Deleted SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data from early Wuhan outbreak recovered | Hacker News Reader

Deleted SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data from early Wuhan outbreak recovered

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I was the person at Google who originally set them on the path of mirroring large amounts of Genomics data in Google Cloud. The SRA was one example- the NIH serves it up on a very clunky and slow (no good for high throughput workflows) so many people, including Google, make a controlled-access mirror in GCS/S3/Blobstore.

In all cases, the mirror should reflect what's served on SRA, which means that if there's deletions, GCS should delete it as well (as soon as technically possible). It's unclear whether Google set up the infra to delete items from buckets (they should have, but it was probably a low priority).

I wonder what other deleted sequences can be recovered from the bucket. I hope the author told the Google Cloud admins about their problem.

Threader.app version (much more readable IMO): https://threader.app/thread/1407445604029009923

Direct link to BioRxiv submission: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1

Are you trying to get this stuff published in a journal and actually peer reviewed or is this just for the “Twitter science community”?

I wonder if China realizes how it only adds to the lab leak idea if you actively delete and burn data…

It's a cultural thing.

For example look at this footage [1] where Chinese police are using umbrella's to try and block filming of Tiananmen square.

In western culture you try to keep up the appearance, in Chinese culture you try to obscure or bury it.

So I don't think they fully realize how this looks to the western world.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzLuzaICJwQ

Another interesting thread on this finding: https://twitter.com/michaelzlin/status/1407544773146120196

Yesterday's thread on this pointed directly at the paper instead of a tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27598222

It seems odd that advocates of the lab leak theory frequently claim to have been silenced and yet have been spamming updates on almost popular every forum for weeks now.

I have heard they are being censored by a process called “peer review”. But now it seems like an influential journal by the name of “The Daily Mail” is picking it up:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9716531/More-proof-...

Science will prevail.

I was hoping there would be people here who understand the analyses and could comment on the degree of validity or importance of this. In that sense this submissions has been a disappointment so far. I was not aware of yesterday's submission, but the conversation there seems to only of slightly higher quality than here.

I'm not attached to any particular theory of origin at this stage, just following the updates as a curious human being. Anyone who's spent time on the "new" queue would know that news updates on anything vaguely of interest to HNers gets posted multiple times, as different people come across it.

It's a paradox about being silenced, though, that the only way that fact comes into public consciousness is when a few lucky individuals are able to break through it (like with oppression) or when its time runs out (like with time-limited censorship). So detractors always get to say "see, you're not actually silenced, stop lying!"

Is it possible that China sought to actively spread COVID (the virus, and the fear) throughout the world in late 2019/early 2020?

For example, allowing people to fly out of China freely, accelerating the departures of 10s of thousands of international students to leave in Jan 2020 instead of their academic schedules,

Deliberately obfuscating data about the true impact and spread of the virus,

And as such, hasn't it all gone according to plan?

- An anti-China American president is removed

- Authoritarianism, tyranny and centralised governance seems justified domestically and abroad

- All foreigners are ejected from China, and the borders are closed

- Trillions of bailout money to Western consumers boosts the value of Chinese-owned assets, and demand for Chinese goods

- China is presented as having an 'efficient' response to managing the outbreak

- Western societies are fundamentally weakened due to lockdowns

Please don't use legitimate posts about ongoing science being conducted by experts to make conspiracy speculations.

Just a few months ago, the 'lab leak hypothesis' was itself a conspiracy speculation. Now its an accepted possibility.

That's only partly correct. I have been telling people, including scientists (and not getting any pushback), that there is literally no evidence that could be shown to absolutely disprove that the outbreak was due to a lab leak.

The media sort of picked up on some scientists messaging that the lab leak hypothesis was "impossible" and turned it into a conspiracy theory. That's on the media and the limited number of irresonspible scientists who 'insist' they are correct when they don't have the data to support it.

Finally, all the things you listed are just absurd, they don't have evidence, and go from a simple scientific possibility "the virus was purposely leaked" to basically implicating the Chinese government in some massive secret bioweapons real-time exercise. Which itself is not impossible, but high improbable, based on the data and a good understanding of modern war and politics.

Why would the CCP intentionally increase the spread of a dangerous novel virus in their own country?

Are you saying they "developed an ingeniuous weapon" and then had the brilliant idea to fire it ~at themselves~?

They began the pandemic by sealing in a city the size of London!

Your theory is one of the least thought-out theories I've seen floated.

Look at the death rates in Sweden, and the fact that COVID seemed to be floating around for months in Italy etc, before anyone took notice.

A critical part of the COVID scenario has been the fear and lockdown, which far exceeds justification or established pandemic management guidelines.

If COVID was spread only in the West, it would burn out like Swine Flu or any regular once-a-decade flu variant:

https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

The fact that it spread first in China allowed the CCP to control the narrative, that lockdown and authoritarianism was the only way to manage the virus.

You are not arguing in good faith and it's becoming clearer that you have a background agenda to promote conspiracy theories with a lack of evidence (nobody but epidemiologists 5 years from now can say anything useful about Sweden vs. other places).

Seems like a stupid plan if you want: everyone to notice that having manufacturing in one country is a bad idea and start migrate away, increased hate of your people since people are stupid and will and have done that , become a sanction target by doing the worse job possible of hiding the conspiracy.

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