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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...

Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?

I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.

(And while we're on the subject, did anything come of the thing about Pfizer engineering the virus, ostensibly for vaccine research purposes?)

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> Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic?

I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though.

> I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding them (without its own knowledge..?), so perhaps that info is not only in China's hands.

Yes, indirectly through EcoHealth Alliance, hence the "without its own knowledge" part.

The BANAL viruses collected in Laos are closer than RaTG13. No published virus is close enough that SARS-CoV-2 could readily be derived from it in the lab, though some people have speculated about pathways via accelerated evolution during serial passaging.

I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it.

As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.

Thanks. To clarify my question, the part about Pfizer seems to be that they were engineering virus variants after the pandemic started, and doing so intentionally in a laboratory, not (merely) as a byproduct of overly-specific vaccines exerting evolutionary pressure.

What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...

Ah, the video with Jordon Trishton Walker--so not the virus origins, but alleged gain of function work after emergence. I understand that the video is real, and he really is (or was) a "Director of Research and Development" at Pfizer. Most of what he said was scientifically incoherent, though. I'd guess that he got the job for internal political reasons, and that he has almost zero influence on or even understanding of whatever Pfizer is actually doing. I don't love fact check sites in general, but this one has some quotes from researchers that are consistent with my judgment of his expertise:

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/scicheck-no-evidence-pfize...

I'm not aware of anyone developing vaccines targeting laboratory-enhanced viruses. GoF proponents sometimes cite earlier vaccine development as a possible benefit, but even they don't actually fund such work--the mutations that occur in the lab aren't predictive enough of the mutations that will occur in real human spread to justify the speculative investment. The research of concern is pretty much all in academia, basic research with more nebulous intended benefit.

The evidence there is not that that particular group created covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play out.

Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2

No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....

It was available well into 2020 if you read past the shitty early headlines.

I guess you're referring here to Flo Débarre's misleading tweet, which you linked to four months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997

As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.

Right, a database put online in June 2019 - widely claimed to be “suspiciously removed” in Sept 2019, actually wasn’t. It was available into 2020 at which point after a bunch of hacking attempts, they took it down. And certainly “everyone hasn’t agreed” because in every thread about the topic people imply like this 6 Month old database is a smoking gun when it’s self evidently not.

I don't think the server is conclusive evidence of anything, but your representation seems misleading to me. The date when the information became publicly unavailable seems like the relevant one to me, even if the server remained connected to the Internet for a few months afterward.

And you seriously believe their claim that it was taken down due to "hacking attempts"? Given the international importance of the subject, is there really no one anywhere in China who can keep a simple database-backed website running? Or could they not share the information in a form that obviously presents no information security risk, like a dump on a flash drive?

Even if we had them and they were found to be different, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they repeated the same experiment with different source material.

True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this.

Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.

The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.

The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic.

I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.

> Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.

I still get the impression the 'selectively silence misinformation' crowd is still as emboldened as ever, even in the pursuit of science. Despite it repeatedly failing and backfiring.

COVID helped give Reddit-style control of discourse a glean of urgency/respectability and "it's okay because we had good-intentions" continues to be the go-to justification.

There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.

Unfortunately, you seem fundamentally confused about the position of people who are skeptical of zoonotic origin.

Please explain to me how position A) is more racist than position B)

A) Scientists all over the world, including Chinese, Americans, and others, made a fundamental misjudgement about the safety of the Wuhan virology lab, or perhaps viral experimentation generally, and the result was a global pandemic

Versus

B) Chinese people eating & trading wild and exotic meat unintentionally caused a global pandemic due to their consumption

Of course, neither theory is racist. That's a word that used to mean something (and I wish it still did!), but is mostly used today to shut down debate in Western countries.

I’d rather just leave you to your false dichotomy. Thanks though.

It is scary to think that educational systems in democracy around the world produce comments like that. The commenter made a good point and your response is simply that you're going to stick with your prior beliefs because what? Part of good rhetoric is entertaining opposing ideas.

Refusing to engage with false dichotomies doesn't mean I'm stubbornly sticking with my priors.. if this is your first dip in the "lab leak" vs "zoonotic origin" pool, welcome, because otherwise you'd know how quickly it turns to shit when people pretend like only two scenarios exist. Don't fret, democracy will survive even I don't choose to engage with this particular round of bad faith argument!

There's no dichotomy here. The OC is merely pointing out that one theory (wet market) was widely accepted despite its obvious racism, while another (lab leak) was dismissed as racist despite being less racist than the wet market one. I believe this is a worthy point of discussion.

I mean... for several years, the notion that Chinese people are unsanitary was conisdered not racist, while the notion that extremely smart Chinese bioscientists may have covered up a lab accident was considered Asian hating. That sort of double think is worthy of questioning and criticism.

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