by jashkenas on 3/31/22, 6:12 PM with 238 comments
by neonate on 3/31/22, 9:05 PM
by erostrate on 3/31/22, 11:37 PM
- Kristian Andersen offered to abuse his power as editor to stealthily edit a preprint. He is the main author of the most notable paper supporting a natural origin, and has been one of the major resources of the natural origins camp. Now his scientific integrity is seriously questioned.
- Peter Daszak appears much more focused on finding new sources of grant money than on doing good science: "What was needed, he exhorted his staff, was a “change in culture” as “part of [a] mentaility [sic] to get money,”
- The Wuhan Institute of Virology is more of a second zone lab than a top lab: "The WIV was also viewed as subpar, especially when compared with the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. Harbin was China’s Harvard, said the former DARPA official. The WIV was more like a safety school"
- EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak were seen by DARPA as amateurs in virology, not at all the expert frontline organisation that's been suggested before: "EcoHealth Alliance was viewed as a “ragtag group” and a “middle guy,” a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels" "EcoHealth Alliance had “bolted on” a serious scientist, Ralph Baric".
by mardifoufs on 3/31/22, 7:19 PM
Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling
by Imnimo on 3/31/22, 9:49 PM
>From the 75-page proposal, a striking detail stood out: a plan to examine SARS-like bat coronaviruses for furin cleavage sites and possibly insert new ones that would enable them to infect human cells.
>A furin cleavage site is a spot in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. SARS-CoV-2, which emerged more than a year after the DARPA grant was submitted, is notable among SARS-like coronaviruses for having a unique furin cleavage site. This anomaly has led some scientists to consider whether the virus could have emerged from laboratory work gone awry.
Should I interpret it as a would-be unbelievable coincidence that they would be working on the very same furin cleavage site that is unique in CoV-2? Or should I interpret it as obvious - maybe the furin cleavage site is the most important part for infectiousness, and so we should expect any new human-infecting virus to have changes there, and should also expect that to be the area scientists focus on.
Without expert knowledge, I have no way to tell, but it feels like the sort of thing I could very easily interpret incorrectly one way or the other.
by g42gregory on 4/1/22, 4:22 AM
by swamp40 on 3/31/22, 11:26 PM
Wow.
by TeeMassive on 3/31/22, 9:49 PM
Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.
by sethammons on 4/1/22, 1:44 AM
Wow
by macawfish on 3/31/22, 10:37 PM
This article from the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology is also candid and informative: https://www.asbmb.org/asbmb-today/policy/112121/gain-of-func...
There are also clips out there of Ralph Baric talking openly about making modified viruses (can't find it now but I believe he mentions it casually in passing in this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE_H7dTqJXU ).
I guess I get why these researchers are so cagey about sharing in simple terms what they do. The facts have a huge potential to be twisted and weaponized politically in this situation, and I'm sure the rationale for the research is very complicated.
That said in my opinion there needs to be transparency around these kinds of incredibly risky ecological engineering projects.
Another thing,"self-disseminating vaccines": there are researchers who propose the creation and release of engineered viruses in animal populations adjacent to people (to prevent pandemics with zoonotic origins of course!):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self-disseminating+vacc...
It's hard to ignore the double edged sword of research like this though. Is there any question that this "biosecurity" technology has inherently troublesome uses as bioweaponry? The potential for sabotage by misanthropic / malthusian actors is also really unsettling. The game theory involved is probably really gnarly and I can only wonder what twisted offspring of mutually assured destruction intelligence agencies are using to grapple with this stuff, and to rationalize this kind of research.
During the cold war there was a kind of presumption that every life is worth protecting. Unfortunately I have a feeling that with the reality of climate change this belief is not as universal as it once was. I worry that it's quite common for people in positions of power to have Malthusian beliefs about overpopulation and stuff in the face of climate change.
(To be clear, I'm not in any way suggesting covid-19 was intentionally released as a tool of depopulation. I'm making a point about the game theory that has so far prevented nuclear catastrophe... I have trouble seeing what holds it together under the normalization of ethical frameworks that see depopulation as necessary, and wondering how that factors into the chess games that governments, defense agencies and their propagandists are playing right now...)
by swamp40 on 3/31/22, 11:42 PM
> And in September 2019, three months before the officially recognized start of the pandemic, the Wuhan Institute of Virology took down its database of some 22,000 virus samples and sequences, refusing to restore it despite international requests.
by rossdavidh on 3/31/22, 11:42 PM
by CryptoPunk on 4/1/22, 1:07 AM
"COVID-19: Schools for more than 168 million children globally have been completely closed for almost a full year, says UNICEF"
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/schools-more-168-milli...
"30-40 percent of minority and low-income students weren’t learning during lockdowns"
https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/coronavirus-leadi...
"We find that the pandemic led to 97 million more people being in poverty in 2020." - World Bank
https://blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/updated-estimates-impac...
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19 years, the rate of body mass index (BMI) increase approximately doubled during the pandemic compared to a prepandemic period. Persons with prepandemic overweight or obesity and younger school-aged children experienced the largest increases."
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
"Covid-19: Children born during the pandemic score lower on cognitive tests, study finds"
https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2031
And the civil liberties of literally billions of people were curtailed. Just India and China, which both imposed severe lockdowns, collectively have a population of 2.8 billion.
In Canada, thousands of people were locked in their room in their last year of their life:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...
by puffoflogic on 4/1/22, 7:47 AM
It appears the analogy is lost on most people. "Smoking gun" evidence would not be some kind of absolute proof of the virus origins. The whole point of the analogy is that if you find the just-fired gun, and a gunshot victim, you don't need to have seen the actual shot to deduce what happened and with what weapon. In the case of COVID-19, the smoking gun would be the virology lab down the street from the virus epicenter. Of course, smoking guns are rebuttable: there's the possibility that another weapon was involved and all the evidence vanished. But you can't consistently say that there's a smoking gun and yet we lack sufficient evidence. At this point there is sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion, and all that remains is to weigh it.
by alevskaya on 4/1/22, 4:02 AM
A lot of people weren't even on this site back then... but this is exactly like watching the "ClimateGate" scandal play out here on HN over a decade ago, and in fact even involves some of the key players like Matt Ridley! Now, over a decade later, it turns out some messy dendrochronological paleoclimatology did not in fact represent a conspiracy invalidating the entirety of climate research and global warming is an even clearer threat.
In another decade we're going to have a much better understanding of horseshoe bats, asian animal markets, and coronavirus evolution... and not a single one of the breathless accusers involved in these screeds will ever apologize for flogging conspiracy.
Yeah, science is messy, scientists are flawed humans, desperate for money and generally terrified of bad PR and the mob. But the entirety of viral reverse genetics can't be thrown into an ill-defined "GOF" bucket. What constitutes acceptable risk and GOF in these areas has been an active debate in virology for as long as I can remember, and the quality of this dialogue is not going to be aided by this circus.
by josephcsible on 4/1/22, 4:08 AM
It's unethical to do things just because China doesn't want you to do them?
by xdrone on 3/31/22, 11:04 PM
Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.
by gnramires on 4/1/22, 1:44 AM
by kkfx on 4/1/22, 3:39 PM
Please remember a thing: there are thing that can't be really know, even if someone tell the real truth we can't know if that's true or not. While there are other things that can't really be hidden that much, banally by their size, we can't know them at the smallest details perhaps, but we can know enough.
Like we read about "a soldier kill a journalist in a certain place", we can't really know if it's true, if the killer was a soldier and one of witch side etc, even if the real truth is published, even with a non-tempered video of the action appear etc. But we can know that there is a war, that's can't really be hidden or mocked up in the modern world. Again we can't really know what's up in that war but war but we can speculate (in the Latin sense, witch means exploring) who profit, who want what etc.
For covid it's not different. We can't really know it's origin, it's real effects etc, but we can know who profit, and who loose. That's enough to act. The fact that:
- covid is natural
- covid is an artificially modified virus leaked from a lab
- covid is leaked by accident vs on purpose
- ...
does not really matter. What it matter is that "thanks to covid" our western world is far more similar to China after it. That big of IT, between those who have founded covid propaganda, research etc, are between the biggest earners from covid, like big pharma. That's matter because that's not just "good business" form them but a crime. The fact that such crime was crafted on purpose, to what extent, just ridden at the right time does not really makes much differences. Morally, politically, ... it makes big differences but since we can't know that for sure it does not matter, the effects are still the same, and those are what it matter.
Learning this is crucial to be part of a society. We can't know anything, we should master the uncertain part, we can't measure anything, we should master the art of "loose tolerance" etc. The society, the reality is not a computer program, imperative style, we can know just reading source code, it's level of complexity is just too big, and that does not means we can't know anything.
by rvba on 4/3/22, 8:14 PM
There is another building few hundred yards from the market but if you mention this on HN your comment gets flagged (probably by Chinese bots).
by alexklark on 4/1/22, 1:50 AM
by simulate-me on 4/1/22, 1:17 AM
Also troubling are minor details not really related to the main lab-origin theory presented in this article:
> In 2011, two scientists separately announced that they had genetically altered Highly Pathogenic Asian Avian Influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu virus that has killed at least 456 people since 2003. The scientists gave the virus new functions—enabling it to spread efficiently among ferrets, which are genetically closer to humans than mice—as a way to gauge its risks to people. Both studies had received NIH funding.
I'm not saying the NIH is directly responsible for these programs, but it seems prudent to cut back on deadly virus creation.
by cannabis_sam on 4/1/22, 10:50 PM
These people should be named, shamed and shunned, and at the very least, be legally prevented from working with anything vaguely related to biology.
by nl on 3/31/22, 9:48 PM
Fauci was receiving credible death threats and even on this topic thread here there are a number of dead comments with comments similar to (and I quote): Fauci must be executed for us to move forward.
The idea that people voice approval for executing people they disagree with is so repugnant and contrary to the idea of civil discourse I don't find it surprising people start yelling in science meetings about the topic.
by Melatonic on 3/31/22, 11:30 PM
The only other person I found talking about this admittedly far fetched theory was a random Russian comedian - he made some jokes about it and the Russian government IMMEDIATELY came down super hard on him and he had take it all down.
by maxharris on 3/31/22, 6:21 PM