The workers at the lab "were tested and there was no evidence found of Covid antibodies."
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-repo...
So theoretically it's possible that three workers at the lab were sick -- and hospitalized -- but with, say the seasonal flu. The original reports from the State Department about this even specified that the workers had been sick with symptoms "consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
This ACE2 binding is causing numerous issues, including damage to human heart, lung, kidney, and pancreatic cell death.
This is serious stuff. If anyone is looking at the "low" mortality rate, they are missing the big picture.
Role of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) in COVID-19
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7356137/
The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 does not rule out a laboratory origin
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/
SARS-CoV-2 infects human pancreatic β-cells and elicits β-cell impairment
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(21)...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
The disclosure of the number of researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organization’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into COVID-19’s origins.
It is just me, or does it seem suspicious to anyone that this information existed, and wasn't reported in 2019 or 2020, or even in early 2021....but only just reached the press on the very evening of the WHO meeting.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_synd...
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-report-of-illnesses-at...
This is a dangerous difference.
> SARS-CoV recognizes angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) as its receptor, whereas MERS-CoV recognizes dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) as its receptor.
Further, the researchers were surely in the 18-49 age bracket. CDC’s estimates for the 2017-18 flu season in that age bracket were 58.8 per 100,000. That is 0.0588% per person per year.
And that’s the whole flu season. To have odds of being hospitalized in november you’d cut that in four at least.
And then the odds of three people in the same lab all needing hospitalization also needing hospital treatment? Even less likely.
Not impossible, but it’s not so simple as suggesting there was a bad flu season. There wasn’t in china then, and flu hospitalization is damned rare in non elderly.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
(It is possible that the “hospital care” in the article doesn’t match “hospitalization” as cdc defines it, but any kind of hospital care for a young person from the flu is still rare)
For those that have run out of free articles.
Edit: Here's the WSJ article.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27184998 - May 2021 (235 comments)
More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27160898 - May 2021 (341 comments)
The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27071432 - May 2021 (537 comments)
Edit: also these:
Scientists who say the lab-leak hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 shouldn't be ruled out - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26750452 - April 2021 (618 comments)
Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540458 - March 2021 (985 comments)
The Lab Leak Hypothesis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25640323 - Jan 2021 (229 comments)
https://twitter.com/ZichenWanghere/status/139663272094448435...
It is an old story. Published earlier by Sputnik News last year. Got an official response. And the source is a mistranslated document (samples of sick human misread as sick employees).
> Here we show that SARS-CoV, but not HCoV-NL63, utilizes the enzymatic activity of the cysteine protease cathepsin L to infect ACE2-expressing cells.
Dr Fauci recklessly claimed in May 2020 that it's "very, very strongly" impossible for this to have come from a lab. [1]
When will public officials actually be held to account for their flip flopping, often times leading to massive distrust from the population and killing people?
How many people are refusing vaccines because officials like Dr Fauci have lied repeatedly?
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/05/politics/fauci-trump-coro...
IIRC, public toilets due to fecal matter were a possible infection vector (I hope I am using the term correctly) [4], which suggests that there had been covid cases since December in Italy as the traces were in waste water [2,3].
Some hypothesise that covid had been circulating in humans long before the market outbreak [5], this hypothesis does seem to corroborate the hypothesis that the virus had long spread before the first 'official' outbreak in Wuhan.
[1] https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20210311-surprises-about-french...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/coronavirus-...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiegold/2020/06/18/new-scient...
[5] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/mar-27-covid-pandemic-origin...
"Steven Quay, a physician-researcher, has applied statistical and bioinformatic tools to ingenious explorations of the virus’s origin, showing for instance how the hospitals receiving the early patients are clustered along the Wuhan №2 subway line which connects the Institute of Virology at one end with the international airport at the other, the perfect conveyor belt for distributing the virus from lab to globe."
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...
(third to last paragraph)
I'm not ignoring their first sentence. I'm explaining that their first sentence is wrong, and that isn't changed by looking at US figures for the year before.
China doesn't follow normal flu seasonal patterns. Instead of a single winter peak China sees flu all year with dual peaks in summer and winter - and the summer peak is higher. Flu starts in the south of China, and moves north over the year.
This particular type of flu was early, not just in Australia but world wide.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/inf...
> The season has started slightly earlier than usual. It is too soon to predict how the season will develop in terms of peak week, severity and duration.
About severity: we can look at death. This flu season showed increased mortality. And we can look at hospitalisation. It had increased rates of hospitalisation. We can look at ages affected: some strains affected younger people.
> A(H3N2) is typically associated with serious health impact in older age groups.Some countries, such as the United Kingdom, are already seeing increased rates of influenza hospitalisation. There is no evidence of significant excess mortality at this early stage, however experience during past seasons suggests a significant mortality impact on the elderly during A(H3N2) dominated seasons.
> B virus circulation might be associated with a higher burden on younger age groups, as already observed in Portugal.
I know flu strains differ year to year - that's the point. The world pays attention to the flu in Australia because that tends to predict the strains in flu seasons elsewhere. This is part of the flu surveillance work to develop seasonal flu vaccines. This flu surveillance recommended that the vaccination included Australia strains:
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/who-recommendation...
> On 18–20 February 2019 in Beijing, China, the World Health Organization (WHO) agreed on the recommended composition of the quadrivalent influenza vaccine for the northern hemisphere 2019–2020 influenza season: an A/Brisbane/02/2018 (H1N1)pdm09-like virus, a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus (B/Victoria/2/87 lineage), a B/Phuket/3073/2013-like virus (B/Yamagata/16/88 lineage) and an A(H3N2) virus component to be announced on 21 March 2019. The recommendation for the A(H3N2) component was postponed in light of recent changes in the proportions of genetically and antigenically diverse A(H3N2) viruses to allow more time for the selection of the appropriate virus strain. It is recommended that the influenza B virus component of trivalent vaccines for use in the 2019–2020 northern hemisphere influenza season be a B/Colorado/06/2017-like virus of B/Victoria/2/87-lineage.
My point is that there was a severe flu strain in Australia in 2019; this strain started making its way around the world; it would be unsurprising to see it in China at the time the article talks about; and that talking about the US stats for 2018 mean nothing because that was a different flu season with different flu strains.
Edit: reference for cave samples
> The closest wild strain of CoVID happens in bats living thousand kilometres from Wuhan
That's weak evidence to claim that the lab hypothesis is more likely or even just to claim that the virus in humans originates from Wuhan.
Wuhan is a transport hub within China. In relation to dates it might be worth taking into account that hundreds of millions of Chinese travel around the country in early October and that the outbreak in Wuhan was detected in November/December. Coincidence? maybe, maybe not.
Additionally, we can also look at SARS (i.e. SARS-Cov-1, while Covid-19 is SARS-Cov-2): That epidemic started with an outbreak in Guangdong province in November 2002 (again, note the relative proximity with early October). Since then the origin of the virus has been traced to a colony of bats in Yunnan province [1] (perhaps also worth noting that this took 15 years). If you look at the map that is quite far away (1000+ km) and domestic transport networks have vastly improved since then.
Based on this, I don't see why the exact same scenario as the beginning of SARS would not be the more likely explanation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
For all of China, in November 2019, it looks like less than 2000 positive test swabs. The number of hospitalizations would be lower.
What are the odds that three hospitalizations would come from a single lab in healthy people? Not impossible, but not probable. Flu hospitalizations are very much clustered in the elderly and very young.
How about those several million minks in Denmark?
https://www.who.int/csr/don/03-december-2020-mink-associated...
Edit: it is factually true to say Trump lied in manipulative ways constantly, and easy to confirm. This is not a partisan statement, it’s a fact that can be checked. Here are 5276 examples: https://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/
Yes, most definitely. Over many generations. They're the same species as wild minks, but domesticated (just as dogs are same species as wolves, but domesticated).
And the scientific community agrees. For example, see this paper: https://bioone.org/journals/wildlife-biology/volume-15/issue...
It's true that they've not been domesticated as long as dogs, for example, but there are clear morphological differences between the two.
Most importantly for our conversation, infectious diseases can behave very differently in wild and domestic populations, for reasons of population density, immune status, etc.
A good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Criticism_and_d...
The gist is that in the 80s nuclear winter was portrayed as apocalyptic by Carl Sagan and others using shoddy models in order to advance an arms control agenda. More recent work depicts far more modest climactic effects that are highly variable based on the season the nuclear war would occur in (worst in the summer, very modest to non-existent in the winter). The issue seems to be not so much the bombs themselves; but how cities burn, how much soot would be produced, and how it would move through the atmosphere.
This is also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in.... Sagan's nuclear-winter modeling team predicted in 1990 that 100 oil well fires would produce a small-scale global nuclear winter. In 1991 Iraq started 800 oil well fires, which caused no such thing. The only effects were localized and stopped soon after the fires were put out.
Here's the US Dept of State "Fact Sheet" for Jan 15, 2021, which (previously disclosed) states much of the same info that WSJ is now just getting to 4+ months later and reporting it as "news": https://2017-2021.state.gov/fact-sheet-activity-at-the-wuhan...
> DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project will examine the risk of future coronavirus (CoV) emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China, molecular characterization of novel CoVs and host receptor binding domain genes, mathematical models of transmission and evolution, and in vitro and in vivo laboratory studies of host range. Zoonotic CoVs are a significant threat to global health, as demonstrated with the emergence of pandemic severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in China in 2002, and the recent and ongoing emergence of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV). Bats appear to be the natural reservoir of these viruses, and hundreds of novel bat-CoVs have been discovered in the last two decades. Bats, and other wildlife species, are hunted, traded, butchered and consumed across Asia, creating a large scale human-wildlife interface, and high risk of future emergence of novel CoVs. This project aims to understand what factors increase the risk of the next CoV emerging in people by studying CoV diversity in a critical zoonotic reservoir (bats), at sites of high risk for emergence (wildlife markets) in an emerging disease hotspot (China).
For a novel coronavirus to emerge in the part of the world containing the institute is not sufficient to implicate them. They are set up to do research in that part of the world, because such viruses are known emerge in such places. And yes, their research involved a lot of testing and categorization that requires some proximity to the wildlife and markets.
> The three specific aims of this project are to: 1. Assess CoV spillover potential at high risk human-wildlife interfaces in China. This will include quantifying he nature and frequency of contact people have with bats and other wildlife; serological and molecular screening of people working in wet markets and highly exposed to wildlife; screening wild-caught and market sampled bats from 30+ species for CoVs using molecular assays; and genomic characterization and isolation of novel CoVs.
And Daszak's role as part of the WHO investigation is similarly plausible. If you (unwisely, but just as a thought experiment) assume for a moment that it is impossible for the source to be a lab leak, he would be a perfect choice -- he is connected to some of the most relevant and nearby research!
I am supportive of further/proper investigation into the lab leak hypothesis, and do think some degree of public and political pressure is required.
But the tenor of the "lab leak" conversation I have with friends and that I see online (including here) is more like that of Russiagate (a mostly unsubstantiated, years long, liberal media conspiracy theory). Alternatively, it's like the idea that Iraq had WMD (some plausible concern, but info published from unnamed intelligence sources, using tiny amounts of raw and unverified intelligence data, taken from the least trustworthy informants imaginable, all to satisfy a pre-existing conservative grudge). I have seen people say the lab leak story reminds them of the doubts about WMD in Iraq, which is ironic, because again, I see it as more like the invention of WMD in Iraq.
[1] https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
It was a conspiracy theory, and it may still be, because the WSJ only mentions that lab workers were "ill" and presented symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19, which could be... really anything. The main strain of the flu in 2019 was H1N1. It could have been that. It may not have been. We don't know yet.
I don't think there is anything wrong about "mocking" people for peddling conspiracy theories with zero evidence. Let's be honest, even if some of their ideas end up being true, it would have been just a coincidence. It's like arriving to the correct solution to a math problem, but through a completely wrong process.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27254877
>> [Damore] argued that biological differences and not a lack of opportunity explained the shortage of women in upper-tier positions.
> This is an unfortunate way of characterizing Damore’s argument. It’s technically true in that Damore IIRC was arguing that there was more variation among men than women (more men at the top and at the bottom but fewer in the middle, but Google hires from the top hence more men). So yeah, technically biological differences, but when the average person hears that they’re going to assume he was arguing that women in general are dumber than men in general or some such. That said, this also represents much more earnest coverage of Damore considering the initial coverage overtly lied on many accounts (calling it an anti diversity screed, claiming he sent it as a memo to the company, etc).
The 2004 SARS was suspected to be lab leak. (I'm not sure if this conclusion has been revised since.)
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-killer-virus-chi...
Yes. These medical researchers are very good and very persistent so I trust them to do their detective work. They have always been my heroes.
For example, a recent claim is that they have found the earliest case of AIDS/HIV in humans. An excerpt:
"^By DANIEL Q. HANEY, AP Medical Editor, CHICAGO (AP)
Scientists have pinpointed what is believed to be the earliest known case of AIDS an African man who died in 1959 and say the discovery suggests the virus first infected people in the 1940s or early '50s...
The virus in the sample had degraded, but the scientists were able to isolate four small fragments of two viral genes. One gene holds instructions for assembling the outer coat of the virus, while the other is code for one of the proteins the virus needs to reproduce...
HIV mutates quickly. About 1 percent of its genetic material changes each year. So the scientists compared the genes from the 39-year-old sample of HIV with those carried by current versions of HIV."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-earliest-aids-case/
Take time to read the (short) article. It is a credit to our medical/biomedical scientific researchers and explorers and a glowing tribute to what good science can do.
Even that I'm not so sure about. This is a collection of all the HCQ studies: https://c19hcq.com/
Early treatment at lower dosages (lower compared to the "negative results" studies) seems to show positive results pretty consistently.
In any case, I can tell you that there was a definite narrative in the media that the lab escape scenario was not only very unlikely, but "xenophobic" and "conspiratorial".
Perhaps the most telling example of all my links below is this one, which is very open to the possibility of a lab escape. The latter half of the article is full of example of the efforts of the media and scientific establishment (for whatever reason, mostly political) to quash the lab escape hypothesis. One key quote:
"Antonio Regalado, biomedicine editor of MIT Technology Review, put it more bluntly. If it turned out COVID-19 came from a lab, he tweeted, 'it would shatter the scientific edifice top to bottom.'"
Article:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2020/09/09/alina-chan-br...
And here is a handful of links, of many:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/01/could-covid-19...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/lab-leak-coronavirus-t...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/04/politics/coronavirus-intellig...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavi...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-much-more-lik...
The genii is out of the bottle so ending biological weapons research will never happen. If we aren't hit by a nation-state using biological warfare then we'll be hit by someone who does biochem in his garage for fun.
The best strategy is to advance the research while taking such steps as creating super-vaccines to make this type of biowarfare obsolete:
https://weather.com/en-IN/india/coronavirus/news/2021-04-21-...
But that also moves us one step closer to the "grey goo" scenario:
Not the exact term itself, but the significancy of it. The "lying press" is a pejorative used since at least the XIX century [1].
Are we looking for 100% reliability here? Then, yes, we could call the NYT or the WP "fake news". But that is just hyperbole, directed at creating doubt and uncertainty where it does not exist. Once Trump followers had a excuse to label the NYT as "partisan" or "fake", it was easy for Trump to steer the narrative any way he wanted.
"Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/16/tom-cotto...
While one might say that the same thing was happening in the market via natural gene replication and disease transmission, don't you think that someone intentionally altering parts of genes with the sole purpose of "gain-of-function" (making a more deadly virus) would be more likely to generate something like Covid-19 than a fishmonger who slaps another tilapia onto the ice?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gain+of+function
""Gain-of-function" is the euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research is government funded; its focus is on enhancing the pathogens' ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=gain+of+function&t=opera&ia=web&ia..."
Consider thalidomide:
https://helix.northwestern.edu/article/thalidomide-tragedy-l...
HN's front page is mostly determined by a tug of war between upvotes and flags [1]. It's common, indeed typical, for a sensational story to get a lot of initial upvotes, make the front page, and then provoke a "WTF why is this on HN" reaction from others, who flag it. With enough of the latter, the story falls off the front page, leading to a wave of "WTF why is HN censoring this story" from the first crowd. This is the cycle of life on HN. Recent example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27240048.
We do sometimes intervene to switch off flags, but only when a story is intellectually interesting and contains enough significant new information (SNI) to create conditions for a substantive discussion [2]. I considered doing that in this case but decided not to, because (a) it's not obvious that this is SNI, and (b) there have been several lab-leak threads recently. The most important thing to understand is that interestingness decays under repetition [3, 4].
If there hadn't been major threads on the topic recently, would we have turned off flags on this one? Well, the odds of that would be higher—but I still think probably not, because the new information in the story probably isn't enough to support a substantive discussion. If you look at those past discussions, you'll notice that in nearly all the cases, the articles themselves were among the most substantive ones that exist on the topic, and in most cases included SNI.
My GP comment had two purposes: it points people to interesting relevant discussions, but it also pre-empts the objection "WTF why is HN censoring this story". Users who post the latter have usually not yet learned to use the search box at the bottom of every page: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
"In 1990 she was offered a tenure track position at the University of Pennsylvania. Around this time, a different group of researchers developed a technique for injecting mice with RNA in such a way that those mice started to produce the proteins encoded by the RNA. [...] After six years of work at the University of Pennsylvania, due in part to a lack of interest from funding agencies in supporting her work, Karikó was demoted from her tenure track position. This type of demotion generally leads to the end of a scientific career. In the same year, she was treated for cancer and her husband encountered a visa problem, leaving him temporarily stuck in Hungary."
https://www.advancedsciencenews.com/pioneers-in-science-kata...
The main peer reviewed gain of function research cited is https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 done in 2015 in the US with one of the researchers being Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan lab.
I'm not sure there are any papers on gain of function research done in Wuhan?
You might want to check that. Afaik, it is 4 months .
(read comments below, I may or may not be correct. Sars1 has been found in Civets, bats and humans. We do not yet know the order of transmission and if civets were indeed the intermediate source.)
It took less than 4 months (feb 2003 -> May 2003) from identifying SARS1 as a novel virus to finding the intermediate animal (civet cats) [1] . It took 10 months to identify that for MERS. (Sept 2012 -> August 2013)
Given that we know it originated in Wuhan, have dedicated order of magnitude more funding to it and all the usual suspects have come up as a negative, the lab escape hypothesis does look increasingly more likely.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_respiratory_syndro...
You might want to check THAT out.
They found other species could be infected with SARS-CoV-1 after 4 months and hypothesized that civet cats were the intermediate species, but that still hasn't been proven yet.
After the discovery of SARS-like WIV1 in bats in Yunnan in 2013 it was determined in 2016 that WIV1 or a very closely related virus may have jumped directly to humans:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_SARS-like_coronavirus_WIV1
And specifically reference 4:
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/11/3048
"Both full-length and chimeric WIV1-CoV readily replicated efficiently in human airway cultures and in vivo, suggesting capability of direct transmission to humans."
So we STILL don't quite understand the origin of SARS1 and if it used an intermediate species or not.
There's still a very similar mystery as to how the closest animal coronavirus is found in a bat in Yunnan, but it showed up in humans in Guangdong roughly 700 miles away (but since it was in 2003 and there's no biological lab in Guangdong there's no competing lab-leak hypothesis over SARS1, even though the observation is exactly the same).
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2014/8/2/this-keller...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/23/politics/us-intelligence-repo...
It just seems weird to me that that's not a part of the media's discussion of this.
https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-peop...
He suggested that the virus may have come from the Wuhan lab.
NYT slammed him for this "fringe theory" in February 2020:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27089774
Washington Examiner does not have the pedigree of a NYT but the writer discussed in that piece wrote for NYT and Science. I think it is a topic is noxious hence I will flag it thing. :shrug: