Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

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hn_throwaway_99

I completely disagree with your characterization of this example, and on the contrary I think your example perfectly shows how "follow the incentives" gives you truer, clearer understanding of what happened:

1. If you dug in to the authors of the now infamous Lancet letter ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_(COVID-19) ), you could see how they had huge conflicts of interests.

2. Early on in the pandemic, you could see how some people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence (e.g. "The China Virus"). On the flip side, though, I think you had a lot of people pushing against this who felt that any acknowledgement of a potential lab leak was playing into "conspiracy theories". So my point is that you have to trace incentives on both sides, and both sides had incentives that were actually against finding the actual truth.

3. I think the other thing that is extremely important is to realize that nearly all humans prefer some explanation to "I don't know". Even today you see people on both sides of the Covid origins debate who are adamant their position is right, when I think the real situation is more "Some lab leak or escaped zoonotic virus being studied by a lab is more likely than not". So early on in the pandemic, you had people confidently proclaiming their personal theories as facts that weren't backed up by evidence. And importantly, the truth nearly always eventually comes out. You say "that hypothesis was totally suppressed for the mainstream media for about 2 years". That timeline is wrong, there were lots of things being reported in early 2021 about a potential lab leak - this article that summarizes the state of reporting is from June 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-media-cal...

I agree with #1 and #3, but in trying to be overly fair, you're leaving out some important details in #2.

people went to a lab leak (intentional or not) theory very quickly with no evidence

It was known at the time that the Wuhan lab was studying coronavirus, and known they had both safety and security lapses. That is far from proof, but it is evidence.

Also, the incentive was to blame China was mixed. At the time, Xi had recently the US, and both sides were advancing a trade deal. It was a moment the US govt was trying to improve relations, and particularly get US agricultural sales to China boosted. The lab leak talk was tamped down for months. It wasn't until March that you had US officials really start to talk about it.

The lab wasn’t just studying coronaviruses. The director had intimate knowledge of gain-of-function techniques, with publications and grant proposals to document this. Some of the research was published during her tenure at the lab, so it can be assumed that the research was performed there.

From what I know you’re mischaracterizing the research.

To the extent that they were looking at gain of function, they were also looking at loss of function. My understanding is that the research was looking at how random point mutation affect infectivity, both positively and negatively.

They were using also using virus evolutionary pretty distant from covid 19.

There are corona viruses present in species in the wet market that were much closer to covid 19. (eg pangolin caron’s viruses)

Blaming the wuhan lab is like finding that your child has been eaten by a tiger and the blaming a house cat breeder on the other side of town.

The WIV had the largest program in the world to sample novel sarbecoviruses from nature. At the beginning of the pandemic, the published virus closest to SARS-CoV-2 (RaTG13) was from the WIV. Closer viruses (BANAL) have since been published, by a different group but from areas where the WIV was also recently sampling.

There's no serious question that the WIV has unpublished viruses--even with no attempt at secrecy, every active research group has unpublished work. Researchers found an unpublished merbecovirus in contamination from shared equipment. This isn't related to SARS-CoV-2, but shows the claim that the WIV had zero unpublished viruses to be specifically false. Public access to the WIV's database of viral genomes was removed early in the pandemic, and never restored.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2

Pangolins were initially proposed as the proximal host, but that's been abandoned for years. After a long delay, the paper in Nature was extensively corrected, following Alina Chan's discovery that the alleged multiple samples were all from a single batch of smuggled pangolins. These were probably infected during trafficking, in the same way that housecats are sometimes infected by SARS-CoV-2 but aren't the source.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2313-x

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v2

The goal of research like DEFUSE was gain of function, a deadlier or faster-spreading virus. That goal wasn't always successfully achieved, but that's true for all goals. The point is that skilled researchers specifically trying to achieve a goal (like by directed evolution during serial passage, or by genetic engineering) are much more likely to do so than would random point mutations alone.

None of this means it's certain that SARS-CoV-2 arose from an accident at the WIV. The picture that you've received isn't accurate, though.

I agree, just not sure when the gain-of-function information really came out. It was being denied in congressional hearing pretty late in the process. The early speculation about the lab may not have been based on that knowledge.

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