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Comment by NationalPark | Hacker News Reader

Can you link some sources here? Call me skeptical, but if the evidence is as convincing as you make it sound, then it implies a pretty widespread conspiracy among experts (of many countries and affiliations) who would understand the implications yet are deliberately mis-communicating via their podcasts, news appearances, papers in famous journals, etc. Are there any papers published on this or is it just in the book that the authors of this article are selling? I'm not sure if I'm confusing this author with a Matt Ridley who seems to be an eccentric but minor British noble who writes about fringe climate change ideas?

Edit: Ok I figured out the source of the claims, it's the Alina Chen (I didn't realize she was co author) stuff. And it is indeed the Viscount Matt Ridley himself!

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"We do know that the insertion of such FCS sequences into SARS-like viruses was a specific goal of work proposed by the EHA-WIV-UNC partnership within a 2018 grant proposal (“DEFUSE”) that was submitted to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (25). The 2018 proposal to DARPA was not funded, but we do not know whether some of the proposed work was subsequently carried out in 2018 or 2019, perhaps using another source of funding.

"We also know that that this research team would be familiar with several previous experiments involving the successful insertion of an FCS sequence into SARS-CoV-1 (26) and other coronaviruses, and they had a lot of experience in construction of chimeric SARS-like viruses (27–29). In addition, the research team would also have some familiarity with the FCS sequence and the FCS-dependent activation mechanism of human ENaC α (19), which was extensively characterized at UNC (17, 18). For a research team assessing the pandemic potential of SARS-related coronaviruses, the FCS of human ENaC—an FCS known to be efficiently cleaved by host furin present in the target location (epithelial cells) of an important target organ (lung), of the target organism (human)—might be a rational, if not obvious, choice of FCS to introduce into a virus to alter its infectivity, in line with other work performed previously."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2202769119

This article from Vanity Fair does a good job collection the circumstantial evidence surrounding the lab leak theory: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-no...

The tl;dr is that there is a group called EcoHealth Alliance that was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) making novel coronaviruses by modifying the furin cleavage site of coronaviruses taken from bats. The WIV (along with EcoHealth Alliance and also potentially the Chinese military) was also making chimeric viruses from the viruses responsible for SARS and MERS. They were then using these viruses to infect "humanized" mice (mice with human lung tissue). The head of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, was one of the first to denounce the possibility of a lab leak (without disclosing the work he was doing at WIV of course). Daszak was later kicked off the Lancet’s COVID-19 commission because he refused to share old progress reports on the work he was funding at WIV.

All of this evidence is circumstantial, but it's really a bit suspicious that this outbreak started just a few kilometers where this exact type of virus was being created.

Thank you for the write up. I’ll add a funny line from Jon Stewart: if an outbreak of chocolate goodness happens outside Hershey, Pennsylvania you don’t need to search for the bat that ate the cocoa bean. It’s the factory, stupid.

You can find the primary source for the DARPA leak on hn; if you care to verify that the sequence comes from a patent yourself directly from primary sources, you can find instructions on how to do that on hn too. I've done the search myself, it's real.

I can't provide direct sources for the fact that these predictions preceded the discoveries, but I can tell you they ran through my head, and others I talked to, and the lack of a sequence match bothered me. If you want to get meta-meta-scientific I would not be surprised if there was at least a blog post by someone out there saying "if it was a lab leak, where's the sequence match?" Out there that preceded the sleuth who found it hidden in plain site (behind an NCBI search option)

Edit: I have not read the ridley/chen book, I know most of the stuff from when they were emergent reports by reading this site and applying my intuition as a former biochemist (and some of my actively working biochemist friends) ti judge relative merits of hypotheses.

If you've done it could you link to or provide instructions on how we may reproduce your findings rather than just saying "the truth is out there"?

Yeah, sorry, here it is:

https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the...

I assume the DARPA leak is this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28644428

~700pts, ~450 comments, with the source published 23. September 2021.

man I forgot all about this. so much has happened in the past couple years it's been impossible to keep it all straight.

2020 and 2021 were each at least five years long.

Fortunately, 2022 has been pretty quiet and uneventful.

A loose conspiracy of a bunch of social media scientists/journalists? Wouldn't the overall size and diversity of the field mean that there would be at least a few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives?

You should just read the book. It's not very convincing. The most likely explanation for the lack of interest in identifying the origins is primarly a lack of data. Speculating about conspiracies does not help the discussion, either.

That's, like, just your opinion, man.

Meanwhile the natural sources hypothesis has made one prediction not found yet (animal zero) and the lab leak has made two. Unfortunately, judgements about this are made difficult because "relative believability" is inherently subjective, so we can endlessly argue about the relative merits of competing hypotheses it is while the biggest suspect is under suspicion of having destroyed key data -- because they did suppress information in the early stages (and are refusing credible audits now). Meanwhile, entropy is happening making further revelations from bioinformatics progressively unlikely. Shrug.

> at least a few dissenters presenting more factual alternatives?

Are there not?

There are dissenters, but it's definitely unclear their claims are more factual.

My point is that it's really impossible to run a loosely organized large-scale conspiracy. There are too many ways for the conspiracy to fall apart.

No conspiracy, most people will be easily pressured when their livelihoods/job/grant is on the line. Most countries politicians want to be favorable to China, the experts sadly just toe the line.

Few scientist are the learned aristocrats of before who did not depend on grant money to live comfortable lives.

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