Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeeMassive | Hacker News Reader

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> The entire world has been blanketed in Coronavirus and as far as I know Africa has seen a mix of action that has been different from how Western countries have experienced it. The rates of infection are different, the rates of vaccination are different. Two VOCs have come out of South Africa, but who's to say that an earlier version from 2020 wasn't bumping around the continent and returned to South Africa?

You're pointing out distinctions that do not make any relevant or substantial differences to the argument.

> Everyone likes to posit human intervention when we have very little information, especially people highly motivated to declare COVID-19 a lab leak for geopolitical reasons. Give the science time and we might start to fill in the gaps.

With lack of information, ideas that have the less assumptions and concepts tend to be true than their counterparts who require many possible sub-hypotheses and concepts. GoF happen and lab leaks happen and the genetic histogram and the genes makes make this hypothesis the more likely one. The opposite require many hypothetical actors (mouses, immunosuppressed patients, back and forth between geographically distant places and all the combinations thereof) to account for it "hiding" since spring 2020.

> especially people highly motivated to declare COVID-19 a lab leak for geopolitical reasons.

Nobody blamed nobody here. GoF research happens everywhere.

> Give the science time and we might start to fill in the gaps.

Science is not beholden to your worldview. Filling the gaps is part of the scientific method, by the way.

All I'm saying is that my bias is towards this virus being a natural phenomenon and I think waiting for the full context will settle the case. Jumping to conclusions on the basis of flimsy evidence mainly serves political agendas. We simply will not know for a long time, months or years, where Omicron came from and that's uncomfortable, but we have to sit with that.

If you DO want to get conspiratorial, you can watch this 2001 Bush administration pandemic simulation where China blames the US for a smallpox lab leak. It's pretty amusing to me to watch the US administration astounded by their luck of COVID-19 first being identified in China try to flip the script on their simulated exercise. My feeling is this Omicron theory is trying to breathe life back into the original lab leak theory by proxy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we7Map5Pho0

I don’t understand how natural origin is your “bias” while everyone else is “jumping to conclusions”. There’s a lack of conclusive evidence for either scenario. And politics aside, SARS has leaked before resulting in deaths… no conspiracy required!

That's true Delta leaked in Taiwan, but that was a preexisting natural strain. Smallpox's last fatality also was a lab leak. However, most gain of function experiments use test harasses that can't infect humans or can't replicate. It's not impossible, but it's hard to have any conclusion at all at this early date with very little evidence.

The virus is infecting so many people and changes so rapidly that a natural explanation will not be surprising in the least. New variants have been expected. I think people are surprised at how bad the new variants have been, but anyone following the scientific literature wouldn't be taken completely off guard.

You seem to have caught some memes which don't make you see things rationally.

> The opposite require many hypothetical actors (mouses, immunosuppressed patients, back and forth between geographically distant places and all the combinations thereof) to account for it "hiding" since spring 2020

If you ever implied that closeness of outbreak of the Wuhan variant to the Wuhan lab the same should make you incredibly suspicious about this being a lab leak, since there is such lab nearby. So it would require an actor in another country to "breed" this variant and import it into South Africa/have agents spread it world wide and someone funding and green lighting what would a be case of international bio terrorism or even bio warfare.

As for accounting for those factors. Africa is an incredible diverse places with Nomads and hyper dense slums, with untreated large scale AIDS and healthcare systems as South Africa has and also a poorly understood and explored flora and fauna.

Does it seem that implausible that some combination of immuno compromised tribes/rural human and animals caught the old variant and didn't interact with the new variants from western civilization for less than two years? I don't think so.

As for the low number of silent mutations. I can not imagine how the lab leak theory would account for that, if it was designed why would there a low number of silent mutations and not an average number or none and if it was due to GoF why would a lab environment have less silent mutations then a "natural" one?

AFAIK we have almost no data on variants in some African capitals let alone people in rural/tribal areas or surveillance of animals. Maybe along its evolutionary it was a variant that has an advantage in sparsely populated areas so we didn't notice a large part of its history because it wasn't competitive in cities with other variants.

There are many possible explanations but the lack of lab is kinda blow for a lab leak theory and your political goal of less GoF-Research is only compatible with a lab leak and not any other form of lab caused (philanthropist/evil government developing and releasing this variant) explanation.

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