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Comment by kneel | Hacker News Reader

>Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing

No it's pretty easy to see that they're pointing towards GoF research performed at Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab very proximal to the origin of the outbreak.

The intercept has done a great job FOIA'ing chains of emails showing real concerns with the veracity of a lab leak.

https://theintercept.com/2022/01/12/covid-origins-fauci-reda...

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You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as evidence of conspiracy instead of just people learning more about a novel virus.

> all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis,

According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that?

None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.

So, more weird insinuation.

Got it.

You are downvoted, but it appears to me that you are accurate in your assessment. I haven't followed this debate much, but every time I look I to it I see weird insinuations, misrepresentations, and "obvious" assertions that are not in any way obvious. It seems like a gigantic waste of time, like debating creationists. I'll wait for my scientific peers to blow the whistle if any of the claims have credibility.

> None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They refuse to say.

Again, this isn't true. Plenty of them have explained it. Just not up to the standards of the conspiracy theorists. This goes beyond the "lab leak vs. natural origin" debate and is now, what, including American scientists in covering up the lab leak to aid the Chinese?

Spell out specifically what you are implying here.

Could you share any interview links for those interested but not familiar enough to find the info on Google?

A lot of them thought that no sarbecoviruses had a furin cleavage site and when they were first exposed to the issue by the headlines they assigned an overly high estimate to the FCS as being evidence of human tampering.

Then other experts pointed out that isn't uncommon at all, and they all adjusted their thinking.

"Woah, that's a million to one odds, that can't be by chance!"

"No, it's actually really common, here's a pile of similar viruses with an FCS."

"Oh, nevermind."

Experts can leap to conclusions and run their mouths off just like everyone else, doesn't take some radical world-wide conspiracy that "got" to them (other than the radical conspiracy theory of "well-informed truthful information").

I don't think that there are any Sarbecoronaviruses other than SARS2 that have an FCS. This paper from 2021 supports that conclusion [1]. There are other Coronaviruses that have an FCS, but not Sarbecoronaviruses, and none of them use PRRA. Those twelve amino acids have essentially come out of nowhere.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/

None of the FCS in that paper are the same: RRAR, RTAR, RSVR, RVRR, RSGR, RRSRR, RRSR, RAKR, RAHR, RRKRR. There's clearly an awful lot of functional sequences that we know of that produce an FCS and uniqueness there isn't special.

You're right that I wrote sarbecoviruses when I meant beta-coronaviruses. We still don't know of any sarbecoviruses with an FCS, but MERS has an FCS and the bat beta-coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5 have an FCS.

There of no known lineage B sarbecoviruses that have a furin cleavage site, at least not prior to SARS-COV-2. This polybasic furin cleavage site is found in various proteins from many viruses, including Betacoronavirus Embecoviruses, and the Merbecovirus. However, within the betacoronaviruses of the sarbecovirus lineage B, this type of site is unique to SARS-CoV-2. It's never been seen before.

> None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020.

Really? Can you point to interviews with these people that have no answer when asked why they change their mind?

It's quite a strong statement to say what you said, and it would surprise me to see an entire group of people refuse to answer a question. That would be quite something.

But I suspect a more likely description of the scenario is that you just don't want to accept their judgements, and replace their actual answer with "no answer." I'd love to have my suspicions proven to be wrong! Show the evidence.

You're basically asking someone to prove a negative as it could always be claimed that they'd explained themselves elsewhere. Wouldn't it be easier to provide interviews where they do explain their reasons?

Can you link to the time these scientists "refuse to say"

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