Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2-718-281-828 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

> why does the US actively support this cover up?

Sometimes, answers are more clear when questions are more clear.

“Why is the US waiting to secure a convincing case that produces useful diplomatic leverage instead of indulging public speculation by making an early call that wastes the opportunity?”

There’s a lot to lose by making a case that other nations can dismiss, and a lot to gain by having a case that they can’t. If there was a culpable lab leak, the game comes down to China making it easy for its partners to plausibly deny while others try to collect thorough enough evidence that they can’t. The tidbits that feed conspiracy circles might be 100% right and very convincing to individuals, but are too thin to put world leaders on the spot. For now.

In my opinion, its more likely wallstreet that doesn't want to loose their cheap Chinese sweatshop labor.

Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.

It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]

Quoting:

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

And from the footnote describing author contributions:

[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids

As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]

It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.

My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/

[3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...

> why does the US actively support this cover up?

If it was a lab leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), it was likely from a research program partially funded by USA.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

"a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself."

You're commenting on a report that the (US Government's) DoE is saying it was lab leaked, so... the US isn't actively supporting any cover up, or they're doing a profoundly terrible job.

Just to clarify, because the nuance is getting lost, they are not suggesting it was lab made. A naturally occurring virus can be studied and then accidentally leaked from a lab.

But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts of things, they're an authoritarian government.

Good point I will edit.

not lab made, leaked from a lab

American Virologists feared that their field would be blamed for the pandemic, and used motivated reasoning to convince themselves that the field could not be responsible for the pandemic. And the US was gripped by Trumpism, so anything in any way connected to Trump automatically became verboten.

Some of the leading voices in opposition to the lab leak hypothesis such as Peter Daszak had close academic connections (collaboration, grants etc.) with the BSL4 lab in Wuhan.

Perhaps because Fauci may have been held partially responsible through gain of function research his department funded?

Maybe they don't have enough evidence to support the lab leak hypothesis. Or maybe they want to prevent China from supplying weapons to Russia for the time being and they're playing the cautios stance while they don't have enough evidence. We will find out eventually in five to ten years or so. The lab leak hypothesis is quite probable.

Didn’t Trump literally call it the “China virus” for over a year? Almost from the start? I know he got a lot of pushback from the DNC over that.

It didn't seem to be based on evidence at the time rather than a simple minded and racist bit to cover up that he had no idea what he was doing.

As a thought experiment, who would have access to the most information in the world outside of the sitting POTUS? The richest man in the world? Surely Trump of all people would be the most qualified to make such a claim.

Trump was... not an ordinary president. In particular, he didn't pay very much attention to his briefings. He may have had access to the information, but there's less indication that he used that access, and plenty of indication that he frequently shot his mouth of contrary to the facts. Whether he did so in this case is not proven, but the parent's argument doesn't work for the particular president in question.

While he may have been less than attentive to these things, he would use every bit of information that was available to him to advance his agenda and he had people around him who read/in those briefings who knew and support his agenda. Certainly his agenda pre-pandemic as it related to China was pretty much an economic war for lack of a better description.

If your intention is to motivate Americans away from Chinese products, what better way to do it then to use a scary virus that seemed to emerge from China to that end.

I don't think Trump is patient enough to sit and read. It's more likely he wanted people to tell him what's important that he needs to know about.

I'm speculating of course but if you think about it, can you imagine him sitting patiently reading documents first thing in the morning? He would get bored so quickly he would end up on twitter to complain or gloat.

Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.

If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

The genie is more or less out of the bottle on that one. If it is a lab leak there is no stopping it from happening again and China is not doing anything special. There are hundreds of these labs all over the world, they have containment breaches all the time [1], and given the way of international politics it is effectively impossible to shut them all down. Probably undesirable as well given that labs like those are the reason we had the medical knowledge to create a vaccine.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecuri...

I strongly disagree that they are not doing anything special. They are literally going out into remote bat caves and harvesting coronaviruses and bringing them into large population centers to study.

What they were doing was downplaying the severity of the problem until it was sufficiently widespread that it was not just a China problem. I'm not saying that was the plan from the start, but it definitely morphed into that.

If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.

Totally agree. That should be and has to some extent been made public. The China portion of the story is a complete mystery.

I actually completely agree. We SHOULD know the true origin and causes; I just have zero faith anyone in the US will put pressure on China or accuse them publicly. That was more the gist of what I was getting at.

That lying about pandemic origins is the best course of dealing with the pandemic is an exceptionally bold statement.

That some bureaucrats might think that is a much less bold statement.

"At this point, what difference does it make?"

-- famous politician, responding to a question on a different issue

that's not all there is to it. there are deeper relations between the NIH and Wuhan.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com