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Comment by EMM_386 | Hacker News Reader

The Wuhan Institute of Virology was working on adding a unique furin cleavage site to a bat coronoavirus strain to make it bind to human ACE-2 receptors.

This is factual, because the grant proposals are out there and DARPA in the US turned them down:

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

Suddenly, we have a global pandemic featuring a bat coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that binds to human ACE-2 receptors, out of Wuhan, China, directly next to the lab where they were studying this.

What are the chances?

We know what they were studying because all of the grants, emails, and other information from NIH to EcoHealth Alliance have been acquired via the Freedom of Information Act:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23793974-tobias-v-hh...

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Unique furin cleavage sites are very common in coronaviruses (see below paper). In fact, one of the papers linked from the intercept article you posted even mentions HCoV-HKU1 which also has a unique furin cleavage site at s1/s2.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612...

I found all of this in about 10 minutes of googling and 15 minutes of reading. Which means I’m as qualified to weigh in on the subject as anyone else here now.

There are other coronaviruses (broad category) with furin cleavage sites, but there are not other sarbecoviruses (more narrow category) with furin cleavage sites. What those two facts tell you about the origin of Covid-19 is beyond my pay grade.

They are not common, and "10 minutes of googling" isn't going to get you anywhere.

Read my link to the FOIA documents. There are many redacted, for "national security".

Why would they be redacted for US national security if this came from a natural animal origin? It should at least give you pause to think. Possibly because the US was funding it via NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, which puts everyone in quite the bind? 6+ million dead and finger pointing between global superpowers probably isn't the outcome they had in mind.

"In April 2020 correspondence with EcoHealth Alliance, NIH wrote that it "received reports that the Wuhan Institute of Virology ... has been conducting research at its facilities in China that pose serious bio-safety concerns."

Page 54.

Or this, where the NIH is requesting the location of a scientist who disappeared?

Page 235.

"The Wuhan institute sequenced the genome of the new virus in January after receiving patient samples. In addition to requiring EcoHealth Alliance provide a sample of the sequenced coronavirus, the NIH said in its letter that EcoHealth Alliance must “explain the apparent disappearance” of a scientist who worked in the Wuhan lab."

There are too many other pages (between all the pages of redactions) worth reading to mention them all.

> Why would they be redacted for US national security if this came from a natural animal origin?

Because US intelligence has an asset in the lab perhaps?

I've heard it said that intelligence briefings are often 90-95% what you can find in any newspaper (or website nowadays), but the last few percentage points use various 'assets and techniques' that the other side doesn't want to get out.

Often it's not about knowing the what of actions and events, but the why.

Can you point to a non-biased source that explains this in more detail?

I'm not a biologist, I don't have the slightest idea what the heck a furin cleavage site is, and so whether this is a red herring or a smoking gun.

But if you think this is such a smoking gun, can you point to somebody who explains in detail for a general audience what it means, why it's true, and how statistically unlikely it would be for it to be natural?

I just don't have anywhere near the background to know whether your comment is valid, but would like to know more.

The furin cleavage theory is fairly controversial: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119

If it were fairly controversial, why are you citing a paper in PNAS, the Journal Of Last Refuge for shitty science?

The only benefit of being a member of the academy of sciences is that you can dump into PNAS whatever hot trash you couldn't sell to any other journal, because they almost never reject papers from members.

Sorry, not going to do the “your cite doesn’t count because I don’t like some ineffable thing about it” game.

There’s a scientific claim in there; I will freely admit that I don’t know enough about viral genetics to have a valid opinion about it. What I do know is that people disagree about the implication of the furin cleavage site and it’s poor form not to acknowledge that.

Neither of those are definitive sources of evidence. Grant proposals that were denied and statements that the furin site could've evolved naturally or been lab manipulated, aren't really evidence that COVID-19 leaked from a lab.

Definitive proof? No.

Damning evidence? Yes.

It's not damning evidence either.

That’s absurd.

No, absurdity is citing sources that say "maybe it was, maybe it wasn't" then claiming they mean it "definitely was".

I wish I had your faith.

I am not relying on faith, I am reading the cited sources.

definitive sources of evidence ? no statements about furin sites being evidence of a lab leak ? no

But clearly enough for quite a number of people in scientific leadership positions to state publicly that any discussion of a lab leak is a conspiracy theory and to ridicule and censor anyone who thought so.

In fact, these scientific leaders were so good, and so on top of things, that they were able to do the research and examine the evidence, and come up with these strong unequivocal conclusions only a few weeks after covid started to spread worldwide (feb 2020)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

We agree that it's not definitive evidence. You typing a lot of words and citing another non-definitive source doesn't make it more definitive.

Ok, so? This is inference from a bunch of connected but circumstantial evidence.

Can someone explain to me what the harm is in this practice?

Speculate all you want, just don't make definitive claims using non-definitive evidence.

Even if you had literal witnesses it wouldn't be 'definitive' evidence, I'm not sure why you're using this argument as if you can't make claims about things you didn't directly observe.

Well I don't even think there's enough evidence here to win a civil trial where the bar is lower than criminal. Don't act like you have the answer while citing sources that literally say your claim might not be what happened. Y'all just want to jump to a conclusion.

You realise you don't have to agree with everything in a source you cite, right?

Why would I ignore the parts of a cited source they don't agree with or that's counter to the claim being made? You don't think that's important?

Ok…but why is that so important to you? I guess I am trying to understand the motivation behind people who are insisting on splitting hairs to downplay or denigrate the circumstantial evidence that points toward a lab leak.

I mean I can understand if there was an accidental lab leak of an engineered virus that killed millions was created in a Chinese lab with American tax dollars why those involved might want that information suppressed and to go away but why is it important to Klinky to take up that cause?

Regardless of the domain, questions of strength of evidence and strength of conclusions that can be drawn are of general interest to many.

That’s the thing, I am certainly interested if governments are engineering a possible plague and accidentally this plague leaked out and killed many. That has a widespread obvious general interest to the public. What I don’t understand is why laypeople with no connection to the possible groups and government supposedly involved would be motivated to take up the cause against the speculation. What motivates them? I don’t see the general interest value to cause them to choose that side of the debate.

I literally said speculate all you want. Just don't expect your speculation to be magically accepted as truth when that's not what the evidence supports.

Have you spoken about your concerns with your congresspersons & asked them to support bans on risky gain-of-function research? That'd be something tangible you could do than just speculating on top of speculation.

Why deflect here? What is your motivation to discount and argue against using circumstantial evidence to draw a conclusion possibility when neither side of the debate has the definitive evidence that you seek?

Does it somehow bother your politics in some way? Are you just being a contrarian for contrary sake? Your desire for evidential purity in a situation where you are most likely not involved is really strange. I am just interested in why that is. What is motivating you here? Please articulate it.

> discount and argue against using circumstantial evidence

Didn't discount or argue against using circumstantial evidence, nor did I argue against speculating. I am stating the evidence only supports the possibility, it does not prove it happened. Please stop making up false arguments.

>neither side of the debate has the definitive evidence

Agreed.

The original comment you replied made no claim that those two links were definitive proof of a lab leak, only that they were known to be factual. They may be circumstantial but circumstantial evidence can still be provably true. You made the leap to assume that original commenter meant it as definitive proof of a lab leak in your comment.

I read the comment to mean thatit was offered as a strong circumstantial evidence because it was indisputably true due to the public records that support it.

Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin conclusion tend to be pretty specific to use words like “likely” or “probable” because of the lack of definitive evidence. Circumstantial evidence can be powerful, especially when the other side does not have a set of similar or better circumstantial evidence in their favor.

>made no claim that those two links were definitive proof

They implied their confidence through the rhetorical use of "What are the chances?". That was not a genuine question.

> circumstantial evidence can still be provably true

Circumstantial evidence MUST be true to be usable.

The circumstantial evidence provided in the articles was:

- There was a denied research grant that was going to look into modifying the furin site of coronaviruses. It was denied though, and as far as we know, never done.

- The furin site was complex, but could've evolved naturally.

- Some scientists think it could have been of lab origin.

- Some scientists think it could have been zoonotic origin.

All of this is true, but it doesn't mean a lab leak is "probable" or "more than likely".

>Every study I see leaning towards a lab leak origin

So even the studies that lean towards the theory qualify that the evidence is not definitive. We're back where we started.

Definitive or Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: No

Probable or More Likely Than Not: No

A strong possibility: Yes

There is not a consensus on the origin of COVID-19 at this time.

> Have you spoken about your concerns with your congresspersons & asked them to support bans on risky gain-of-function research? That'd be something tangible you could do than just speculating on top of speculation.

US law already bans US funding of gain-of-function research.

Is this true? I saw NIH lifted a moratorium in 2017. There's currently an unpassed bill to stop Fed funding of gain-of-function research. It does not seem banned either completely or from federal funding.

Why is that not important to you? I am not "splitting hairs" or "denigrating" anything. I am reading the sources cited and not jumping to a conclusion. The evidence here probably isn't even enough to win a civil trial.

> What are the chances?

No matter if it was lab leak or not, my problem with the Chinese government is the way they tried to handle it. Can help but draw parallels to the Chernobyl accident.

It does seem odd they would want to set up a lab in close proximity to what they wanted to study

> It does seem odd they would want to set up a lab in close proximity to what they wanted to study

The lab was nowhere near the site of what they were studying.

The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.

Again, none of these viruses have a unique furin cleavage site for ACE-2.

If you read the FOIA document requests, one of the people who got grant money said "I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature . . . it’s stunning. Of course, in the lab it would be easy to generate the perfect 12 base insert that you wanted.”.

This person afterwards did a complete u-turn and signed onto the infamous publication in The Lancet. A lot of people quickly did a u-turn around the exact same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19)

> The lab was nowhere near the site of what they were studying.

> The coronavirus strains came from a cave 600 miles away and brought to Wuhan for further study.

The best theory I've come across is that patient zero was a person collecting bats in caves for the lab in Wuhan. By all records, they wore woefully inadequate PPE (unlike the people in the lab itself who had well-established procedures).

This theory explains the jump from animal to human, the geographic origin, the reason why China didn't allow any outside investigations, and why most geneticists believe it likely had a zoological origin. (Yes, that last bit remains true no matter how badly the conspiracy theorists want it to be false.)

> why most geneticists believe

Whenever I see a claim of this type, I always wonder how you back it up?

I'm not saying that most geneticists don't believe what you're saying, because I have no clue what most members of any profession believe about anything. I have plenty of gut feelings, but how do you go beyond that?

Did you mean most geneticists that you know? That you've seen articles from?

> The best theory I've come across is that patient zero was a person collecting bats in caves for the lab in Wuhan.

There are literally millions of people in China who live in close proximity to bats. You don't have to invoke the 1-in-a-million lab worker here (who will be much more careful than the other 999,999 people, anyways). There are literally people who go shovel bat poop out of caves for a living. Then there are all the millions of farmed animals that have contact with bats - this is how the original SARS got into people.

A lab worker getting infected in a cave and then going back to Wuhan is not the best theory. It's an extremely improbable explanation for the pandemic, when you realize just how much contact people and farmed animals have with bats.

That doesn't really detract from the cluster of coincidences.

Are you saying the virus did not originate from a wet market?

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