Coronavirus

Out of context: Reply #5427

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  • yuekit2

    I always thought the irony in all this debate over SARS 2 origins is that the "lab leak" is depicted as this apocalyptic scenario. When in reality it would probably be the easier problem to solve. Lab safety regulations can be rewritten, certain kinds of research can be banned.

    But if there are thousands of similar viruses floating around in nature and constantly recombining...as seems likely...and humans are cutting down forests on an industrial scale and hunting wildlife to extinction in exactly the part of the world where these viruses are known to circulate...good luck! There will almost certainly be another outbreak within our lifetimes.

    yuekit 2Permalink
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    • I should dispute all this, but I just don't feel like it anymore...grafician
    • Will just say that just because these viruses are present in wildlife doesn't mean they can jump easily to humans! that's the trick pony you nudge in a lab to..grafician
    • ....to see "what if"

      then if that leaks - the world, beware      grafician
    • IF the virus started in Laos, it would be very fast stopped but it originated in China - the worst of all places and here we are...grafician
    • But viruses do jump to humans all the time right? SARS1, MERS, Nipah virus, Ebola and many more...just within the past few decades.yuekit
    • Wuhan institute was collecting samples from bats in Laoskingsteven
    • I mean, not that natural transfer isn't possible but that was in the documents released a few weeks ago (freedom of info request on programmes funded by US)...kingsteven
    • @grafician Laos is one of the poorest, most undeveloped states in Asia and quickly becoming a client state of China.yuekit
    • It would be entirely unsurprising if a new virus began circulating in Laos or Cambodia or Southern China and no one noticed.yuekit
    • Yes yuekit they sometimes jump, but we squash easily the outbreaks as there are no coverups, no delays, etc. we let science work, but not this time with Chinagrafician
    • Official numbers are over 4M dead, but probably the real numbers are over 20M by now and counting...massive waste of life that could've been preventedgrafician
    • Well yeah exactly...we have no idea how many died, in places like rural India it could be underestimated by millions.yuekit
    • But people think an unknown virus with symptoms similar to other diseases would be picked up by a developing world government?yuekit
    • I'm not saying this completely rules out lab leak, but that part never made sense to me.yuekit
    • i've always suspected the conflation of 'lab-leak' and 'lab created' in the media as part of a move to discredit the idea of accidental release from WIVkingsteven
    • Yeah I get what you're saying...it was definitely conflated by the media back when they just wanted to dismiss it entirely.yuekit
    • The thing about WIV collecting samples from Laos or elsewhere is that very few of them will result in an actual live virus capable of infecting people.yuekit
    • https://twitter.com/…yuekit
    • yep, that's what i'm suggesting. the virus collection would have been a few years before so it would have to be... i doubt we will ever know if that's the casekingsteven
    • but i don't think until we trace the mutations between a bat virus in Laos and Wuhan through other means there's sufficient evidence to rule it outkingsteven
    • The research was only BSL-2 level labs and the database of collected bat viruses (incl. Laos) was dumped in September 2019 is a smoking gunkingsteven
    • ie. gain of function research would have been high security and authorised by FDA. to study and create cultures of stored viruses... that's everyday lab workkingsteven
    • I think what she’s saying is that most of these samples are just some genetic material. It’s not the same thing as having a collection of live viruses, and inyuekit
    • most cases very difficult to isolate or reverse engineer an actual virus from the sample.yuekit
    • So you have to ask what is the chance they stumbled across the exact virus capable of starting a global pandemic in a cave, already preadapted to infect humans.yuekit
    • They successfully recreate the live virus from the sample, and then proceed to accidentally release it in their own city...yuekit
    • As opposed to the virus slowly adapting to infect other animals and then humans over time in nature.yuekit
    • there are theories and studies of RNA virus outbreaks that suggest that they evolved at a consistent rate while frozen. i'd love for them to prove naturalkingsteven
    • transfer, but to rule out the possibility of lab release at this stage would seem ignorant of how little we know about outbreaks emerge (however unlikely)kingsteven
    • Yeah definitely agree it can't be ruled out. I guess my skepticism comes from the fact that a lot of "evidence" that is commonly repeated for lab leak, if youyuekit
    • really research it in detail, often it falls apart or at least it's not as presented in the media.yuekit
    • For instance the thing you mentioned about the database being taken offline...this seems to all be based on one guy on Twitter noticing that according to ayuekit
    • "database monitoring service" on the Chinese internet, one of WIV's databases was no longer accessed outside China after September 2019.yuekit
    • Seems to me that could mean any number of things, and yet this actually made it into the GOP's report on the origin in the USA. They even propose the leakyuekit
    • happened in September, all because of this random bit of information. And there is a lot of stuff like that...yuekit
    • it's pretty well documented what happened the guys behind the paper (where the GOP lifted a lot from) is quite critical of China/US/EU handling of the situationkingsteven
    • it's also been shown a lot of the commonly spouted claims on how / the frequency viruses jump species is totally incorrect by experts in the fieldkingsteven
    • The 'DRASTIC' report on the WIV's databases is free on researchgate if you fancy a read of itkingsteven
    • Yeah I was actually discussing this with some of the DRASTIC people on Twitter...yuekit
    • It's impressive that they dug up all this info and propelled the story into the media. But at same time I got impression some of them have a conspiracy mindset.yuekit
    • And there were some weird things I noticed. For instance that paper refers to a virus database that supposedly existed at http://batvirus.whio…yuekit
    • But if you search on archive, backlinks in Google etc I can't find any evidence this page ever existed at all.yuekit
    • there are a few archived pages where the db was referenced with an earlier date but those pages themselves have been archived after the start of the pandemickingsteven
    • and the database itself seems like it would have been password protected - given the data is said to be the same as other pathogen dbs but with more metadatakingsteven
    • from collection and more recent data from WIV it's unlikely it would have been indexed (just looked for some of my public pages from university and they aren'tkingsteven
    • showing on google or archive either even though the URLs are circulated within emails/pdfs/VLEs... but yeah would like more proof on that myselfkingsteven
    • You can also search historical DNS records and there is no record of any "batvirus" subdomain.yuekit
    • interesting that the lancet chose to publish an article effectively reversing its stance on the likelihood this weekend too. hoping that doesn't make the mediakingsteven
    • in the same way as the last article (which spawned the lab leak/ lab made confusion) and leave it up to science to prove what happenedkingsteven
    • What you do see on Archive is that they actually launched a virus database site at a different URL in late 2019, and it stayed up until mid 2020.yuekit
    • I obviously spent way too much time looking into this BTW but I just was curious if I could dig anything up :)yuekit
    • At the very least it seems like no one actually knows which database was put up or taken down for what reason, and yet the media just ran with it.yuekit
    • haha, amazing. just had a nosey because i didn't know it would be possible to look up subdomains and found this https://imgur.com/f8…kingsteven
    • obviously later again, but an IP in the same range as the other related university sites. i guess if the data exists it may come to light at some pointkingsteven
    • Wow interesting...what did you use to look that up though? I tried a few different subdomain lookup tools and it showed other subdomains but not that one.yuekit
    • What I noticed is that by end of 2019 the WIV added a "virus database" link which goes to this site:
      https://i.imgur.com/…      yuekit
    • But it's unclear to what extent this overlaps with the "batvirus" set of data. This page was hosted on a different site called the Basic Science Data Sharingyuekit
    • Network but if you look at the attribution it says data is from WIV. So I started wondering if they just changed approach as happens in these sorts of projects.yuekit
    • this was the lookup tool, but yeah i can only see dates before 2020 relating to the construction of the db https://securitytrai…kingsteven
    • and nothing really to confirm the correspondence relating to its withdrawl. it is funny (given public security concerns) how much academia is a black holekingsteven
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