Comment by rngname22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rngname22 | Hacker News Reader

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> why the lab in question would be doing secret work on coronaviruses

what was secret about it? the lab in Wuhan was literally doing research in 2015 on how bat coronaviruses could adapt to spread in humans vs ACE2 receptors and developed their own strain: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985

from the linked study: "Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis.... On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations."

Thanks, that's exactly what I mean. They were publishing their work and making public what viruses they were working on with collaborators and public databases etc. There doesn't seem to be a plausible explanation for why they'd be working on a related but entirely new virus and keeping it secret.

I suppose they could have just received some samples and then that triggered an immediate outbreak before anyone heard of it, but having an instant spillover event from a handful bat samples with workers using biosecurity measures doesn't seem to me especially likely compared to the many more interactions humans have with animals outside lab settings. (For example, the tens of thousands of live animals kept caged in extreme proximity with each other and unprotected humans in the huge Wuhan wet market).

I'm totally trying to be good faith here, but are you aware of the recent admissions by NIH that EcoHealth (the funders of the research at WIV) basically did exactly this?

"On Wednesday, the NIH sent a letter to members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that acknowledged two facts. One was that EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City–based nonprofit that partners with far-flung laboratories to research and prevent the outbreak of emerging diseases, did indeed enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans, which the NIH letter described as an “unexpected result” of the research it funded that was carried out in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The second was that EcoHealth Alliance violated the terms of its grant conditions stipulating that it had to report if its research increased the viral growth of a pathogen by tenfold."

Further in the article:

"As scientists remain in a stalemate over the pandemic’s origins, another disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of research that could accidentally have led to the pandemic. On September 20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research."

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/nih-admits-funding-r...

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