Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

hn_throwaway_99

I know most of the comments here are the politics of the situation, but I just want to point out the extreme irony of this sentence from the article:

> Researchers are undertaking some work to pin down a timeline of the virus’s initial spread. This includes efforts to trap bats in regions bordering China in search of viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2;

There is significant concern that the mere act of having researchers wade around in bat caves looking for coronaviruses is a bad idea. As happens frequently, Zeynep Tufekci has some of the most reasonable, logical takes on the pandemic [1]:

> Many of these research practices weren’t deviations from international norms. A bat field researcher in the United States told me she now always wears a respirator in bat caves but that wasn’t standard practice before.

> It isn’t a wild idea to suggest that field research risks setting off an outbreak. Dr. Linfa Wang, a Chinese-Australian virologist based in Singapore who frequently works with Dr. Shi and pioneered the hypothesis that bats were behind the 2003 SARS epidemic, told Nature there is a small chance that this pandemic was seeded by a researcher inadvertently getting infected by an unknown virus while collecting bat samples in a cave.

There is also a good Twitter thread on this subject [2].

My vote is we stay the fuck out of trapping wild bats looking for viruses in the first place.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-lab.h...

2. https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/1557378231342350343

> There is significant concern that the mere act of having researchers wade around in bat caves looking for coronaviruses is a bad idea.

Bat guano collection for farming along with mining activity probably has a hundred thousand times more human to bat contact than research does. It isn't like nobody in China is coming into contact with these bats other than the scientists.

Also in Hubei's Enshi prefecture there is the Tenglong cave which is the longest monomer Karst cave system in the world, home of probably millions of bats, and open for tourism:

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r...

> Bat guano collection for farming

I thought this was made obsolete by the Haber-Bosch process.

Currently fallout from the Ukraine war has disrupted fertilizer markets globally. Anyone who can keep a Haber-Bosch process going is dominating the output and selling any extra at a premium. Guano is extremely valuable right now.

Tell that to the people in China, Thailand and elsewhere that collect it:

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-thaila...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3739538/

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijecol/2020/9872532/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31860-w

https://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/CN/bat-guano-fertilize...

> My vote is we stay the fuck out of trapping wild bats looking for viruses in the first place.

That's not the issue here. The issue is there's a fucking NIH funded lab that was doing (and still is) doing gain-of-function research on bat viruses (and other viruses I take it). And that the outbreak did happen, by sheer coincidence and out of all the place in the world, very near that lab.

And that the dude who got the funding happens to be the authority that was consulted at first to know about the origin of the virus.

No, that outbreak didn’t happen by sheer coincidence near that lab.

That outbreak happened in a certain region, and the lab happened to be one of the things humans would immediately look at and be like “oh thst looks suspicious”.

For example, the outbreak also happened right next to, and all evidence points to, a live animal market. The kind of thing that is known to have led to Novak viruses multiple times before.

Happening next to a research lab is far less suspicious than happening at a wet market. The latter have a history of originating novel viruses and all the research so far points to that being the source.

And Wuhan's epidemiology lab was a few football fields from the market..

Here is the problem with your argument. There are wet markets in every city in asia, and the animals sold in these markets are from all around South East asia. For every single spill over that has occurred prior to SARS2 there were multiple independent outbreaks overtime, this is because the virus is circulating in an animal species, and this happens regardless if one of the viruses has spread to humans. It's hard to imagine how no closely related virus has been found in wet markets in bordering nations that researchers are actively studying.

Another problem is when spill overs do happen, the virus rapidly mutates as it adapts to humans from a virus adapted to another species. It was due to these mutations that allowed researchers within months for both SARS1 and MERS to track down the animal responsible for the spillover(this is known as the proximal origin ). For SARS2 there virus seemed already completely adapted towards humans, and in fact had more affinity towards human receptors than all other candidate animals tested. You'd think with the 80K animals tested and all the environmental samples taken they'd at least find SARS sequences with distinct animal markers.

One last thing when you look at virology research, for years FCS(furin cleavage site) as been a key area of focus due to it's key role in allowing the virus to enter cells. But for some reason when the head of WIV published a report on the SARS2 genome, she neglected to point out the FCS despite it being a major focus of her and many collaborators research for years prior.

Regardless, due to pandemic-induced scrutiny we now know that there exist these labs that are playing fast and loose and could cause a pandemic. They should stop doing that even we have reason to doubt they caused this specific pandemic.

Wait until you hear how the Wuhan lab and Peter Daszak’s Ecohealth Alliance are still doing NIH-funded virus research…

> still

It's worse than this implies. If NIH had taken no action, then the Ecohealth contract would have expired. Instead, Fauci made sure that one of his last acts as (the highest paid) public official was to renew that contract.

Wanna know what is real infuriating. Is the fact Ecohealth still to this day has refused to share any data or records from their decades of research. You'd think if the reckless research they were conducting was so vital (as they have and continue to claim), then sharing their research and databases would have helped fight the pandemic. But for some reason they have refused.

What’s objectionable about that? Can you explain that to me. I’m afraid I really don’t understand.

The theory is the US through ecohealth funded the Wuhan lab in their gain of function research which brought us the virus which causes Wuhan Pneumonia.

That is a hypothesis. I just don’t understand why it should have policy impact since there is no evidence for it. It’s currently just a conspiracy theory.

You asked what. I said what. What I said is why someone might find it objectionable that they're still going.

If it were just a conspiracy theory, someone would have gone through the claims in the book "Viral" by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan and debunked its arguments one by one. Matt Ridley is a journalist who wrote numerous books about scientific topics (one about the genome in 1999). Alina Chan is a biologist who works at Harvard and MIT. When people say "trust the science", or "trust the scientists", why should we trust Peter Daszak, with his obvious conflicts of interests, over Alina Chan?

Depends on your definition of conspiracy theory I guess, but serious people take it seriously https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1463219980506439691 There may be no direct positive evidence for it, but that doesn't mean it's all that implausible.

No, it not "just a conspiracy theory". They were seeking research funding for a proposal to do gain of function research on Corona viruses. Function that would produce something very much like covid19. Whether they ended up doing it is not even relevant IMHO because the proposed result would have essentially been that virus. Lab leaks have happened before and will happen again. People are actively looking to make similar things for "research".

It's not that they make Covid. It's that they may as well have and wanted to (sans releasing it hopefully)

Shouldn't we be doing more research on viruses that come from bats?

Bats are bad news and generally it's a very good idea to completely avoid contact with them and also with bat feces. Don't touch bats. Ever.

One of the day trips on a Vietnam visit was swimming/wading deep into a bat cave. I wonder now what viruses we dodged and if they are still taking tourists in there?

Then again bats also eat many many many bugs that carry disease. All things considered I'd rather have the bats then the bugs.

Well you don't have to wipe out the species, just keep your distance.

The OP just said not to touch them, not to eradicate them.

It's the same with crocodiles. They're important in their ecosystem, but I highly recommend that you avoid coming close to (or worse, touching) a wild crocodile. Or a bear, tiger, etc.

It's not just bats. Plenty of wild animals carry rabies and other diseases. Bats are incredibly vital to their ecosystems and shouldn't be vilified. It's generally a good idea not to touch any wild animal or its droppings.

As someone else pointed out, bats eat mosquitos and other insects that transmit disease at much, much higher rates.

When I was living in San Francisco, I had bats take nest between my (rented) house and the place directly next door. It was just a few inches gap and perfect for them to build a nest in. I could hear them through the wall. Called the city to do something about it and since the bats were protected, there was nothing they could or would do about it.

I knew it was just full of poop in there...

Basis of the plot for the Alien movies.

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