> The animal viruses were found in Himalayan palm civets and raccoon dogs, which were sold for food in the markets, according to the report. The findings indicate a route of transmission between species but do not reveal whether these animals are the virus's natural reservoir or contracted it from another source, according to the report.

Source [1].

The same thing didn't happen for SARS-CoV2. I believe none of the animals in the wet market has been tested positive for SARS-CoV2 or SARS-CoV2-like viruses [2].

[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/09/animals-...

[2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/26/1021263/bat-covi...

Wait what? So we agree that they didn't find the oroginal reservoir, just a similar virus, right? Meaning, that it's not a zootoc link, as you previously asked for. You understand that it isn't possible anymore, because the current SARS-CoV-2 would almost certainly displace them now that it's endemic, correct?

So why do you expect the same thing to happen now that it's very unlikely, knowing that there is no way to know that these viruses actually are the ancestors and may very well have been cousins of SARS, that would have disappeared if SARS was more contagious.

To find an actual virus that is actually an ancestor of SARS, we had to wait until 2017. What you cited wouldn't meet the criteria you yourself set forth, and for this virus it would be impossible to find on the same timeframe. So I really don't get neither how this validates your point that we would expect to find the zoonitc link in a year, nor even how it would fit into an argument that it's unexpected we didn't find this.

I think you've misunderstood the difference between the proximal and reservoir hosts, because your comment is almost entirely wrong. As noted in the article linked above, scientists researching the original SARS found the exact (within the few mutations expected on any short transmission chain) virus that infected humans in palm civets and raccoon dogs, within about a year. These are the proximal hosts, i.e. the hosts believed to have infected humans. Once a proximal non-human animal host is found, we can be very confident that the virus is zoonotic.

Much later, Dr. Shi discovered that the greatest diversity of similar viruses was in bats. The bat viruses are less closely related to human SARS than the palm civet or raccoon dog viruses; but there's a lot of them, and they look ancestral. We therefore believe that the virus mostly evolved in bats, then was transmitted to the palm civets and raccoon dogs, evolved a little bit more there, and finally was transmitted to humans. This was very important in understand the evolutionary history of the virus, but provided no new information on how humans were first infected.

Knowing one of the classes of host doesn't imply knowing the other:

1. For the original SARS, we found the proximal host within about a year. Much later, Dr. Shi found the reservoir host.

2. For SARS-CoV-2, we knew the reservoir host immediately, because it's closely related to the original SARS. After two years of searching, we still haven't found the proximal host.

If one exists, the proximal animal host of SARS-CoV-2 is probably in China. Since China has seen low human spread (probably more than their official statistics, but clearly far less than the rest of the world), I don't see why you'd expect a human variant to displace the original zoonotic variant. There's also no particular evolutionary pressure for that--a variant evolved in humans might happen to be more transmissible in the proximal host animal, but that's not what's getting selected for when the virus is transmitted between humans.

That a person cited sources should not be seen as a sign of the quality of the work. Nor should be the amount of citations the person makes. In some cases the lack of citations can be used to suggest a piece of writing should not be taken seriously. But never the other way around.

It's extremely common for people to reach a conclusion, and only then to go looking for research. And, then, to be looking only for research which backs up their claims. Since there is often extensive research backing up both sides of issues, and also because these people rarely actually examine closely the articles they are citing (upon inspection the articles are often speaking about something different, saying the exact opposite thing, etc.), the citations have nearly zero positive value.

That doesn't change that I was correcting an incorrect statement. Someone said the source was Reddit, it isn't, it has multiple sources, none of which are Reddit.

As far as I'm concerned this is a complete non-sequitur.

The source is undeniably Reddit, in a sense (in the sense that it is opposed to a peer-reviewed journal).

Regardless, I directly addressed a portion of your comment. I believe the portion was meant to borrow some of the creditability of serious journals and give it to Reddit - which is, perhaps, a bad idea, for the reasons I laid out. To label my comment a non-sequitur is ridiculous.

In no sense is the source Reddit, anymore than the source of a New York Times article is paper, or the source of my word is your screen.

Citing sources is meant to borrow the credibility of the source for elements of your argument. Not to attribute that credibility to the sheet of paper your pen is inking.

I suspect you've locked onto the specific denotation of "source" as being an individual article. That is not the only denotation of the word. It can also refer to, as examples, persons or journals.

I absolutely haven't. A source can be an article itself (as in the content), or it can be an organisation (a joirnal, a newspaper), or it can be a person. I'm saying that the source isn't the medium over which the content itself is delivered. So for example, the New York Time is a source, so is any given article and it's associated author. However, the blank paper on which it was printed isn't a source, neither is the ink it was printed on, and correspondingly a website which merely relays words is not a source, but a medium.

True, that's another sense of being sourced from a journal

Several top virologists have publicly tarred lab leak as racist conspiracy theory, while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's highly probable. Here's a very recent email that has been released yesterday [1]. So forgive me for not taking another virologist's take on why lab leak is improbable on redit seriously.

[1] https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1480930691919618051

So now a single passage out of context that accounts for 4 out of 1000 differing nucleotides is proof positive that the author's mind was absolutely settled that it was a lab leak? Give me a break.

This is what I've written:

> while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's *highly probable*.

This is what you have written:

> proof positive that the author's mind was *absolutely settled* that it was a lab leak

Judge for yourself. I am not going to respond to any of your comment on this thread. Peace.

There is actually only one of these people that pronounced themselves about the implausibility of it being a lab leak. The only email attributed to him don't say that he thinks it was "highly probable", just that he didn't find at the time an explanation for those 14 nucleotides.

Do you have something about Mike Farzan saying, in public, that it was very unlikely that the lab leak theory was true? Or is it then incorrect to say that individual virologists were saying privately one thing and publicly another?

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