10 More Virus Researchers Say 'Virtually No Chance' Coronavirus Escaped From a Lab (npr.org) 401
Long-time Slashdot reader Charlotte Web writes: "Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else," writes NPR, citing "10 leading scientists who collect samples of viruses from animals in the wild, study virus genomes and understand how lab accidents can happen."
NPR reports: "All of the evidence points to this not being a laboratory accident," says Jonna Mazet, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis and director of a global project to watch for emerging viruses called PREDICT. Rather, the experts interviewed by NPR all believe that the virus was transmitted between animals and humans in nature, as has happened in previous outbreaks — from Ebola to the Marburg virus — and with other known coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS...
Lowering the odds further still, when researchers begin to work in the lab to see what they've collected, the samples they handle aren't actually infectious. Mazet says they are "inactivated," a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself while preserving its genetic material for study... These protocols are used by scientists all over the world, including in China. Mazet says that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where much of the suspicion has been focused, has been trained by U.S. scientists as part of the PREDICT program. Scientists working there follow the rules, Mazet says.
Mazet says researchers at the Wuhan institute were so good, they actually helped to shape the protocols. "They were not only completing all of those trainings, but they were also weighing in and helping us to make those trainings very strong from a safety perspective," she says.
U.S. intelligence officials have now also joined additional scientists saying there's zero evidence that the virus escaped from a lab. And NPR also interviewed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, who points out that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."
"We have a bat virus in my neighborhood in New York killing people. Let's get real about this."
NPR reports: "All of the evidence points to this not being a laboratory accident," says Jonna Mazet, a professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis and director of a global project to watch for emerging viruses called PREDICT. Rather, the experts interviewed by NPR all believe that the virus was transmitted between animals and humans in nature, as has happened in previous outbreaks — from Ebola to the Marburg virus — and with other known coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS...
Lowering the odds further still, when researchers begin to work in the lab to see what they've collected, the samples they handle aren't actually infectious. Mazet says they are "inactivated," a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself while preserving its genetic material for study... These protocols are used by scientists all over the world, including in China. Mazet says that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where much of the suspicion has been focused, has been trained by U.S. scientists as part of the PREDICT program. Scientists working there follow the rules, Mazet says.
Mazet says researchers at the Wuhan institute were so good, they actually helped to shape the protocols. "They were not only completing all of those trainings, but they were also weighing in and helping us to make those trainings very strong from a safety perspective," she says.
U.S. intelligence officials have now also joined additional scientists saying there's zero evidence that the virus escaped from a lab. And NPR also interviewed Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance researching the origins of pandemics, who points out that nearly 3% of the population in China's rural farming regions near wild animals already had antibodies to coronaviruses similar to SARS. "We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field..."
"We have a bat virus in my neighborhood in New York killing people. Let's get real about this."
False Flag (Score:5, Funny)
"U.S. intelligence officials have now also joined additional scientists saying there's zero evidence that the virus escaped from a lab."
They're just trying to hide the fact that 5G is spewing the virus.
(this is satire, sad it even has to be said)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I just hope 6G will bring a zombie outbreak...
Oh wait, the mobile phone already did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Re:False Flag (Score:5, Funny)
Just asking for a friend: (Score:2, Funny)
Unsurprising (Score:2, Flamebait)
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Oh, so the alleged president and Fox News then.
This is very unfortunate (Score:2)
Re:This is very unfortunate (Score:5, Informative)
However-
scientists have been screaming that we need to be prepared for zoonotic pandemics [ucsusa.org]
A reemergence of SARS or a zoonotic pathogen like SCoV could cause the next great pandemic—an event on the scale of the 1918 flu outbreak that killed 40 million people worldwide.
Re:This is very unfortunate (Score:4, Informative)
And the 2002 SARS is not the end all be all. Random respiratory diseases arise all the time and every time they do, proper response has beating it back. The 1993 Four corners outbreak was quashed before it became a problem in the US. That was due to Sin Nombre orthohantavirus (SNV). The West Virginia outbreak of 1985 was stopped in it's tracks. That was due to Monongahela virus (MGLV). In 1995 a new zoonotic virus was stopped at patient one in Florida. It came from the new Black Creek Canal orthohantavirus (BCCV).
People fail to realize. Fighting disease is a fight eternal and we've been winning and preventing any of these diseases from hitting the headlines, by trusting the experts and allowing policy to be based on their recommendations. Between now and 1918, there have been countless new viruses of zoonotic origin. All of them have been beaten back by quarantine, sanitation, contact tracing, and just basic standard medical protocols. This current outbreak, in every single way was completely preventable and wasn't. That's a clear indication that there is a global breakdown in this trusting experts and basing policy on their recommendations. Now it could be that some leaders are incompetent. It could be that the policy recommendations are too inconvenient. It could be a mixture of multiple things. But the fact remains, there is a breakdown in listening to sound science planet wide. The priority of things is being redirected to things that distract from making sound science based decisions. And people will pay with their lives for leaving science for comfort as they currently are paying for it.
This virus we're dealing with will hardly be the last we deal with. And if the policy makers of this world continue to ignore science, it will lead to the exact same outcome as we are seeing or perhaps even worse. There is no question about if this will happen again, only when and how we will respond to it.
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It decidedly will not be the last one and it is not even the big one the experts have been expecting for a decade or two. This is a less serious outbreak we get as a bonus in between large ones.
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Didn't you read the summary? Lab safety procedures simply aren't needed. One wonders why they spend all that money on negative pressure rooms, filtration, PPE, etc.
It came from a bat cave (Score:5, Funny)
Ok guys, I'm not saying he was involved. But man, it's damn suspicious when you think about the fact that may have originated in a bat cave. Where was Bruce Wayne at the time? Shouldn't we at least look into it? I say we check it out just to rule it out, you know what I'm saying?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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It was lizard bats who made the COVID in their secret lizard bat laboratories.
It's no use (Score:5, Insightful)
We grew up fearing that nuclear weapons would destroy society as we know it, it turned out that it will be memes to do it.
Re:It's no use (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Dark times.
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I'm not convined (Score:5, Insightful)
They fail to make a convincing argument that it couldn't have come from a lab where they were researching corona viruses.
That raises the first coincidence that would be needed for SARS-CoV-2 to come out of a laboratory: Scientists would have to find it in nature first.
If it wasn't manufactured in a lab, wouldn't it have to come from nature anyway? This could happen at a market certainly, but someone has to collect and deliver samples to labs and study them, and the ones a lab would want are ones more likely to be infectious.
Even if researchers stumbled across the virus, they would be very unlikely to get infected. When researchers collect samples, they take extraordinary precautions to avoid infecting themselves in the field, says Mazet
Yeah, we take extraordinary precautions to train employees to detect phishing scams and choose decent passwords, yet malware seems to make it on computer networks all of the time. If there's one thing the scientific research world can learn from from the world of computers, it's that any security system built on requiring everyone to voluntarily do even one thing correctly every time is a system that will fail eventually, and the last thing anyone wants to hear out of a person's mouth at that point is, "But we have procedures!".
Now it is possible for viruses to escape from a laboratory by infecting a worker. In the early 2000s, there were three documented cases of the original SARS virus escaping from a laboratory environment, according to Lim Poh Lian, a senior consultant at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases in Singapore. But the circumstances surrounding those escapes were vastly different.
Great. Well first of all since they don't know anything about the circumstances, they don't know how those circumstances could have been different and we know it's possible for it to escape from lab environments. It should be very difficult to spread if proper procedures are followed, but there's no way to prove that the proper procedures were being followed at the lab.
In any event, lab escape still gets a rating of "plausible" even if there's no smoking gun.
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Lab escape is a reasonable hypothesis. But is it lab escape of something found in nature already? Or lab escape of an edited virus? The latter case can be traced back by experts analyzing the code because editing is 'clearcut'. You only do the purposeful substitutions in the code while you don't bother touching the rest of the code.
Unless you're trying to obfuscate the source and add a lot of random changes as well, which is what you could call the creationist variant: it was inserted deliberately but ever
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No you'll have to show me proof of your extraordinary claims.
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I'd like to see the actual evidence of this claim.
If the sequences are identical, I think it would point to a high likelihood release from the lab. They would be too similar for it to be a coincidence, because we would expect some degree of natural variation. We would need to look at a sampling of natural coronaviruses within the bat population in the area to see what the expected variation is like to quantify that probability.
Re:I'm not convined (Score:5, Informative)
Almost every epidemiologist working on the virus has agreed this is a chimeric combination of the two viruses, which can only happen "en vivo" -- in other words, in a single organism infected simultaneously by both viral strains.
There was, of course, one known location where both of these strains were found in close proximity, and we know this because both strains had already been gene sequenced at that location. Namely, the Wuhan Virology Institute, which specializes in corona virus infections. In fact their lead scientist is literally known world-wide as "Bat Woman" -- Shi Zhengli [scientificamerican.com] -- for all her work finding corona virus in bats and other species. In the linked article, she even admits that her very first thought on hearing of a new infectious corona virus in Wuhan was, "Did it come from our lab?"
The clinic itself was working with live bats and live strains of viruses in a study injecting immune compromised bats (basically given a "bat" form of AIDS) to determine whether the compromised immune system caused dangerous changes in the corona virus itself, namely an enhanced bonding site on the surface of the lipid viral sheath which is extremely common in HIV infections and causes enhanced infectiousness in other viral strains. The lab, and Shi Zhengli, literally published a paper on just this research in late 2018.
Several visitors to the lab have published reports saying that, during this time, the workers dealing with the live bats were often covered in the urine and feces of the bats they were working with, and that they regularly took inadequate care to prevent infections. One visitor even claimed that his visit in late October of 2019, "sounded like I was in a hospital ward, with nearly every single worker coughing violently." US officials repeatedly warned that the lab was not following proper safety procedures. [washingtonpost.com]
So, am I saying this was released from the virology clinic? Not with any certainty, no.
But Occam and his Gillette Mach3 are warming up and asking the question of which is more likely:
- A seafood wet market, which did not have bats in it, is the source of the disease that came mostly from bats, with one contribution from a second virus that's only found 10,000 km away, and, which has now been determined to not be the source for nearly 1/3rd of the earliest cases, or...
- A clinic where live animals with compromised immune systems were repeatedly infected with live viruses in studies through at least early 2019, suddenly got a chimeric combination of two virus strains known to be stored and studied at the lab, which then somehow infected one of the workers known to take inadequate precautions, and then that worker walked the disease out into the city.
I remain amazed, given the above situation, that scientists with no access or history with the Wuhan lab are willing to write stories like the original article, claiming there is no chance it came from the Wuhan lab -- when even the lead scientist's first thought was, "Did it come from my lab?"
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> match to the S protein from a Gabonese (10,000km from Wuhan) pangolin coronavirus.
Globalisation, imports and exports are a major consideration though with the capability for two way transfer. I don't know where you got Gabon from I thought they were Malayan but both Gabon and China share common bushmeat habits.
"Pangolins used in the study were confiscated by Customs and Department of Forestry of Guangdong Province in March-December 2019."
T
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Fair enough. But what is the conclusion that we come to? Is it that we have a moratorium on scientific research? given that research could in your scenario be involved in it's release? Because that plainly would not work because the virus was already out there in nature ready to spread and one day it would. The only sane conclusion is that we need to find these viruses faster and to create vaccines against them. That involves research. The same dilema faces study of computer malware.
Re: I'm not convined (Score:2)
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You are absolutely correct. This virus could easily have come from bat samples collected in Yunan province. It's spread may be due to mishandling of hazardous samples.
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You cannot prove a negative. It is impossible to prove that it didn't come from a lab. Even if researchers find it in wild animals, conspiracy theorists can claim those wild animals were infected by escaped lab animals.
So the burden of proof has to be upon those claiming it came from a lab to prove that it came
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If it wasn't manufactured in a lab, wouldn't it have to come from nature anyway?
So how would this work? It occurs in nature, people start getting infected. Scientists get a sample and take it to the lab, and also manage to stop it spreading beyond a very few people so nobody notices. Then some time later it escapes the lab and a couple of million people get it, spreads over the entire world... Even though they already knew about it and managed to shut it down the first time.
That's the opposite of plausible.
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Re:I'm not convined (Score:5, Insightful)
They fail to make a convincing argument that it couldn't have come from a lab where they were researching corona viruses.
Then allow me to make one:
Since the advent of microbiology laboratories, (and when this was is up for debate, 6th century BC by Mahavira, 16th by with Girolamo Fracastoro, 17th century by Athanasius Kircher (1646), Robert Hooke (1665), and/or Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1676), 19th century by Ferdinand Cohn, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Adrien Certes, or the late 19th century with the work of Charles Chamberland, Martinus Beijerinck, Sergei Winogradsky, Adolf Mayer, Dmitry Ivanovsky, Martinus Beijerinck, Adolf Mayer, John Buist, and/or Carlos Finlay, or early 20th century by Wendell Meredith Stanley, Hubert S. Loring, Frederick Twort, Félix d'Herelle, Fred Griffith, Ross Granville Harrison, Friedrich Loeffler, E Steinhardt, C Israeli, RA Lambert, Walter Reed, Paul Frosch, William Crawford Gorgas, John Kunkel Small, Thomas Milton Rivers, Christopher Andrewes, Francis Holmes, Richard Pfeiffer, Ernest William Goodpasture, Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll (last two here invented the electron microscope), or in the mid 20th century with formation of the Phage Group including Max Delbrück, Salvador Luria, Alfred Hershey, Martha Chase and founding of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, or Frank Macfarlane Burnet, George Hirst, Rosalind Franklin, Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, Robley Williams, John F. Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins, Rosalind Franklin, Jim Watson and Francis Crick, or the late 20th century by Denis Parsons Burkitt Joseph Atabekov, Anthony Epstein, Yvonne Barr and Bert Achong, Baruch Blumberg, Howard Temin and David Baltimore, Luc Montagnier, and/or Michael Houghton, though I think everyone can agree that by the late 20th century modern microbiology and virology laboratories became far more common, but even ignoring the modern labs, there have been a lot of labs previously throughout late history), though there have been a few dozens of breaches around the world, not one of these escaped pathogens led to a pandemic, nor an epidemic, nor even an outbreak, not a single one.
Since the dawn of recorded history, however, every single outbreak, epidemic and pandemic originated from people working and living close proximity to animals, especially livestock (but of course not exclusively), every single one we know about originated this way.
But who knows? Maybe this time, with SARS-CoV-2, your paranoia-fueled skepticism is well-founded, and the Wuhan wet market is just a coincidence. After all, there is always a first time for every single thing, right?
Re:I'm not convined (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, we take extraordinary precautions to train employees to detect phishing scams and choose decent passwords
No you don't. The fact that you compare this to training a researcher working at a BSL-4 rated lab just shows you have no idea what you're talking about.
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It doesn't matter if everyone in the lab is perfect, it only requires one person to screw up once. One anecdote from a few years back:
I once trained up a new guy to work in a cat 2 lab in a disease research centre. Seemed intelligent, was a med student on a research placement, and they picked up the procedures quickly enough and seemed competent. Sterile technique is not rocket science, its just ingrained discipline. I went through the procedures several times over a few days with them, saw they could d
Job interview question (Score:3)
A: Divide the population around a 20 mile radius of such centers (you can probably count them on one hand) by the total world population.
It's a damn small number. Read the linked article, it was written in 2017: The prospect of ramping up opportunities to inject monkeys with pathogens also worries, rather than excites, him: “They can run, they can scratch, they can bite.”
Marburg virus not the best example (Score:4, Informative)
To summarize (Score:3)
"Our procedures are really good, so couldn't possibly have been us, or our colleagues in China. We've never actually been to that lab, or even China, but we just know. Because there is nothing dangerous about what we do. All those level-4 precautions are taken for no reason at all, the viruses we work with have been deactivated." Suuuuuure...
The one thing I don't understand is this: if you want a level-4 biolab, why do you put it in a city with 11 million people, and not, for example, in the middle of the Gobi desert? An outbreak there would be a lot less hassle, seeing how there is just dust and sand for hundreds of kilometers in all directions...
N39.856553, E85.962737 seems like a good spot for dangerous bio-research.
Re:To summarize (Score:4, Insightful)
The one thing I don't understand is this: if you want a level-4 biolab, why do you put it in a city with 11 million people, and not, for example, in the middle of the Gobi desert?
Same reason these aren't all in the desert [wikipedia.org]
Who wants to work or live in a desert?
The people working there will eventually travel to a city anyway and can still infect people when they get there.
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Error: Trying to apply logic to a religion. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are trying to use observation and logic to counter claims, that weren't supported by valid arguments in the first place!
You are falling for the classical strategy of the moron:
10 Make a wild claim. Do not back it up!
20 Lure opponent into validating the weight of your previously invalid claim, by countering it with arguments. (Trigger him, make him angry.)
30 GOTO 10 (repeat), until opponent trips up and makes a tiny error.
40 Attack opponent's error, and claim victorious!
Because it is not a logical agument for them. It is an emotional one! They feel unsafe! Fear. That's all it is.
But the argumentative trick here is, that the moron becomes the game master! The rule maker. The judge!
So he can change the rules however he wants, to make him win and you lose.
When really, YOU should stay the judge of his arguments, and NOT accept invalid arguments in the first place!
It needs no counter-arguments, because it doesn't contain any valid arguments in the first place!
I don't know why smart people always freakin feel the need to put themseves into that weak position... I fell for that too in the past. A lot.
Maybe because they assume the opponent is like them, thinking logically... Maybe it's because in their heads, they are trying to find the basis for the opponent's arguments thenselves, because they assume there must be some, for the opponent to make his statement. (The Dunning-Kruger effect makes smart people doubt themselves too much.)
Maybe because due to past traumata, they automatically assume the morons to be the dominant position, and create a self-fulfilling prophecy...
In any case: Never argue with an idiot! He'll drag you down to his level, and beat you with experience! :)
Just stay in the game master / judge role, amd reject him until he *actually* makes a valid argument!
(Hint: Buy yourself a grown-up dosis of self-confidence!
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Well said. "Stupid and uneducated" is not a state that most people want fixed, it is the state most people prefer to exist in.
If it didn't escape the lab... (Score:3)
...doesn't that mean someone left the door open?
The Wuhan bio lab still bears significant blame. (Score:2, Informative)
Chinese bio labs have a notorious reputation for selling their animal subjects on the black market after they've expended their experimental usefulness.
So, although the virus may well not have been “created” (purposefully engineered) in a Chinese bio lab, the prevalence in Wuhan of wild bats is extremely low in that city, so either the bats there that infected humans were brought in from nearby specifically for the animal “wet markets” or they were brought into Wuhan for the bio l
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. . . or they just handled the samples incorrectly at the lab and infected some of the workers there.
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Chinese bio labs have a notorious reputation for selling their animal subjects on the black market after they've expended their experimental usefulness.
Only among bullshit merchants. I'm afraid Infowars is not a reliable source of information.
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Are these guys *that* obtuse? (Score:3, Insightful)
We have papers saying this lab in Wuhan dealt with coronaviruses in bats. So...
Lowering the odds further still, when researchers begin to work in the lab to see what they've collected, the samples they handle aren't actually infectious. Mazet says they are "inactivated," a chemical process that breaks apart the virus itself while preserving its genetic material for study...
Okay researchers, where the fuck do you get these samples from before you "chemically inactivate" them? Do you pick these bat coronaviruses off a tree? Or do you get them out of bats which shit and sneeze all over the place spreading fluids everywhere? Neither group, "it came from a lab!" vs "No it didn't," will ever be able to prove one way or the other.
Here is the thing though, Occam's Razor in this matter weighs way more heavily in favor of this virus getting out of a lab than it coincidentally just happening to spawn 10 miles from a lab that studies bat coronaviruses.
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A) New coronavirus outbreak occurs in an area with no bats, within walking distance from biolabs which study bat coronavirus (note: study, no mention of create or alter)
B) Virus said to have emanated from a wet market, which didn't apparently sell bats (or pangolins).
C) If the virus emanated from a wet market, and you were an authoritarian regime, would you be re-opening said wet markets 3-4 months into a global pandemic originating in said markets?
Occam's Razor
Re: Are these guys *that* obtuse? (Score:3)
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If it's a conspiracy, then everyone is in on it (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless the WHO, US, and China are all conspiring to frame China, it couldn't have come from a lab. The ability to make non-human viruses to fake a chain of infection from a host species, to an intermediate species, to humans, then get a natural-looking spread of the disease in local wildlife is beyond out abilities. It's theoretically possible to do, but is not practical.
All the right markers were found in all the same places as MERS and SARS1, so SARS2, being a human-made version of SARS1 sounds reasonable, but the frame up is too good to be possible, at least with current tech, and the "enemies" all having to be in on it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When it comes to genetic comparison, 90% and 97% are not all that good.
Human beings are a 90% genetic match to the common house cat, and a 97% genetic match to a chimpanzee. You would never look at a common house cat and say "oh man just one more intermediate step and we'll have a human."
You would never look at a common house cat and say "well that thing is going to give birth to a chimp, and then that chimp is going to give birth to a human being.
To say that A virus that is a 90% match made the leap in two
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You're talking about two different things.
1) Was the virus MANUFACTURED in a lab, and then accidentally released?
2) Was the virus being studied in a lab, and then accidentally released?
I believe most of the public conversation today, barring a few tinfoil hatters, is #2. So shrill protestations that #1 is obviously not true are either misunderstanding or disingenuous.
NPR should have mentioned... (Score:4, Informative)
Peter Daszak, their source has worked with Zhengli Shi of the Laboratory of Virology, Wuhan Institute of Virology...
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q=author:%22Peter+Daszak%22+author:%22Shi+Zhengli%22&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
Not that it matters but for full disclosure it does.
Pretty weak article (Score:2)
I'm not trying to pull a Glenn Beck here..... (Score:2)
Nor do I genuinely believe it's from a lab, I don't believe it is.
But if you told me it was and provided proof, I wouldn't be surprised.
It seems to do the following things all of which seem convienient.
Doesn't seem to exhibit symptoms for a very long time
It apparently sheds the most viral load before symptoms are apparent
It seems to do a variety of random things to the target. Not just the lungs, but organs, skin, etc. This thing really does a number on you
My memory is slipping but I've read a few other t
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"We're really careful, so China is too" (Score:3)
"What about all those Chinese farmers with Corona antibodies?" So what? Having been exposed to some kind of Corona virus means what exactly? That there are Corona viruses in the wild, some of which will cause serious harm and some which don't? Is that supposed to be a serious argument made by serious scientists? Sure doesn't sound like one to me.
China is a Communist nation. They lie. They conceal. Corruption is rampant and there is no accountability. This is the same system that led the USSR to tell everyone their reactor design could not possibly ever melt down, even after it did.
There is no reason whatsoever to believe they followed the same protocols our researchers do. That their first reaction was a coverup suggests that there was something they were more worried about than a disease. Perhaps something that would threated the Party's power, like an appallingly embarrassing failure to perform virology research in a safe manner.
Passive research on viruses gone wrong? (Score:2)
Think the Weyland-Yutani Corporation from 'Alien'. The priority is to preserve the Alien not the crew.
A virology research center in an area where viruses crossing to humans is highly possible. A new virus is identified. The center suppresses the information in the hopes of being able to capture and harness the virus' potential as a weapon. It also allows and follows the virus' spread in the wild and observes the effectiveness of existing infrastructure and counter-measures ... a low-cost experiment. No
Can't be manufactured, humans not smart enough? (Score:2)
FTA: "Garry says the reason is simple â" the virus infects people in a way that scientists had never seen before: "The virus is just really too good at what it's doing," he says. "No human using a computer could do this. This is very clearly a natural process that occurred."
What? So it's not plausible that someone very clever could think of the mod? That is the opinion of someone not familiar with say, evolutionary computing or other machine learning techniques.
How can they be sure? (Score:3)
What evidence? What evidence can this be — even in theory?
Beliefs aren't proof...
That does not disprove the idea either...
Peter Daszak worked at the Wuhan lab (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look on Google Scholar Peter Daszak worked with the Bat lady who worked on combining SARS and HIV for gain of function at the Wuhan Lab and they released 11 papers on SARS and Coronavirus together. Obvious conflict of interest is obvious. https://scholar.google.com/sch... [google.com]
Russian Anthrax Leak, 1979 (Score:3)
The anthrax leak didn't happen because a scientist did it, it was an error by the maintenance personnel. It was only confirmed decades later once the USSR fell. The same guy who confirmed it wasn't from the lab re-investigated after the fall of the USSR and confirmed it was from the lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You can't tell if a leak happened a priori. You can't trust the authorities to be truthful. Even smart people make mistakes. Shit happens.
We'll have to wait until the fall of the Chinese Communist Party to know for sure, and even then we might never know.
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Wow, a YouTube link. Case closed, everybody!
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Everyone knows that Covid-19 is retaliation for the American made [cdc.gov] H1N1 virus that killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese.
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Re:Sure (Score:5, Informative)
It's in Italian but the auto translate shows it is a program about whether gain of function research could be a cause of the virus. According to the worlds virologists this is not the case. I can make a tv program about whether the moon landings were faked, NASA says otherwise. Some people prefer the fiction to the fact. It does not persuade me to start believing in fiction, it just makes me sad that people can quote entertaining speculation as fact.
Re:Sure (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, this is a video from 2015.
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So, if it was a research facility, didn't it have a lab there? Or do think they did the virus research in the cafeteria?
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Re:Chinese Labs, Cleared. Chinese Markets, Guilty! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if this prooves to be the case I don't see your coherent strategy for eliminating similar zoonotic escapes from Africa where wet markets are also common. Nor anythiing about how our western industriall farming practises also create zoonotic escapes such as Swine flu and BSE. China is not the problem, better preparedness for pandemics and research into the diseases that we can catch from animals is the solution. Have we fixed maleria yet?
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BSE is easy: Cannibalism bad. Swine flu, a bit more difficult but not as bad since the current research shows that the strain from 2009 was similar to same from 30 years prior, and 30 years prior to that. In other words it was 'sleeping' somewhere and woke up, similar to how people have become infected with the black death when they accidentally dig up a plague pit.
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We need more Darwin awards.
Re:Ok, not a Chinese lab. How about a Russian one? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mischaracterise what is happening. Some scientists are doing the calculation that public health measures are either not effective or that economic damage will cause more health damage than the measures taken against the virus. This is how science works, it questions the known science. So far no public health or medical organisation in the world has been persuaded by these analysis to change their recommendations. The media is reflecting this process, the contrarians are being reported but they are not being reported as the settled view of the institutions we pay to evaluate these questions.
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Given that the use of mouse models often involves modification of a virus or the mouse genome to enable the virus to replicate in the mouse you are correct to think that modified viruses are often used in research. This has been done in polio research for example if you want to google it. e.g. "modified virus mouse polio" - it comes up with a virus that might be used to treat brain cancer in humans. The same sort of search being done by virologists on the papers about Corona viruses do not come up with any
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Wow, a youtube video, ironclad proof. Have you told anyone else about this?
Re:Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else"
Says nothing about being created in a lab. The "lab accident" possibility refers to a nature-created virus being studied in a lab and being released accidentally.
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You're right. That had already been proven previously, which is why anyone claiming lab release was saying it was natural and only there under study.
Re:Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:5, Informative)
So the coronavirus wasn't the result of genetic manipulation, and is a wild-type. Fine. But it is not possible to prove if its origin was from direct contact with a wild animal or from a stored lab sample. They are genetically identical, so you can't say one way or another.
As for the claims that it couldn't escape from the lab... I did my PhD in a category 3 containment facility working with several rather nasty pathogens. I wasn't directly working on the really nasty stuff, but one of my fellow PhD students managed to infect themselves despite all of the rigourous safety precautions, the double door negative pressure airlocks, the double gloving, the laminar flow hoods, sterilisation of everything with autoclaving and ethanol, the drilled in safe working practices etc. People are people, and can make mistakes. Gloves can have manufacturing defects. Tiny droplets of vapourised liquid can be on the outside of the storage vials, rather than the inside. Pipette barrels can cross-contaminate if non-filter tips are used. No matter how many precautions you take, there is a small possibility of an unintentional screwup.
The other thing to point out is the normalisation of risk. Despite working in a hazardous environment, it is a known phenomenon that people get complacent about risk. Take it from someone who has worked in one of these places. I've seen people develop bad working practices who should have known better. The student mentioned above might have been one of them, though we'll never know for sure the route of infection or the action which caused it. I suspect it must have been a needlestick; fine gauge needles are so fine that you can catch yourself without feeling it, and latex or nitrile gloves wouldn't necessarily show an obvious hole.
So while we can't prove it one way or another, I wouldn't be so quick to rule out the possibility entirely. Likely I have less faith in how great these labs are run after seeing some first hand. Some of the most intelligent academics I knew were terribly sloppy in the lab. This type of work requires strict discipline with zero deviation from protocols. But most scientists are not robots. In practice, people slip up all the time to varying degrees, and it's only through careful risk management and working practices we mitigate them. I used to be one of the people that trained lab staff in safe sterile working practices and point out every deviation and instil that discipline. There is a non-zero chance that someone could have screwed up.
Re:Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:5, Informative)
Without knowing the specific inactivation process, I can't comment on that in detail. However, some general and fairly obvious points. Inactivation might not be 100% efficient, or might be done incorrectly e.g. insufficient time, wrong temperature, poor technique. There might be a possibility that live virus could persist. Additionally, if you're dealing with "inactive" virus, you might take less safety precautions, or be more complacent, therefore raising the risk to infection due to misplaced assumptions. Lastly, even if you've inactivated what's on the inside of a sample container, is the outside completely clean? If it's spread around by touch, just moving the vial around or unscrewing the lid could transfer it to your gloves, and then to somewhere else which you assume is clean. It's for reasons like this that you spray everything with 70% ethanol and other sterilising and cleaning agents. This is where the strict discipline and adherence to material handling protocols comes in. One tiny bit of sloppiness there could result in exposure, independently of how good your inactivation protocol is. Ultimately it all comes down to managing hazards and risks, and risk is just a nice way of saying probability. There's always a probability of failure, even if it is reduced to a very tiny figure.
I would take the claims that "samples they handle aren't actually infectious" with a degree of scepticism. Claims are not proof. It might be true. But it only requires one screwup for it to not be true any longer.
Re:Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've studied this extensively and people should be very worried by how desperate people are to hide that it's possible. The chance of some from of laboratory involvement is reasonable hypothesis and not significantly different from others in terms of probability. There is a large amount of evidence in public that shows the work done by the laboratory was compatible with that. You can get as many experts as you like to come out and say things but it doesn't escape the fact that they can't know, they weren't there.
I would not trust the "inactivation" claim. Sure, that applies to some viruses and some cases, it's one security procedure, what they're doing is listing their security procedures but it's also a fact that they were collecting live viruses and experimenting both in vitro and in vivo. There are job requests from just around when the virus broke out even requiring people to help with viral research that required experience with breeding animals.
Stating low risk activities doesn't do anything to cover for the fact that the lab was engaged with high risk activities. Now everyone is arguing about inactivation, it's a moot point.
The lack of evidence in either direction if you perform an investigation of what we currently know is because there was never a decent investigation into the virus's origins including scrutinising the lab. If the research had some how been involved it might not know if it were an accident and in that case a month's worth of normal activity might be enough to destroy the evidence by chance.
Ignoring the possibility has created a large information void. Experts are speculating from a distance like backseat drivers but none of them have been on the ground at all times at all relevant places and no one has been made privy to full records of activity which likely don't even exist.
I do agree though, inactivation has been known to fail though very rarely so even if they had stuck to the methods this science claims but is unable to support beyond speculation it's not a clear guarantee that the risk was zero.
This is a fairly common media trick. If you think about a murder trial you can get all kinds of experts in the press to speculate and make very strong statements as to who they think is the guilty party in a his word against her word case but we all know when it comes down the the actual facts of the matter on the ground and what really happened they're just blowing hot air and giving at best an educated guess.
You can't study stuff and become a kind of clairvoyant or psychic medium able to know what happened in cases where you weren't there and couldn't see. Experts are not all knowing.
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They don't have much information to base that "virtually no chance" estimate on because they're not at the lab and know nothing of how well the procedures are practiced.
Also, there was one of those leaked cables from years ago that mentioned that this specific lab was sloppy and had some accidents.
Given that, and China's PR campaigns, I have to wonder how many people here are getting their 50 mao per post.
Re: Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:5, Informative)
There are many ways of inactivating viruses. Which one they used isn't clear. I'm not going to make comments relating to the efficiency of the inactivation in this specific situation without that information. Even on slashdot. I would have hoped that would be obvious, rather than a reason for unnecessary scorn.
Having a PhD in immunology, having worked in as a researcher in infectious disease research, and having spent many hundreds of hours working in high level containment labs, I do perhaps have a fairly realistic understanding of the dangers and risks involved, grounded in practical experience as well as extensive training. Likely moreso than yourself. Would you care to specifically point out the nonsense?
Re: Seriously, why is this even news? (Score:2)
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It is possible that the virus has been in human hands before it was released again.
By now we've had bioweapon , deliberate accident with edited virus, accidental accident with edited virus, deliberate accident with wildtype, accidental accident with wildtype. There does appear to be a pattern that we need to put the blame on whoever we don't like and we continue till all options have been exhausted.
I'd sooner look into good and bad practices which affect the chances of accidents happening. how we handle our
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No, they're not identical, in fact the human-contagious version is considerably different than any wild bat coronavirus. University of Ottawa research indicates that it probably passed through feral dogs that had eaten dead bats first.
https://medicalxpress.com/news... [medicalxpress.com]
Scientists have been looking for an intermediate animal host between bats, which are known to harbor many coronaviruses, and the first introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into humans.
Many animals, beginning with snakes and most recently, pangolins, hav
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If they do have live animals there, it would certainly be of interest to see the conditions and working practices. In one of the places I worked, I didn't work on live animal research in the attached animal facility myself, but had to go in on occasion to use specialist equipment there, and I did all the training necessary to be allowed to be present in the facility. The animals were stored in sealed plastic cages connected to a filtered air supply with HEPA filters on each cage. This was to prevent spre
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Have you ever seen a diplomat who was even vaguely qualified to critique the operations of a BHL-4 lab? I certainly haven't, and especially not the political appointees who are the US's pitiful excuse for "diplomats".
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This is staggeringly naive.
By the time this is all done, we may well have over a million people dead as a result of it. The economic losses will be in the trillions, and a global recession will be upon us. At this point in time, all of this is essentially unavoidable. We'll be paying the costs of this collectively for decades. You're seriously suggesting that this isn't deserving of detailed scrutiny given the impact?
When any industrial accident occurs in the first world, be it chemical, biological, nuc
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Someone must have told him to put his claims where the light doesn't shine, to which he replied triumphantly...
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Trumphantly needs to be a word.
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I am blinded by the sheer brilliance of his stable genius.
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Elephant seals?
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There is literally nothing they could do that would convince you it wasn't released from a lab.
Confirmation - conspiracy confirmed
Denial - conspiracy confirmed
Silent - conspiracy confirmed
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Simple logic should be sufficient to give a reasonable person confidence that it wasn't a lab release.
Simple logic is not how you estimate odds. Simple logic cannot predict accidents. I asked for a probability. If you believe something with a 100% certainty because of the reasons you outlined, then you have already fooled yourself with 2 logical fallacies: appeal to authority and survivorship bias.
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How about this - If a Communist government is faced with an embarrassing failure that could threaten it's hold on power, it will try to cover that up in order