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Comment by hackingonempty | Hacker News Reader

It is scary to see the President and Health Secretary and their appointees acting on conspiracy theories.

The evidence for zoonotic origin of SARS-COV2 is very strong[0] and the conspiracy theorists as usual have little more than speculation.

[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...

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Quite strong:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

Great links and even briefly skimming them makes me lean more towards zoonosis myself.

However, @hackingonempty's comment shows how dangerous over politicising these topics can be. Claiming lab-accident origin as a conspiracy theory stifles debates like the one linked.

Take a report from the first link where experts in the field still give a 21% chance to lab leak definitely takes it out of the range of conspiracy theories.

The only reason it was "removed" as a plausible origin was politics.

> asked how likely it is that COVID-19 originated from natural zoonosis, experts gave an average likelihood of 77% (median=90%). In fact, four out of five experts stated that a natural zoonotic origin was more than 50% likely. > However, consensus was not complete. Across all experts, the average likelihood they gave for a research-related accident origin was 21%. Overall, one out of five experts reported a 50% or greater chance for an origin other than natural zoonosis.

Yeah, this is both true and tricky. My belief is that the original sin was politicizing the question soon after the beginning of the pandemic; both the Chinese and US governments are at fault here (destroying all the raccoon dogs seems like a very stupid action to me, for example).

I further believe that a lot of people overreacted to the rush to judgement. It is correct to say "we don't know yet" and in March/April 2020 it was wrong to say "this has to be a lab leak." But it's also wrong to overcorrect and say "it couldn't be a lab leak." That's both a political reaction and a human reaction.

Having worked in Science, "we don't know yet" is exactly the response I expected to hear from Science leaders. It's what the scientists I worked with said often, even about subjects they were legitimate experts in. One comes to expect the familiar.

Which is why "it couldn't be a lab leak" struck me like a ton of bricks when it was said.

My immediate response was "that's not science, he's not speaking like any scientist I know, and I know a few hundred."

My position in Science, as support personnel working on software related to funding requests, grants, research collection, and reporting, for nearly a decade, left me in that moment with a distinct feeling that the difference in communication was about protecting funding, reputations, positions, etc. Scientists are not dummies, and their communications with political agencies are very politically aware. I can see a scenario in which, to preserve public confidence in Science(TM) such false confidence might be presented. Gave me the heebie jeebies.

From the review I posted above: "Whether such an escape is deliberate or accidental, the laboratory in question almost certainly must have known that an incident had occurred, such that their denial necessarily indicates a cover-up (74)."

That's what makes it a conspiracy theory, as used in the popular lexicon. While there is substantial evidence the initial transmission was from an animal at the Huanan market, the conspiracy theorists are running with a tiny bit of circumstantial evidence and a whole lot of conspiring between researchers and the Chinese government, etc...

> The only reason it was "removed" as a plausible origin was politics.

I disagree, at this point the evidence has stacked up and not in favor of the lab leak allegation. A major reason it persists is because of the efforts of the White House and their political appointees who want to cast blame on China.

I would love to see a peer reviewed review of the scientific evidence by an expert, like I posted above, that leads the author to the conclusion that the virus escaped from a lab.

I think it's unfair to call the theory that a coronavirus popping up next to the world's most active lab experimenting them may have come from the lab a conspiracy theory. I mean did we call people saying radiation from the Chernobyl reactor might have come from an accident conspiracy theorists?

The "conspiracy theorists" include the director of the CDC at the time who was actually in contact with the Chinese CDC and also a virologist, and also the chair of the one official investigation which visited Wuhan in the early days.

The WIV is more than 30km away. The quote below is from the above link, which is a relatively recent review of the "scientific evidence" from a virologist who (from the disclosure statement) "between 2019 and 2021, he was an unpaid Honorary Visiting Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and between 2014 and 2020, he was an unpaid Guest Professor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China." You should read the link I sent, at least

>Obvious evidence against the laboratory leak allegation is that the first documented cases of COVID-19 were not linked to the WIV nor in the same geographical region of Wuhan (44). The WIV laboratory of Prof. Zhengli Shi, who has been the subject of abundant accusations because of her work on bat coronaviruses (10, 11, 13), is located more than 30 km from the Huanan market epicenter. Clearly, if the virus first emerged at the WIV, then that location should be the site of at least some of the earliest cases or linked to those cases. It is not.

Holmes also collaborated with Shi in 2018 so is maybe not unbiased. The paper only has the WHO location data which was provided by Chinese government sources who seemed pretty determined to make out it came from the market. There is an earlier data set from a radio phone in, clustered on the other side of the river.

Redfield the CDC head is quite interesting and basically says the Chinese faked the location data https://youtu.be/oMlhvnMpRU0?t=119

Market believers tend to say he's a Republican he must be an anti science crank but what motivation would he have to lie about such stuff which caused a lot of criticism or him?

Could you post some links to papers comparing the clustering of this "earlier data set from a radio phone in" to the "WHO location data" I couldn't find anything about it with Google Scholar.

I'm skeptical, because Holmes points out that the Huanan market origin is supported by molecular evidence:

>Phylogenetic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences also points to the Huanan market being the epicenter of the pandemic, with the Huanan market sequences falling at the root of the SARS-CoV-2 tree. The earliest split in the SARS-CoV-2 phylogeny, which seemingly occurred in Wuhan, is between the A and B lineages that differ by two nucleotide substitutions (45) yet gave rise to many descendent lineages. Remarkably, despite its relatively low number of visitors, both these lineages were present at the Huanan market (44, 46, 47). The odds of this co-occurrence without the market being the global epicenter are extremely low. Molecular clock studies of SARS-CoV-2 evolution also point to a market origin. Estimates of the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) for the epidemic as a whole, of the specific outbreak in Wuhan, and of the sequences from the Huanan market overlap with a time span encompassing November and December 2019, again suggestive of an outbreak that started at the Huanan market (47). This timescale also means that the virus was circulating for only a short interval before it was first detected by physicians in Wuhan. Additionally, these observations fit the available epidemiological and serological data from Wuhan, which provide no evidence for SARS-CoV-2 in that city prior to December 2019 (44, 48).

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