Why is parent getting downvoted? The lab leak theory is pretty mainstream these days.
And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.
And gain of function research is 1: real 2: fucking insane and 3: a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic.
Is it "possible"? Yes, theoretically. But it's not at all trivial, and far down my worry list. It's bit like worrying that sharks are going to evolve wings and start flying around eating people.
Mainstream, and conceivably true, but lacking in evidence. Personally I find it rather implausible due to a lack of motivation for why the lab in question would be doing secret work on coronaviruses.
> fucking insane
I don't think this is a helpful way to have this debate. I don't know enough to have a strong opinion on this, but a majority of virologists seem to think it's necessary, so I wouldn't automatically label them as lunatics.
> a plausible way we would have a true captain trips style pandemic
Other plausible ways are a mutation from an existing pathogen or another zoonotic spillover event, which gain of function research could potentially predict or help mitigate.
so anything short of a public confession by a CCP spokesman isn't enough?
Thank you for saying this. We know xenophobic racist right wingers are saying that COVID came from China. But WHO-China investigation definitely proved that COVID came outside of China. Even western virologists have been supporting Chinese scientists. [1]
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
what was secret about it? the lab in Wuhan was literally doing research in 2015 on how bat coronaviruses could adapt to spread in humans vs ACE2 receptors and developed their own strain: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
from the linked study: "Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.... On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations."
I suppose they could have just received some samples and then that triggered an immediate outbreak before anyone heard of it, but having an instant spillover event from a handful bat samples with workers using biosecurity measures doesn't seem to me especially likely compared to the many more interactions humans have with animals outside lab settings. (For example, the tens of thousands of live animals kept caged in extreme proximity with each other and unprotected humans in the huge Wuhan wet market).
"On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold."
Further in the article:
"As scientists remain in a stalemate over the pandemic’s origins, another disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of research that could accidentally have led to the pandemic. On September 20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...
Stricter control of GoF makes a lot of sense but the reason everyone was studying coronavirus pandemics in the first place is because we'd had several near misses and everyone in the virology community knew it was only a matter of time before the right circumstances allowed a spillover to do exactly what Covid19 did.
I’ll leave it at this: I would encourage everyone to do their own research on this and try to look past the elephant in the room of the politics angle.
Even some expert 'pre-reviewers' that received the advance of the most recent bombshell paper that supposedly proved an unnatural virus with lab origin missed obvious tells that completely invalidated the authors' claims. E.g. this thread; https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/15870905072887767...
If people do want to make up their own minds on this - I'd encourage you to track down people making falsifiable claims and then changing their priors based on the results of that research instead of people jumping from one conspiracy theory to the next to avoid changing their views.
As one data point, several prominent "lab leakers" on Twitter are now insisting that prior strains are fake and were invented by virologists since those strains disprove recent papers instead of considering that maybe those recent papers were flawed. It's bizarre to watch. (One of the authors of the most recent 'bombshell' LL paper claiming that two related field-collected coronaviruses are fake / manipulated: https://twitter.com/VBruttel/status/1584920770605621248)
But the answer isn’t “go away and let the grownups decide”, the answer is to try to learn what constitutes an expert, try to understand what degree of consensus does or does not exist amongst those experts, try to ferret out some obvious biases (e.g. red team / blue team idiocy) and be as informed as possible.
The standard model of particle physics, or Wiles FLT proof, or 1000 other things are every bit as technical as anything in virology, but you’ll notice the mathematicians all agree: the layperson doesn’t have to look very hard to know what the takeaway is there.
It’s medicine’s (including virology’s) job to get its shit together on the public’s behalf, not the other way around.
This kind of condescension infuriates me, I’m working hard to be as polite as possible here.
There's no political or financial implications to whether Wiles' proof of FLT is correct or not, and the proof can be checked with certainty by experts in the field -- so of course they can come to a consensus about something extraordinarily technical. Unfortunately with Covid, every question has turned into a political shibboleth so there will forever be FUD promoted by people who should know better. How is the average reader supposed to weigh the probabilities of some esoteric question like what the potential presence or absence of IIS restriction sites means when it's being promoted by people with advanced degrees as evidence of an artificial origin, even though it's nonsense?
So I retreat to my earlier advice for those trying to form an opinion here -- look into the history of claims from the various scientists, and see whether evidence is guiding their claims or if their claims are guiding their evidence.
I called it a theory, as in, neither conclusively proven nor conclusively disproven. It’s a theory about which there has been significant controversy. I didn’t even say there was significant evidence for it.
Acknowledging the existence of a controversy is not the same thing as promoting a conspiracy theory, and as you yourself point out, basically everyone, from word-renowned virologists down to the man in the street, has skin in the game on this one.
The world’s medical community had a COVID response that was a fucking disaster: inconsistent and constantly changing guidance, conflicts of interest, geopolitical 4th dimensional warfare, rushed and sloppy-looking vaccine approvals.
It’s no wonder the public believes a bunch of crazy shit: the experts dropped the ball. Trying to blame that on the ignorance and gullibility of the layperson and flip the script like that set back the public’s willingness to take vaccines and listen to the authorities by 50-100 years.
Don’t try to blame that on us plebs.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I agree with the other person though, there is a correlation between people I've heard say "do your own research" and people with less reasonable beliefs. (Hi, mom).
I meant it in the more nuanced sense of trying to actually do research. A layperson who wants to be informed has to start somewhere, and when the stakes are as high as with global public health, I think it behooves the person in the street to try to at least read the abstracts of some papers, try to identify experts on both sides of a controversy, and be aware that credentials are no guarantee of reasonability.
Shockley played a big role in the transistor, IIRC got the Nobel, and later spent years advocating for racist eugenicist horseshit: credentials are a good guideline, but they can’t be blindly trusted.
I really wish the medical community just agreed about all this stuff: then my job would be easy, do what they say.
Unfortunately you seem to get one group of MD/PhD people saying those other MD/PhD people are cranks, we’re the “real” scientific consensus. This does not make it easy for the well-intentioned layperson.
I don't think you can claim to have consensus on this matter since Dr. Li-Meng Yan who worked at the lab and got the CCP scrub when she went public had been speaking out about this since 2020 after having been in hiding and then fleeing China for her claims. Moreover she detailed how people who worked at the lab in Wuhan have been in retrospect beholden to the CCP for not discussing the poor safety record of the lab.
And your position about how it's not worthy of discussion makes it very clear you speak with a sense of bias because ultimately a conclusive epidemiological study will prove impossible since the floods in Wuhan in 2020 took place that coincided with the CCP's abject refusal to have outside investigators come in and search for the possible origin of the COVID, and even accused the US of creating the virus and spreading it--much how Russia has made to justify it's illegal invasion into Ukraine to de-nazify it and now de-satanize it after claims of US COVID biolabs in Ukraine.
For what's it worth, I have a BSc in cellular and molecular biology, and I was also involved in the plight of the HK people since the Umbrella Revolution, and had people been actually abreast of that situation they would have known that something was going incredibly wrong by November 2019: the CCP/Lam regime forced the protests for the extradition bill (and possibly declare independence the way things were going since the Summer) in HK to be quelled altogether for a fear of contagion of what had been going around in order to prevent the calamity of the Avaian Bird flu that is still in recent memory for many in HK--which was much worse on the mainland than it was in HK because of the abysmal health and safety practices by the CCP.
And had people paid attention, the CCP not only arrested many dissenters and created a massive diaspora in one of the most affluent and well educated countries in Asia that served as an economic hub to the West it got the NSL to pass during this time, it also continued to arrest and intimidate Hong Kong into abject repression all under the pretense of COVID. when they themselves, via the Lam regime, kept the borders open and allowed mainland Chinese to enter HK and their were plenty of recorded footage of them violating covid practices (quarantine) and actively going into public areas and act as vectors (coughing and spitting on elevators), going into restaurants despite quarantine practices etc...
Lastly, Propublica released an investigative piece last month about the lab leak theory [0] under the auspicious of the US senate, which I'm not denying has glaring geo-political overtones; especially given the CCP's saber-rattling towards Taiwan and well documented tyrannical behaviour in Xinjiang and Hong Kong; the latter violated the Sino-British treaty and dismissed international Law which effectively mean it illegally annexed a territory imposed a repressive law (NSL) to suppress any dissent which was to operate autonomously until 2037--which can be seen as hostile as Russia violating both the Budapest Memorandum and the Minsk agreements when it invaded Ukraine in 2014 and illegally annexed and occupied Crimea/Lugansk/Donetsk and has led to full invasion and crimes against Humanity ever since with indiscriminate shelling on civilian areas under the aforementioned pretenses.
I'll leave it here because quite honestly I can't fathom anyone to be so brazenly reductionist in their thinking and claim to have the 'upper hand' when their is clear violations all the way which implicate not just the CCP but the US (via NIH funding) as well for funding the GoF research in Wuhan [1] despite repeated safety record violations.
And on a personal note: it's because the health sciences is filled with people like you that I had to turn to tech in the end. I was sent into such a forlorn depression after a short career in it when I found the Industry is was mainly filled with people who will cling on to any party-line in order to continue their work and research. In retrospect I wish I had chosen something else to give so much of my time, effort and passion had I known how quickly it becomes a way to legitimize the commonly held narratives of the State or a Corporation, and how quickly it willing compromise itself for such short-sighted goals in the process.
0: https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or...
1: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
You: "What about this Chinese scientist who lied about their experience and had no actual evidence of anything but who was working with Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui and repeatedly platformed on Tucker Carlson?![1] Oh and a Senate Republicans minority committee just released a report that mistranslates standard Chinese party doctrine as menacing![2]"
Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/business/media/steve-bann...
[2] - https://twitter.com/janeqiuchina/status/1589098167051911169
For you to say, e.g. “My bona fides are such and such, I find this theory highly implausible for $REASONS” would be eminently useful and helpful and very much in the spirit of the site.
In case the multiple people saying this aren’t saying it clearly enough: you sound more like “Serious people all agree about this, only cranks disagree with us, and you plebs wouldn’t understand even if I explained it”.
Love #1. Fuck #2 in fucking particular.
Mostly joking but if the shoe fits... As one example, one of the authors of the famous 'Viral' book pointing to a Lab Leak is a coal baron GW denier who chaired a bank that failed due to subprime loans and who previously claimed that HIV was a man-made virus derived from failed polio vaccination experiments[1]. How much credence should we give someone like that? How many hours of time should be spent debunking every new theory he promotes rather than just casting him aside and looking for non-morons to engage with?
Or how should one engage with this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33522713
It's just a smattering of grievances and debunked conspiracy theories. How would virologists begin to respond to that?
I mean I said it above, and I'll just copy/paste it here;
> Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
There are well-intentioned scientists testing theories that could point to a lab origin of Covid, it would be extremely interesting and important if they find something to indicate that's the case. Unfortunately to the casual observer of the actual state of science here, they'd be led to believe that there's consensus about a lab leak or at least a strong likelihood backed by evidence when that's not remotely true.
[1] - https://www.bmartin.cc/dissent/documents/AIDS/River/Prospect...
Since you put the Twitter handle as an evidence for your argument. This particular Chinese jounalist is using Twitter and publishing articles in Western journals *while living in China*. What makes you think she is more trustworthy than Steve Bannon? Even if she is an honest and trustworthy person why would CCP let her publish anything that goes against their narrative?
> just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin
actual physical evidence *provided by China* FTFY. You don't think China will readily handover the data to you if it came from lab, do you? And what physical evidence? The evidences are just some early patient data and virus gene sequences. By that logic HIV spillover happened in US, not in Africa. Because early HIV cases have been detected in USA.
> overwhelmingly points to a natural origin
according to whom? The virologists who also have a history of covering up lab leaks. The virologists who will have the most to lose if lab leak is true. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/world/europe/coronavirus-...
I'd rather question your claims than your position, because I know where you stand anyway, which is the crux of my response: so, where was it revealed that Dr. Yan lied about her credentials and her experience at the Wuhan lab? To date that has never been proven despite constant criticism, what has been proven is that she was scrubbed from the Internet when she went public and that the CCP targeted her family (she is a Chinese National) while she was still in HK. She continues to publish her work in peer-reviewed journals [0] and her work stands alongside her colleagues who continue to publish their work on other journals. I'm willing to review these sources that discredit her in order to contrast with my currently held position and arrive to a better informed position, which is something I'm not sure you are willing to do.
I will agree that those who ran with the story first have a clear and unscrupulous bias, but that is the very definition of shooting the messenger which never result in her claims being thoroughly vetted--she released her scientific papers after having arrived to the US and fleeing from China then HK and finally to the US. That takes resources she likely didn't have after the ordeal.
This has to be seen as dire as the exodus of Jewish scientists fleeing Nazi Germany for it to be seen in proper context, as that is what has happened in Hong Kong since the Summer of 2019 and ultimately what set the NSL doctrine in HK, but since so many dismiss things based on association then you're making my point for me that is continues even in the upper echelons of Academia as I presume you are given what you have said and how you have expressed yourself thus far.
> Admitting that Covid19 was very likely a spillover of a natural virus doesn't mean that you trust China, that you think their labs are run well or are incapable of accidents, that they've been transparent or helpful with the investigations, or that the possibility of new evidence pointing to a lab origin is foreclosed -- just that the actual physical evidence we have today about this virus and this pandemic overwhelmingly points to a natural origin.
Personally, I fully admit I do not have beyond an undergrads understanding of genetics/virology; my career was spent in the field of oncological diagnostics (specifically Leukemia and Lymphoma), so it's hardly the same field and I do not claim expertise. But, unlike most, I have a very clear and documented history laying out the violent hypocrisy of the CCP's held beliefs on COVID and it's actions in HK that coincided with the protests in 2019-2021.
But, it stands to reason that anyone who remains so adamant of the claims (Natural origin) and is coaxing it as much as you are the likely cause requires much more compelling evidence and is otherwise ignoring the simple fact that we will never know what happened due to the refusal of the CCP to allow investigators into the country in the onset while having cases in HK and still forcing the borders open to the mainland when it was in lockdown and that the subsequent floods removed any real evidence that could identify the origin (on either side) in order to create a consensus is done in order to get back to business as usual while simultaneously trying to absolve anyone guilt of this as something that needs to be accepted--which is ironic since this naturaly caused illness is still forcing people in China to be locked-down due to China's zero-covid policy.
These are the (many) mental gymnastics I underscored in my first post, and why I think it's deserving of such ire. You make claims, you cannot support and instead will play identity politics (entirely useless since I'm an anarchist and I have no political affiliation) rather than rebuttal with actual evidence and facts to support your claim. Which thus far include:
- COVID is of Natural Origin due the evidence (that's not conclusive)
- Dr. Yan is not a real scientist and lied about her experience and is puppet of the MAGA crowd
- Lab Leak is absurd and should be dismissed because reasons(?)
Again, I remain that any person with any shred of credibility would question all positions and realize we simply do not have, and will likely never have, enough information to conclusively arrive to either.
But it's this forced narrative and consensus MO (and the arrogance that follows with it) that is strikingly consistent in my experience--not to mention this need for a 'COVID amnesty' and the blanket immunity of pharmaceutical corps got early on.
Do I know it definitely leaked from a lab? Absolutely not, I felt it was rather convenient and compelling evidence to quell the HK revolts against the extradition bill (given who bird flu went down) and I saw to what length the CCP was willing to go to do so, and has continued on a belligerent war-path to achieve it's end thorough out it's bloody history and will disspaear, kill and enslave people who question it's position and supremacy clause on the one china policy.
And this is why I think it's not beyond reason that they used the pre-tense of a wet-lab based disease in order to achieve their end(s), which ironically was supported by the US via NIH grants to study GoF at the Wuhan lab until 2017 and had a documented lengthy history of safety violations and had reported cases of similar symptoms in the Fall of 2019 which was critical in suppressing the HK protests.
0: https://www.scirp.org/(S(lz5mqp453edsnp55rrgjct55))/referenc...
I read "do your own research" differently. I think it can go two different directions.
In the positive direction, it can mean "Ignore all the loudmouths, all the liars, all the self-anointed experts. Even ignore me, the speaker. Find out who really knows what they're talking about, and listen to them." This assumes, though, that the listener can do that. Am I actually capable to discern truth from lies, or even real expertise from incompetence, in virology? Maybe, if I devote enough time to it. Do I have that kind of time for every topic on which someone tells me "do your own research"? Probably not. So what it really turns into is finding someone who at least sounds like they are doing their own research (and doing it well), and listening to them.
More negatively, I suspect that "do your own research" at least sometimes is a veiled way of saying "If you really knew, then you would agree with me" in a much less in-your-face way than just saying it. The person saying this may have done their research as you say, finding a loud voice that said what they wanted to hear, and now be totally convinced that they are right, and that if you did your research, you would wind up agreeing with them.
Biology is such an enormously wide and diverse field that opinions of someone who’s not a virologist is often as relevant as an opinion of the software engineer.
I mean if you seriously believe that theory you are probably going to either end, start thinking about how to end, or significantly change how you develop, your career as a virologist. Of course it's not mainstream.
It’s pure tin hat thinking to say that “my idea is correct and everyone who has any expertise is compromised”. I don’t know what is right or not, but I know a lot of virologists (through work) without any personal interest in the case who don’t put much stock in the lab leak hypothesis.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
So is denying climate change or the moon landings...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theori...
Despite actual pictures taken recently...
What percentage you think makes an idea mainstream I will leave up to you...
mainstream : the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts.
So, no, 6% is not mainstream. Moon landing conspiracies are by no means a dominant trend anywhere aside from joke books and parody.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Ah yes, so I would assume that the WHO would conclusively say that the lab leak theory is incorrect then?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/06/09/who-sago-cov...
Oh... they say they are still investigating it and that the theory should be left on the table... but I guess the British Medical Journal would say it's total nonsense right?!
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656
Hmm... Maybe not, they say it's plausible too. Presumably Nature just flat-out tells us that it's a total conspiracy theory though right?!
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01529-3
Ah, they stay on the fence and say that it's plausible.
So it's not exactly like denying the moon landings, as I haven't heard NASA saying "the moon landings might have been faked, but we can't prove either way" anytime recently.
That's what baffles me here: "We cannot conclusively say it's wrong" so it must be right. When did that become a popular mode of reasoning? I can only assume people are so desperate to believe they will swallow this rather than accept reality.
In reality nobody knows the origin for certain, but IMO you seem to fall for the fallacy you are describing but with the opposite premise - i.e. "We cannot conclusively say that the lab leak theory is right or wrong, thus it cannot possibly be a lab leak".
And given how fast viruses evolve, there’s no real alternative.
Intentionally engineering them as high as possible on transmissibility and morbidity is bioweapon development being money laundered through conventional science: it’s an insane thing to do.
Leaving SARS-COV-2 out of it completely: there have indisputably been other leaks. It’s the height of irresponsibility and shortsightedness to engineer civilization-ending viruses, which is why it’s banned under multiple international conventions that GoF is a workaround for.
You don’t need a vaccine for the fucking superflu if you never develop the fucking superflu.
Also, gain function refers to basically any change to pathogen. Banning it is like banning 5G, because it could be used to steer nano bots.
And you also heavily overstate our abilities to actually mutate viruses in a way we’d want.
This always feels like the "we can't afford to fix climate change so we just will ignore the problem" take.