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“This shouldn’t happen”: Inside the virus-hunting nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance

323 points by jashkenas 4y ago

cannabis_sam 4y ago
It’s fucking embarrassing that humanity hasn’t held Peter Daszak and his ilk to account for their consistent lies about the pandemic. These people should be named, shamed and shunned, and at the very least, be legally prevented from working with anything vaguely related to biology.
4tlkjgra 4y ago
mardifoufs 4y ago
>The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research? Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling
- TrispusAttucks 4y ago
  Don't worry we can just change the agency's definition of "gain-of-function" in the continued War on Words.
- travisathougies 4y ago
  No this is not new information. Rand Paul has been on this for a long time, but has been censored from most platforms because of it.
  - naoqj 4y ago
    Wait a few years until you hear about the biochem weapons labs in Ukraine.
    - travisathougies 4y ago
      I'm confused about this comment. The biochem weapons lab in Ukraine are accusations Putin has made but has not substantiated, whereas the GoF research being done in Wuhan is known and there is ample evidence from many sources, including this Vanity Fair article. If you have a problem with the article's contents, please post your own comment on the main feed instead of making snark comments on mine. Thanks.
      - Proven 4y ago
        jazzyjackson 4y ago
        > Hunter Biden's little Ukraine-related consulting business related to biolabs If the Russian defense ministry was a reliable source, Russia might have annexed Ukraine a little sooner. I wouldn't take anything out of state media at their word; I agree NYT can't be trusted, but how is Russia Today better?
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        It's not Star Wars; you don't have to work so hard to cram all the different characters together into one single plotline like this.
        dEnigma 4y ago
        I don't quite understand. Are you saying that Hunter Biden consulted for bio-weapon labs in Ukraine?
        speeder 4y ago
        I believe he is referencing this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Biden-helped-secure-millions-funding-military-biotech-research-program-Ukraine.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...
- nicoburns 4y ago
  No it's not, and yes it is. That these laboratories were (and still are?) doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them - has been known since the start of the pandemic (the results are published in reputable scientific journals, and a lot of the funding came from western medical research bodies). And it's definitely something I think we need to have a societal conversation about. Personally in light of recent events I feel like this is something we probably ought not to be doing.
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Yeah I knew about GoF research but I didn't know they planned on doing it on MERS. Another troubling thing was that they basically ignored the moratorium so even if measures were taken to stop GoF... they were just ignored by using a foreign lab as a loophole? To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us commoners were punished based on the possibility that we could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or completely virus free didn't matter.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Yes, this is where the whole lab leak "conspiracy" came from. The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.
    - ryanobjc 4y ago
      I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here. You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate: - GoF was never banned - The ban was NIH funding GoF - The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways - Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se. - The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done. - Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more. All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it. Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why. Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  A paper from 2008: Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105 One of the listed authors is Ralph Baric.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Coincidentally, the moratorium on gain of function research was dropped during the Trump administration, though I believe funding to Wuhan’s virology institute started in the Obama administration.
- rvba 4y ago
  This is basically bioweapon research, I posted a link about it before and it got flagged.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
rvba 4y ago
> Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a short drive from the WIV itself. 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).
maxharris 4y ago
Has anyone else looked into the things that former EcoHealth Alliance executive Dr. Andrew G. Huff (@aghuff on Twitter) has been saying since October? I am surprised that this article doesn’t even mention him, despite the fact that he worked at EHA for some of the years in question.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  His Twitter thread is a mishmash of the zaniest conspiracy theories imaginable and plenty of concerning paranoia (the government is flying drones around his property to shut him up, "spooks" fired bullets through his mailbox, his vehicles were hacked, Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic viruses, and on and on) along with tons of promotion for his own book "The Truth About Wuhan - How I uncovered the biggest lie in history." He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab.. Doesn't seem like an entirely trustworthy person..
  - georgia_peach 4y ago
    > He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab.. I don't believe a PhD in virology is necessary to understand that this is some risky business. Not being in-line for patent royalties (or retributions--prisoner's dilemma and all that) may have made his lips a little looser than those of his co-workers.
  - president 4y ago
    Would you apologize if you were proven wrong?
    - oh_sigh 4y ago
      You have proof that Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic viruses? That is not any kind of idea I ever entertained in the past, but it is so outrageous that yes, I would apologize to you on behalf of OP if you had proof of it.
4tlkjgra 4y ago
alkjlk43t34t 4y ago
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5lerg45y4y5 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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neonate 4y ago
https://archive.ph/xP8Xx https://archive.ph/xP8Xx
nl 4y ago
Is it any surprise meetings around this topic are contentions? 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.
- 323 4y ago
  Hypothetically speaking, if it is ever proved that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed leaked from a lab, and that the people working there are guilty of gross negligence and the evading of gain of function controls, what do you think the punishment should be? Considering ~20 million world wide excess deaths. Or should they just be forgiven because they were scientists with good intentions.
  - nickff 4y ago
    The even bigger (to me) question would be what level of liability would be attributed to people who granted funding or otherwise supported the work. Would they be charged with 20MM counts of contributory negligence? This situation does seem to have been “foreseeable” in the legal sense.
  - lupire 4y ago
    This wasn't a single scientist or conspiracy, even in the worst case. This was a systemic problem. The US President promoted the virus spread because it hurt NY and NJ more than the South. If you execute everyone negligent, society will collapsed. And then when you look at the negligent executions, more.
  - hallway_monitor 4y ago
    - joebob42 4y ago
      I'm not personally in favor of sizing punishment based on the outcome as opposed to based on the action. I'm not sure how it serves society other than some sort of sense of vindication to kill all these people.
Imnimo 4y ago
A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example: >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.
- 323 4y ago
  Quite a few experts said originally that the furin cleavage site (FCS) is the "smoking gun" evidence that the virus is lab modified. But then other experts said that it's just a coincidence that could arise naturally. Now we learn that EcoHealth had these plans to insert FCS's in viruses, yet they stayed quiet during the whole FCS debate and didn't mentioned it until it was found out from FOIA'd emails. And not only that they didn't mention it, they kept saying it's just a coincidence and to say otherwise is a conspiracy theory.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    part of the claim of the furan cleavage "smoking gun" is that the sequence matches a sequence that was patented by Moderna 3 years before the Covid-19 outbreak (Hoping somebody here can shed further light. I don't want to spread misinformation, and I'm not able to corroborate this myself, so be skeptical; however we have seen a lot information manipulation or suppression in every direction the past few years, so be skeptical in the other direction too) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-lab-leak-fears-study-finds-genetic-code-Covids-spike-protein-linked-Moderna-patent.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-lab-... https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/moderna-patented-cancer-gene-is-in?s=r https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/moderna-patented-cancer-ge...
TeeMassive 4y ago
> Presumably, Daszak possessed a great deal of that inaccessible data. He said as much during a March 2021 panel organized by a London-based think tank: “A lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases.” Previously, EcoHealth Alliance had signed a pledge, along with 57 other scientific and medical organizations, to share data promptly in the event of a global public health emergency. And yet, in the face of just such an emergency, Daszak told Nature magazine, “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.” Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.
- goodluckchuck 4y ago
blurbleblurble 4y ago
The Intercept has published a whole series of articles on this topic, which include leaked emails from people involved: https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/ https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/ 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-function-research-all-in-the-eye-of-the-be 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 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://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self-disseminating+vaccines 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...)
xdrone 4y ago
My occam's razor thoughts. Most bad viri have origins from humans using animals for food. Aids from bushmeat, 1918 pandemic is thought to be from birds, same with the common flu. Just look at the latest bird flu sweeping the world, this one isn't affecting humans, but yet another pandemic from raising animals for food. Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.
- voldacar 4y ago
  Consider the following scenarios from a Bayesian perspective: - an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city - an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses, and multiple years later no animal reservoir of this novel coronavirus has been found, despite the massive incentives for this. In fact they seemingly haven't even been able to fake it by infecting some wild animals deliberately and claiming that they found the zoonotic origin. I could go on and on but I think you get my point
swamp40 4y ago
> In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan. Wow.
- ImaCake 4y ago
  Not wow. This is routine. The NIH has a policy to let researchers delete data from the sequence archive for various reasons. The reason they deleted it is very suspect, but the actual act is unremarkable and doesn’t implicate the NIH.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Why does this policy exist? It seems horrific.
    - luxuryballs 4y ago
      It surely seems like it can only be used for badness.
    - ImaCake 4y ago
      The uploading process is done using code. It is super easy to screw it up especially if you are a trained biologist who learnt some python and bash from some random websites that stole their content from stackoverflow. So the process is there for that. Also likely for retractions where people have uploaded spurious data.
  - a_shovel 4y ago
    This is another reason I'm so skeptical of the lab leak theory. People with no knowledge of epidemiology are willing to portray routine actions as horrific ethical violations, and it's difficult to tell when they are.
    - ImaCake 4y ago
Melatonic 4y ago
I am not usually much of a conspiracy theorist but the giant bioweapons lab explosion in eastern Russia (accidentally caused by huge fires in Siberia) somewhere around November of 2019 always seemed a bit suspect considering the timing. I have not seen anyone else talk or theorize about this at all but given it was the same lab that ended up developing their Covid19 vaccine it seems (maybe) plausible that a virus was leaked during that time. 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.
- blurbleblurble 4y ago
  I personally found the layoff of Dr. Linda Quick from a key CDC position in Beijing in July of 2019 to be pretty suspect: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-... > Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said. It's hard for me to forget the fake Time Magazine cover that the last president had hanging in his golf cabinet. One of the blurbs on it reads "Global Warming: A New Age of Extinction". It creeps me out to think this person who openly subscribes to a "racehorse" theory of eugenics was in charge of the US government during the leadup to the pandemic and during its immediate response. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/time-asks-donald-trump-s-golf-clubs-remove-phony-magazine-n777546 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/time-asks-donald-trump-...
erostrate 4y ago
Some points I found interesting: - 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".
- jhbadger 4y ago
  It's interesting that Harbin became so prominent given its general obscurity otherwise. If you are interested in the history of biology, Harbin during WWII was occupied by the Japanese and was the primary site of their "Unit 731" which focused on biological warfare. Did the Chinese take over their labs post war?
  - thematrixturtle 4y ago
    It seems to be mostly grim coincidence. All the researchers were Japanese, who destroyed everything including the buildings themselves before they left. Most returned to Japan and were granted immunity by the US in exchange for access to their research, a few served short jail terms in the USSR, but none remained behind in China.
- saghm 4y ago
  > a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels I'm not sure why this is supposed to be compelling evidence. Are people who refuse to work unless provided first class plane tickets, meals at Michelin star restaurants, and five-star hotels expected to be more reliable? If anything, I imagine people would be way more willing fudge or flat out lie about their research if they were willing to get that kind of accommodation out of it.
swamp40 4y ago
Another interesting tidbit I'd never heard: > 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.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  This way an early part of the conspiracy theories, but it was subsequently debunked. This was a private database, not meant for the public, but rather for sharing data with colleagues off-site. It actually remained online until early 2020, when the WIV says it came under sustained attack and was taken offline. It should also be noted that this private database was only in existence for a short time period in the first place - less than a year, I believe. I should warn everyone that this is far from the only error in this article. The lab leak theory has become ever more heavily rejected in the scientific community, as more evidence has piled up on various fronts (the early outbreak clustered around the market; two different viral lineages were discovered at the market, including on stalls where wild animals were sold, suggesting that there were multiple spillovers at the market; new viruses have been found in Laos that are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than anything previously discovered). It seems, however, that the lab leakers are making another effort to push their case in the press, for a popular audience that doesn't know better.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
[flagged]
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  Whether it's true or not, it does not justify what Putin is responsible for in Ukraine. (I'm not sure whether your comment was trying to soften the Russian invasion of Ukraine or not, but any attempted justification is no justification at all).
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
    Not to side step into a full on political discussion. The conflict has been going on since 2014. If it did turn out the Ukraine was developing biological weapons to target Russians, it would definitely bolster Putins justification for invading. I'm not sure you though this through. Same way the US used Iraqi mobile labs to justify its invasion and the seeking of regime change in Iraq, with arguably more deadly to civilian tactics like "Shock and Awe".
    - Akronymus 4y ago
      It does not matter what the truth is in this case. Both sides will claim whatever is best for them.
    - drran 4y ago
      RF develops and holds biological weapons, including plague. Moreover, it suspected that SARS-CoV-2 was released from «Vector» BSL4 lab: https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/ https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/ . So, why RF is not nuked yet? Moreover, if biological weapon will target Russians only (by asking them a question in the Russian language, I suppose) then it's completely legal for Ukraine to use such biological weapon to defend itself against Russian aggression. Madness is an important part of MAD.
- fourstar 4y ago
rossdavidh 4y ago
While a good article, the evidence it presents has mostly already been known. What is very interesting, however, is that a publication as mainstream as Vanity Fair is publishing such an article. That, is new, as far as I know.
- strogonoff 4y ago
  It is an interesting world where Vanity Fair publishes diligent reporting that reveals troubling information on the origins of ongoing pandemic (they did it more than once[0]). The reasons might be that it is unaffiliated with scientific community and the editors probably don’t care if they burn a few bridges (it’s not VF’s core topic)—other outlets might be worried of being excluded from information streams and inside scoops for inconvenient reporting that could cost some individuals a lot of money in future grants. As a non-US resident I also feel like there is an unfortunate consequence of political positioning, where the range of viewpoints acceptable to be held by left- and right-aligned US media is seemingly narrowing (so a left-aligned editor would not want to publish something that counters the conventional bat origin theory, and a right-aligned editor may not want to give even more airtime to the problem of COVID that they may consider insignificant), while most media becomes left- or right-aligned. On that note, it is possible VF’s research is also funded by somebody politically aligned in some way and thus interested in exploring this viewpoint. Not to say it is mutually exclusive with truth, from what I read VF’s points are consistent and well-supported. [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... Edit: removed note mistakenly assuming TFA is from 2021.
  - rossdavidh 4y ago
    Your analysis of US newsmedia is spot-on. I take it your own country's newsmedia are not suffering from this (at least as much)? What country would that be, if you don't mind me asking?
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Newsweek and Rolling Stone are the only other mainstream media publications covering it. The Intercept does as well, but I don’t feel that it’s mainstream despite the good reporting.
CryptoPunk 4y ago
Some of the collateral damage from COVID-19: "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-million-children-globally-have-been-completely-closed 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-leading-through-the-crisis/charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal/30-to-40-percent-of-minority-and-low-income-students-werent-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-impact-covid-19-global-poverty-turning-corner-pandemic-2021 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=mm7037a3_w 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 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-confinement-1.5969825 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...
- goldenkey 4y ago
  And last but not least important: Crime soared as masks became normalized. As Vince Staples put it: "No face, no case."
  - relaxing 4y ago
    “Crime soared” is false. Some crimes went up, some crimes went down. The overall rates are very low so small changes make big percentages.
simulate-me 4y ago
After reading this article, it seems that it's much more likely than not that the virus has lab origins. That is crazy, but what's more interesting is how interconnected all the players in this space are. Trump often referred to the virus as the "Chinese Virus" due to his view that the virus originated from the WIV. While it does appear likely that the virus originated in China, it turns out an NIH-funded U.S. NGO was also highly involved? 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.
gnramires 4y ago
I think it's important that we don't, in under any circumstances seek punishment here (if there are culprits). This is too politically charged and complex for that. But we can work to make sure this doesn't happen again (it could be worse next time).
- goldenkey 4y ago
  Yeah, too complex just like the banking crisis of 2008. Let's just bail 'em out... /s
- coolso 4y ago
  I totally agree, President Xi.
- tgv 4y ago
  Steal a purse, get jailed, kill millions of people, and walk scot-free?
  - Symmetry 4y ago
    If you do it accidentally, yes. The reason our airlines are so safe is that even if a lethal crash is due to the error of a pilot or mechanic we don't try to punish them but instead try to improve our systems so that it doesn't happen in the future.
    - spazrunaway 4y ago
      We do punish mechanics and airlines who cause crashes through financially-motivated negligence, though.
sethammons 4y ago
> Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had urged Fauci privately to vigorously investigate both the lab and natural hypotheses. He was then excluded from the ensuing discussions—learning only later that they’d even occurred. “Their goal was to have a single narrative,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. Wow
- tdfx 4y ago
  I'm actually a bit more shocked there's not more outrage coming from mid-level public health practitioners whose jobs will now be that much harder. Through incompetence, failure to admit and clarify mistakes, and deliberate steering of the narrative away from things they didn't want to talk about, this generation of leaders has destroyed the average person's confidence in public health agencies and we will likely feel the effects of this for generations to come.
alexklark 4y ago
Thats cool. Should be my next diy project.
TrispusAttucks 4y ago
alevskaya 4y ago
In the absence of any concrete scientific evidence for a lab leak (and an enormous amount of real, arguably dispositive, evidence against it), I see this doubling-down of articles attacking the character of anyone peripherally involved in work on coronaviruses. There's nothing at all new here. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tloup 4y ago
  I thank you very much for your comment, you summed up my thoughts pretty well.
- bondarchuk 4y ago
  Consider the alternative history where we had always decided that GoF research is not worth the risks. There is a very real possibility that in that universe, we wouldn't have had the coronavirus pandemic with (checks) around 6 million casualties (and counting, and countless other negative effects for billions of people). You need A LOT of high quality results from successful GoF research to make up for that. I'm not familiar with the field at all, but I highly doubt you could point at the complete accumulated body of research resulting from all GoF research everywhere and say that it was worth it.
josephcsible 4y ago
> If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed. It's unethical to do things just because China doesn't want you to do them?
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  Bloom was saying it was unethical to use other scientists' unpublished data. In normal circumstances, that would be heavily frowned upon, and maybe even lead to some sort of censure. Basically, imagine you find out a rival scientific group accidentally made a dataset public. Imagine that you found out how to reverse-engineer an AWS URL at which you could access the data. Now, you analyze this data and publish your own paper on it. Most scientists would view that as a form of theft. In this case, Bloom can say that the data was so much in the public interest that what he did was ethical. However, the data didn't actually shed any light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. I'm inclined to say the way he obtained the data isn't such a big issue, since the raw data itself isn't useful, and because the Chinese team had already published a paper that described the only interesting parts of the data. What I do fault Bloom for is making unfounded accusations against his Chinese colleagues. That's something he should apologize to them for.
g42gregory 4y ago
I just sincerely hope that people remember that the subject of this article was “banned” from all media and social media as recent as 1.5 yrs ago. People got deplatformed and cancelled. And now it turns out to be true. What can we learn from this going forward?
- elSidCampeador 4y ago
  Trust, but verify, I guess?
  - luxuryballs 4y ago
    How about verify until we feel like we can trust again and then keep verifying.
- tomrod 4y ago
  My take: that when the house is on fire, deal with the fire first then the cause of the fire after. Put it on the shelf to deal with the real issues first. Politically, Trump targeted China from the beginning of his race in 2015 and never backed down. We didn't need the further fan geopolitical or realpolitick flames when we needed at least minimal international cooperation. I wish I could trust that people will respond with neighbor-first mentalities when disasters like pandemics arrive. I feel it might be unpopular with the HN crowd, but I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around.
  - pas 4y ago
    what we need is flexibility and good judgment (duh). in a crisis we need coordination and compromise, in "peacetime" we need the opposite. it's hard to give up the simple mantras, but if we want more efficiency we need more complexity in our policies. > I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around. on one hand, that might help to decrease the spread, on the other hand, spending resources on measures that are easy to enforce, but still not terribly effective is a bad trade off. (for example testing a lot more and organizing our life around respecting the result is a lot less draconian than simply shutting everything down, yet these nuances were mostly lost on people.)
puffoflogic 4y ago
> Everyone is looking for a smoking gun 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.
- DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
  You're using "down the street" to mean, "On the other side of a massive city." It's like calling the Bronx "down the street" from JFK International Airport. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is on the other side of Wuhan from the market where the early cases were clustered. That market sold wild animals that are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, and the virus was even found on the exact stalls where those animals were sold. On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with (this was known even before the pandemic), and those viruses are not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. They're not even the closest known relatives - those were found by a French team in Laos.
  - WesternEdge 4y ago
    >On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with They took down their database in September 2019.
    - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
      First of all, I'm talking about the many publications, talks, and NIH-database submissions they made before the pandemic. The viruses that the WIV has worked with are publicly known, because like most scientists, the researchers at the WIV go to great lengths to publicize their work. What you're talking about is a private, password-protected database that was used to share data with off-site collaborators. It was actually available until early 2020, when the WIV says they took it offline because of persistent attacks.
kkfx 4y ago
IMVHO discover the real origin is just a game, we simply can't. What we can instead and the classic cui prodest (who gain) from covid, who pay for it. 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.

323 points by jashkenas 4y ago

It’s fucking embarrassing that humanity hasn’t held Peter Daszak and his ilk to account for their consistent lies about the pandemic. These people should be named, shamed and shunned, and at the very least, be legally prevented from working with anything vaguely related to biology.

4tlkjgra 4y ago

mardifoufs 4y ago

>The report he finally did submit worried the agency’s grant specialists. It stated that scientists planned to create an infectious clone of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus found in dromedaries that had emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and killed 35% of the humans it infected. The report also made clear that the NIH grant had already been used to construct two chimeric coronaviruses similar to the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which emerged in 2002 and went on to cause at least 774 deaths worldwide. (A chimeric virus is one that combines fragments of different viruses.) These revelations prompted the NIH’s grant specialists to ask a critical question: Should the work be subject to a federal moratorium on what was called gain-of-function research? Wait what?! Is this new information ? Because this is incredibly troubling

TrispusAttucks 4y ago
Don't worry we can just change the agency's definition of "gain-of-function" in the continued War on Words.
travisathougies 4y ago
No this is not new information. Rand Paul has been on this for a long time, but has been censored from most platforms because of it.
- naoqj 4y ago
  Wait a few years until you hear about the biochem weapons labs in Ukraine.
  - travisathougies 4y ago
    I'm confused about this comment. The biochem weapons lab in Ukraine are accusations Putin has made but has not substantiated, whereas the GoF research being done in Wuhan is known and there is ample evidence from many sources, including this Vanity Fair article. If you have a problem with the article's contents, please post your own comment on the main feed instead of making snark comments on mine. Thanks.
    - Proven 4y ago
      - jazzyjackson 4y ago
        > Hunter Biden's little Ukraine-related consulting business related to biolabs If the Russian defense ministry was a reliable source, Russia might have annexed Ukraine a little sooner. I wouldn't take anything out of state media at their word; I agree NYT can't be trusted, but how is Russia Today better?
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        It's not Star Wars; you don't have to work so hard to cram all the different characters together into one single plotline like this.
      - dEnigma 4y ago
        I don't quite understand. Are you saying that Hunter Biden consulted for bio-weapon labs in Ukraine?
        speeder 4y ago
        I believe he is referencing this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Biden-helped-secure-millions-funding-military-biotech-research-program-Ukraine.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10652127/Hunter-Bid...
nicoburns 4y ago
No it's not, and yes it is. That these laboratories were (and still are?) doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them - has been known since the start of the pandemic (the results are published in reputable scientific journals, and a lot of the funding came from western medical research bodies). And it's definitely something I think we need to have a societal conversation about. Personally in light of recent events I feel like this is something we probably ought not to be doing.
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Yeah I knew about GoF research but I didn't know they planned on doing it on MERS. Another troubling thing was that they basically ignored the moratorium so even if measures were taken to stop GoF... they were just ignored by using a foreign lab as a loophole? To me it's mind-boggling that you could get arrested and fined for violating covid-related restrictions but people who did much much much more potentially dangerous stuff are not only getting away with it but also kept getting financed by the government. Even if covid turns out to not originate from a lab, just the insane potential risks that came from the blatant violations of the GoF moratorium should have been enough to land people in trouble. Especially since us commoners were punished based on the possibility that we could transmit the virus, whether we were infected or completely virus free didn't matter.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Yes, this is where the whole lab leak "conspiracy" came from. The lab was doing GoF research with bat and pangolin Coronaviruses exploring if the spike protein can be modified to enter through the human ACE2 receptor. There are a number of papers from Ralph Baric and Shi Zhengli on the topic with research done at the Wuhan lab.
  - ryanobjc 4y ago
    I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here. You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate: - GoF was never banned - The ban was NIH funding GoF - The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways - Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se. - The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done. - Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more. All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it. Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why. Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.
blurbleblurble 4y ago
A paper from 2008: Synthetic recombinant bat SARS-like coronavirus is infectious in cultured cells and in mice https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0808116105 One of the listed authors is Ralph Baric.
chaostheory 4y ago
Coincidentally, the moratorium on gain of function research was dropped during the Trump administration, though I believe funding to Wuhan’s virology institute started in the Obama administration.
rvba 4y ago
This is basically bioweapon research, I posted a link about it before and it got flagged.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rvba 4y ago

> Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a short drive from the WIV itself. 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).

maxharris 4y ago

Has anyone else looked into the things that former EcoHealth Alliance executive Dr. Andrew G. Huff (@aghuff on Twitter) has been saying since October? I am surprised that this article doesn’t even mention him, despite the fact that he worked at EHA for some of the years in question.

mikeyouse 4y ago
His Twitter thread is a mishmash of the zaniest conspiracy theories imaginable and plenty of concerning paranoia (the government is flying drones around his property to shut him up, "spooks" fired bullets through his mailbox, his vehicles were hacked, Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic viruses, and on and on) along with tons of promotion for his own book "The Truth About Wuhan - How I uncovered the biggest lie in history." He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab.. Doesn't seem like an entirely trustworthy person..
- georgia_peach 4y ago
  > He seems to have a psychology degree and a public health PhD and was a mid-level manager, who likely wouldn't have any insight at all into the research activities of the lab.. I don't believe a PhD in virology is necessary to understand that this is some risky business. Not being in-line for patent royalties (or retributions--prisoner's dilemma and all that) may have made his lips a little looser than those of his co-workers.
- president 4y ago
  Would you apologize if you were proven wrong?
  - oh_sigh 4y ago
    You have proof that Hunter Biden funded labs in Ukraine to create pandemic viruses? That is not any kind of idea I ever entertained in the past, but it is so outrageous that yes, I would apologize to you on behalf of OP if you had proof of it.

4tlkjgra 4y ago

alkjlk43t34t 4y ago

[dead]

5lerg45y4y5 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

neonate 4y ago

https://archive.ph/xP8Xx https://archive.ph/xP8Xx

nl 4y ago

Is it any surprise meetings around this topic are contentions? 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.

323 4y ago
Hypothetically speaking, if it is ever proved that SARS-CoV-2 was indeed leaked from a lab, and that the people working there are guilty of gross negligence and the evading of gain of function controls, what do you think the punishment should be? Considering ~20 million world wide excess deaths. Or should they just be forgiven because they were scientists with good intentions.
- nickff 4y ago
  The even bigger (to me) question would be what level of liability would be attributed to people who granted funding or otherwise supported the work. Would they be charged with 20MM counts of contributory negligence? This situation does seem to have been “foreseeable” in the legal sense.
- lupire 4y ago
  This wasn't a single scientist or conspiracy, even in the worst case. This was a systemic problem. The US President promoted the virus spread because it hurt NY and NJ more than the South. If you execute everyone negligent, society will collapsed. And then when you look at the negligent executions, more.
- hallway_monitor 4y ago
  - joebob42 4y ago
    I'm not personally in favor of sizing punishment based on the outcome as opposed to based on the action. I'm not sure how it serves society other than some sort of sense of vindication to kill all these people.

Imnimo 4y ago

A lot of this is tough to evaluate as a lay person. For example: >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.

323 4y ago
Quite a few experts said originally that the furin cleavage site (FCS) is the "smoking gun" evidence that the virus is lab modified. But then other experts said that it's just a coincidence that could arise naturally. Now we learn that EcoHealth had these plans to insert FCS's in viruses, yet they stayed quiet during the whole FCS debate and didn't mentioned it until it was found out from FOIA'd emails. And not only that they didn't mention it, they kept saying it's just a coincidence and to say otherwise is a conspiracy theory.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  part of the claim of the furan cleavage "smoking gun" is that the sequence matches a sequence that was patented by Moderna 3 years before the Covid-19 outbreak (Hoping somebody here can shed further light. I don't want to spread misinformation, and I'm not able to corroborate this myself, so be skeptical; however we have seen a lot information manipulation or suppression in every direction the past few years, so be skeptical in the other direction too) https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-lab-leak-fears-study-finds-genetic-code-Covids-spike-protein-linked-Moderna-patent.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542309/Fresh-lab-... https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/moderna-patented-cancer-gene-is-in?s=r https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/moderna-patented-cancer-ge...

TeeMassive 4y ago

> Presumably, Daszak possessed a great deal of that inaccessible data. He said as much during a March 2021 panel organized by a London-based think tank: “A lot of this work has been conducted with EcoHealth Alliance…. We do basically know what’s in those databases.” Previously, EcoHealth Alliance had signed a pledge, along with 57 other scientific and medical organizations, to share data promptly in the event of a global public health emergency. And yet, in the face of just such an emergency, Daszak told Nature magazine, “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.” Even if they fucked up by committing a legitimate mistake doing honest work, the cover-up is a legit conspiracy and downright criminal.

goodluckchuck 4y ago

blurbleblurble 4y ago

The Intercept has published a whole series of articles on this topic, which include leaked emails from people involved: https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/ https://theintercept.com/collections/origins-of-covid/ 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-function-research-all-in-the-eye-of-the-be 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 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://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=self-disseminating+vaccines 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...)

xdrone 4y ago

My occam's razor thoughts. Most bad viri have origins from humans using animals for food. Aids from bushmeat, 1918 pandemic is thought to be from birds, same with the common flu. Just look at the latest bird flu sweeping the world, this one isn't affecting humans, but yet another pandemic from raising animals for food. Most people want to blame a lab, but the obvious answer is more likely imo.

voldacar 4y ago
Consider the following scenarios from a Bayesian perspective: - an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city - an outbreak of a novel virus occurs in a city with a virus lab - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses - an outbreak of a novel coronavirus that is genetically similar to RaTG13 and infects humans through the ACE2 receptor and has a furin cleavage site (not present in RaTG13, SARS, or other similar coronaviruses) occurs in a city with a virus lab that studies coronaviruses under BSL-3 and BSL-2 conditions and contains samples of RaTG13 and conducts gain of function research on coronaviruses collected from the wild, with the goal of creating viruses that can infect human cells through the ACE2 receptor, and is funded by a group (EcoHealth) which has filed grant applications for research that attempts to insert furin cleavage sites into SARS-like bat coronaviruses, and multiple years later no animal reservoir of this novel coronavirus has been found, despite the massive incentives for this. In fact they seemingly haven't even been able to fake it by infecting some wild animals deliberately and claiming that they found the zoonotic origin. I could go on and on but I think you get my point

swamp40 4y ago

> In Bloom’s view, their disappearance raised the possibility that the Chinese government might be trying to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread. Piecing together clues, Bloom established that the NIH itself had deleted the sequences from its own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan. Wow.

ImaCake 4y ago
Not wow. This is routine. The NIH has a policy to let researchers delete data from the sequence archive for various reasons. The reason they deleted it is very suspect, but the actual act is unremarkable and doesn’t implicate the NIH.
- lupire 4y ago
  Why does this policy exist? It seems horrific.
  - luxuryballs 4y ago
    It surely seems like it can only be used for badness.
  - ImaCake 4y ago
    The uploading process is done using code. It is super easy to screw it up especially if you are a trained biologist who learnt some python and bash from some random websites that stole their content from stackoverflow. So the process is there for that. Also likely for retractions where people have uploaded spurious data.
- a_shovel 4y ago
  This is another reason I'm so skeptical of the lab leak theory. People with no knowledge of epidemiology are willing to portray routine actions as horrific ethical violations, and it's difficult to tell when they are.
  - ImaCake 4y ago

Melatonic 4y ago

I am not usually much of a conspiracy theorist but the giant bioweapons lab explosion in eastern Russia (accidentally caused by huge fires in Siberia) somewhere around November of 2019 always seemed a bit suspect considering the timing. I have not seen anyone else talk or theorize about this at all but given it was the same lab that ended up developing their Covid19 vaccine it seems (maybe) plausible that a virus was leaked during that time. 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.

blurbleblurble 4y ago
I personally found the layoff of Dr. Linda Quick from a key CDC position in Beijing in July of 2019 to be pretty suspect: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-cdc-exclusiv/exclusive-u-s-axed-cdc-expert-job-in-china-months-before-virus-outbreak-idUSKBN21910S https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-... > Quick left amid a bitter U.S. trade dispute with China when she learned her federally funded post, officially known as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, would be discontinued as of September, the sources said. It's hard for me to forget the fake Time Magazine cover that the last president had hanging in his golf cabinet. One of the blurbs on it reads "Global Warming: A New Age of Extinction". It creeps me out to think this person who openly subscribes to a "racehorse" theory of eugenics was in charge of the US government during the leadup to the pandemic and during its immediate response. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/time-asks-donald-trump-s-golf-clubs-remove-phony-magazine-n777546 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/time-asks-donald-trump-...

erostrate 4y ago

Some points I found interesting: - 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".

jhbadger 4y ago
It's interesting that Harbin became so prominent given its general obscurity otherwise. If you are interested in the history of biology, Harbin during WWII was occupied by the Japanese and was the primary site of their "Unit 731" which focused on biological warfare. Did the Chinese take over their labs post war?
- thematrixturtle 4y ago
  It seems to be mostly grim coincidence. All the researchers were Japanese, who destroyed everything including the buildings themselves before they left. Most returned to Japan and were granted immunity by the US in exchange for access to their research, a few served short jail terms in the USSR, but none remained behind in China.
saghm 4y ago
> a backseat collaborator willing to get on an Air China jet, eat terrible food, and stay in bad hotels I'm not sure why this is supposed to be compelling evidence. Are people who refuse to work unless provided first class plane tickets, meals at Michelin star restaurants, and five-star hotels expected to be more reliable? If anything, I imagine people would be way more willing fudge or flat out lie about their research if they were willing to get that kind of accommodation out of it.

swamp40 4y ago

Another interesting tidbit I'd never heard: > 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.

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
This way an early part of the conspiracy theories, but it was subsequently debunked. This was a private database, not meant for the public, but rather for sharing data with colleagues off-site. It actually remained online until early 2020, when the WIV says it came under sustained attack and was taken offline. It should also be noted that this private database was only in existence for a short time period in the first place - less than a year, I believe. I should warn everyone that this is far from the only error in this article. The lab leak theory has become ever more heavily rejected in the scientific community, as more evidence has piled up on various fronts (the early outbreak clustered around the market; two different viral lineages were discovered at the market, including on stalls where wild animals were sold, suggesting that there were multiple spillovers at the market; new viruses have been found in Laos that are closer to SARS-CoV-2 than anything previously discovered). It seems, however, that the lab leakers are making another effort to push their case in the press, for a popular audience that doesn't know better.

dukeofdoom 4y ago

[flagged]

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Whether it's true or not, it does not justify what Putin is responsible for in Ukraine. (I'm not sure whether your comment was trying to soften the Russian invasion of Ukraine or not, but any attempted justification is no justification at all).
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Not to side step into a full on political discussion. The conflict has been going on since 2014. If it did turn out the Ukraine was developing biological weapons to target Russians, it would definitely bolster Putins justification for invading. I'm not sure you though this through. Same way the US used Iraqi mobile labs to justify its invasion and the seeking of regime change in Iraq, with arguably more deadly to civilian tactics like "Shock and Awe".
  - Akronymus 4y ago
    It does not matter what the truth is in this case. Both sides will claim whatever is best for them.
  - drran 4y ago
    RF develops and holds biological weapons, including plague. Moreover, it suspected that SARS-CoV-2 was released from «Vector» BSL4 lab: https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/ https://jglobalbiosecurity.com/article/10.31646/gbio.41/ . So, why RF is not nuked yet? Moreover, if biological weapon will target Russians only (by asking them a question in the Russian language, I suppose) then it's completely legal for Ukraine to use such biological weapon to defend itself against Russian aggression. Madness is an important part of MAD.
fourstar 4y ago

rossdavidh 4y ago

While a good article, the evidence it presents has mostly already been known. What is very interesting, however, is that a publication as mainstream as Vanity Fair is publishing such an article. That, is new, as far as I know.

strogonoff 4y ago
It is an interesting world where Vanity Fair publishes diligent reporting that reveals troubling information on the origins of ongoing pandemic (they did it more than once[0]). The reasons might be that it is unaffiliated with scientific community and the editors probably don’t care if they burn a few bridges (it’s not VF’s core topic)—other outlets might be worried of being excluded from information streams and inside scoops for inconvenient reporting that could cost some individuals a lot of money in future grants. As a non-US resident I also feel like there is an unfortunate consequence of political positioning, where the range of viewpoints acceptable to be held by left- and right-aligned US media is seemingly narrowing (so a left-aligned editor would not want to publish something that counters the conventional bat origin theory, and a right-aligned editor may not want to give even more airtime to the problem of COVID that they may consider insignificant), while most media becomes left- or right-aligned. On that note, it is possible VF’s research is also funded by somebody politically aligned in some way and thus interested in exploring this viewpoint. Not to say it is mutually exclusive with truth, from what I read VF’s points are consistent and well-supported. [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-... Edit: removed note mistakenly assuming TFA is from 2021.
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  Your analysis of US newsmedia is spot-on. I take it your own country's newsmedia are not suffering from this (at least as much)? What country would that be, if you don't mind me asking?
chaostheory 4y ago
Newsweek and Rolling Stone are the only other mainstream media publications covering it. The Intercept does as well, but I don’t feel that it’s mainstream despite the good reporting.

CryptoPunk 4y ago

Some of the collateral damage from COVID-19: "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-million-children-globally-have-been-completely-closed 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-leading-through-the-crisis/charting-the-path-to-the-next-normal/30-to-40-percent-of-minority-and-low-income-students-werent-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-impact-covid-19-global-poverty-turning-corner-pandemic-2021 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=mm7037a3_w 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 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-confinement-1.5969825 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...

goldenkey 4y ago
And last but not least important: Crime soared as masks became normalized. As Vince Staples put it: "No face, no case."
- relaxing 4y ago
  “Crime soared” is false. Some crimes went up, some crimes went down. The overall rates are very low so small changes make big percentages.

simulate-me 4y ago

After reading this article, it seems that it's much more likely than not that the virus has lab origins. That is crazy, but what's more interesting is how interconnected all the players in this space are. Trump often referred to the virus as the "Chinese Virus" due to his view that the virus originated from the WIV. While it does appear likely that the virus originated in China, it turns out an NIH-funded U.S. NGO was also highly involved? 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.

gnramires 4y ago

I think it's important that we don't, in under any circumstances seek punishment here (if there are culprits). This is too politically charged and complex for that. But we can work to make sure this doesn't happen again (it could be worse next time).

goldenkey 4y ago
Yeah, too complex just like the banking crisis of 2008. Let's just bail 'em out... /s
coolso 4y ago
I totally agree, President Xi.
tgv 4y ago
Steal a purse, get jailed, kill millions of people, and walk scot-free?
- Symmetry 4y ago
  If you do it accidentally, yes. The reason our airlines are so safe is that even if a lethal crash is due to the error of a pilot or mechanic we don't try to punish them but instead try to improve our systems so that it doesn't happen in the future.
  - spazrunaway 4y ago
    We do punish mechanics and airlines who cause crashes through financially-motivated negligence, though.

sethammons 4y ago

> Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had urged Fauci privately to vigorously investigate both the lab and natural hypotheses. He was then excluded from the ensuing discussions—learning only later that they’d even occurred. “Their goal was to have a single narrative,” Redfield told Vanity Fair. Wow

tdfx 4y ago
I'm actually a bit more shocked there's not more outrage coming from mid-level public health practitioners whose jobs will now be that much harder. Through incompetence, failure to admit and clarify mistakes, and deliberate steering of the narrative away from things they didn't want to talk about, this generation of leaders has destroyed the average person's confidence in public health agencies and we will likely feel the effects of this for generations to come.

alexklark 4y ago

Thats cool. Should be my next diy project.

TrispusAttucks 4y ago

alevskaya 4y ago

In the absence of any concrete scientific evidence for a lab leak (and an enormous amount of real, arguably dispositive, evidence against it), I see this doubling-down of articles attacking the character of anyone peripherally involved in work on coronaviruses. There's nothing at all new here. 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tloup 4y ago
I thank you very much for your comment, you summed up my thoughts pretty well.
bondarchuk 4y ago
Consider the alternative history where we had always decided that GoF research is not worth the risks. There is a very real possibility that in that universe, we wouldn't have had the coronavirus pandemic with (checks) around 6 million casualties (and counting, and countless other negative effects for billions of people). You need A LOT of high quality results from successful GoF research to make up for that. I'm not familiar with the field at all, but I highly doubt you could point at the complete accumulated body of research resulting from all GoF research everywhere and say that it was worth it.

josephcsible 4y ago

> If the Chinese scientists wanted to delete their sequences from the database, which NIH policy entitled them to do, it was unethical for Bloom to analyze them further, he claimed. It's unethical to do things just because China doesn't want you to do them?

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
Bloom was saying it was unethical to use other scientists' unpublished data. In normal circumstances, that would be heavily frowned upon, and maybe even lead to some sort of censure. Basically, imagine you find out a rival scientific group accidentally made a dataset public. Imagine that you found out how to reverse-engineer an AWS URL at which you could access the data. Now, you analyze this data and publish your own paper on it. Most scientists would view that as a form of theft. In this case, Bloom can say that the data was so much in the public interest that what he did was ethical. However, the data didn't actually shed any light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. I'm inclined to say the way he obtained the data isn't such a big issue, since the raw data itself isn't useful, and because the Chinese team had already published a paper that described the only interesting parts of the data. What I do fault Bloom for is making unfounded accusations against his Chinese colleagues. That's something he should apologize to them for.

g42gregory 4y ago

I just sincerely hope that people remember that the subject of this article was “banned” from all media and social media as recent as 1.5 yrs ago. People got deplatformed and cancelled. And now it turns out to be true. What can we learn from this going forward?

elSidCampeador 4y ago
Trust, but verify, I guess?
- luxuryballs 4y ago
  How about verify until we feel like we can trust again and then keep verifying.
tomrod 4y ago
My take: that when the house is on fire, deal with the fire first then the cause of the fire after. Put it on the shelf to deal with the real issues first. Politically, Trump targeted China from the beginning of his race in 2015 and never backed down. We didn't need the further fan geopolitical or realpolitick flames when we needed at least minimal international cooperation. I wish I could trust that people will respond with neighbor-first mentalities when disasters like pandemics arrive. I feel it might be unpopular with the HN crowd, but I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around.
- pas 4y ago
  what we need is flexibility and good judgment (duh). in a crisis we need coordination and compromise, in "peacetime" we need the opposite. it's hard to give up the simple mantras, but if we want more efficiency we need more complexity in our policies. > I believe the anti-public health measures tantrum will be used to justify a lot more draconian measures when the next global disaster comes around. on one hand, that might help to decrease the spread, on the other hand, spending resources on measures that are easy to enforce, but still not terribly effective is a bad trade off. (for example testing a lot more and organizing our life around respecting the result is a lot less draconian than simply shutting everything down, yet these nuances were mostly lost on people.)

puffoflogic 4y ago

> Everyone is looking for a smoking gun 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.

DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
You're using "down the street" to mean, "On the other side of a massive city." It's like calling the Bronx "down the street" from JFK International Airport. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is on the other side of Wuhan from the market where the early cases were clustered. That market sold wild animals that are known to be susceptible to SARS-CoV-2, and the virus was even found on the exact stalls where those animals were sold. On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with (this was known even before the pandemic), and those viruses are not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2. They're not even the closest known relatives - those were found by a French team in Laos.
- WesternEdge 4y ago
  >On the other hand, it's public knowledge which viruses the WIV has been working with They took down their database in September 2019.
  - DiogenesKynikos 4y ago
    First of all, I'm talking about the many publications, talks, and NIH-database submissions they made before the pandemic. The viruses that the WIV has worked with are publicly known, because like most scientists, the researchers at the WIV go to great lengths to publicize their work. What you're talking about is a private, password-protected database that was used to share data with off-site collaborators. It was actually available until early 2020, when the WIV says they took it offline because of persistent attacks.

kkfx 4y ago

IMVHO discover the real origin is just a game, we simply can't. What we can instead and the classic cui prodest (who gain) from covid, who pay for it. 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.