The idea of this being an engineered virus wittingly unleashed on the world by some malevolent Party conspirators strains credulity--the notion is preposterous, especially from a country as obsessed with internal stability as China.
However, the Wuhan pathogen research laboratory is still a worthy source to consider relating to this virus. Accidents DO happen, and China has a history of making mistakes leading to dangerous pathogens escaping their labs.
In 2004, SARS escaped a BS-3 lab in Beijing, infecting several and killing at least one:
" In April 2004, China reported a case of SARS in a nurse who had cared for a researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology. While ill, the researcher had traveled twice by train from Beijing to Anhui province, where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill and died. The nurse in turn infected five third-generation cases, causing no deaths.
Subsequent investigation uncovered three unrelated laboratory infections in different researchers at the NIV. At least of two primary patients had never worked with live SARS virus. Many shortcomings in biosecurity were found at the NIV, and the specific cause of the outbreak was traced to an inadequately inactivated preparation of SARS virus that was used in general (that is, not biosecure) laboratory areas, including one where the primary cases worked. It had not been tested to confirm its safety after inactivation, as it should have been."
For more recent, though more vague, evidence that China may not share the same views on handling extremely dangerous pathogens as the rest of the world, we have this story from July 2019, wherein a Chinese researcher working in one of Canada's BS-4 labs, along with her husband who was a SARS researcher, as well as several students she brought over from China to work with her, were all given the boot over unspecified "administrative matters".
The University later severed all ties with her and her crew.
The article speculates that this was related to IP theft of some kind, which seems strange considering the lab's work was all in the public domain--what's to steal?
This happened about six months ago, and four months before the Coronavirus broke. Is this at all related? Maybe, maybe not.
>For more recent, though more vague, evidence that China may not share the same views on handling extremely dangerous pathogens as the rest of the world, we have this story from July 2019, wherein a Chinese researcher working in one of Canada's BS-4 labs, along with her husband who was a SARS researcher, as well as several students she brought over from China to work with her, were all given the boot over unspecified "administrative matters".
She (and her husband) are both Canadian researchers who happens to be Chinese. She shipped Ebola and henipavirus samples with "all appropriate precautions" as part of "routine" sharing program according to National Microbiology Laboratory. They suspended her non-salaried appointments during current investigation, her students, some of whom were Chinese nationals, were reassigned. The IP concern was a Chinese Mabworks company was developing the experimental and patented ebola drug ZMapp which she worked on without authorization.
>The idea of this being an engineered virus wittingly unleashed on the world by some malevolent Party conspirators strains credulity--the notion is preposterous, especially from a country as obsessed with internal stability as China.
How about the idea that this is an engineered virus unwittingly unleashed on the world by some accident/incompetence?
If one reads the history of nuclear weapons/reactors, and how all kinds of BS, negligence, incompetence, has only by miracle spared us from major catastrophe at various times, one would consider what might happen with all those military virus labs...
Because by far the simplest explanation is that this is a zoonosis. The virus is not particularly virulent, it doesn't seem to have an easy time of human-to-human transmission, and interesting coronaviruses have been found in animals in Asian wet markets many times before.
That's assuming, for the sake of argument, of course that a biolab creating these types of viruses for "offensive" purposes would only focus on one, extremely lethal virus and nothing else. It's easy to imagine that less lethal viruses are also created to study the effects of different modifications, and these viruses may be kept under less strict supervision than the worst ones (increasing the risk of it spreading).
Anyway, there's no evidence so far to support any of these theories, but considering China's record I guess it wouldn't surprise me. For now I still think the easiest explanation is the most likely.
I thought of that too, than my tinfoil hat went further on thinking that maybe this is just a QA test, a mild version of the pathogen released to see how far it spreads to fine tune the "production" version.
Given the rapidity with which the Harvard chemical-biologist was arrested after we received a sample and sequenced it (~36 hours), I think it is possible (possible! not likely!) that we engineered it, and they paid a researcher to give them a copy.
* Some pretty heavy researchers in the US say that it (the virus) was not human-engineered. I find their reasoning spurious, but they know more than I do.
More likely is that before coronavirus Lieber's arrest wasn't politically feasible.
He was Chair of the Chem department at Harvard, respected key opinion leader etc. All he did was take money from more sources than he disclosed, to fund the normal business of his academic career. Reading between the lines, looking at the photos, everyone familiar with science+academia can clearly see he's slimy but no more slimy than many other respected businesspeople. But to lay people it seems like a scientist is getting persecuted for furthering international cooperation in basic research. And of course one does not chair a Harvard department without powerful friends.
From the court filings, it seems Lieber was caught a long time ago when he e.g. explicitly lied about funding sources to investigators.
When coronavirus happened, suddenly Wuhan, China, and research became politically exposed. Before coronavirus, if you said Lieber took money to help develop a university in Wuhan people in the USA would think he was doing charity work in some unknown tier 3 city. Now people in the USA hear the same and think of advanced bioweapons. It's a good time to indict and convict.
Oh. Sorry. I was too embedded in the context of the Chinese-funding of US University/Academic research story.
In this context here:
- "We" == "US Research Programs, funded by the Chinese, but not disclosed according to requirements given to them by the university or the federal grant authorities (whoever they might be for any given program)"
- "They" == "Whichever Chinese organizations, governmental or otherwise, that fund US researchers, and encourage them to 'under-the-table' provide results/data/samples"
EDIT: For whatever it's worth. I have no problem with US and Chinese researchers collaborating and funding each other. But I do like a bit of disclosure from time-to-time.
EDIT: User pavelrub made a very reasonable comment on this thread that he was amazed at American's ability to conspiracy-monger (my words, not his, but he has since deleted his comment. I hope I am not taking too many liberties with his statement), but he's right. I have no basis (as I said up-thread) to believe any of this. Right now, I am hypothesis-hunting, and probably shouldn't share that mental-process in public, given that 99.9% of them (the broken hypotheses) will turn out to be trash.
This is a good lesson for me in a very different context.
I could relate to what you said about it’s a mental-process with maybe 99% trash, but there’s still 1% not trash in there and I can only know it isn’t trash by not getting carried away without verifying the hypothesis in first place.
Lesson learned: sure, go ahead with hypothesis hunting, but also spend time to verify them first.
Edit: more simply, be careful about confirmation bias.
I think this might be the official US Justice Department link. It's long, but worth reading the whole thing since it is primary source and not some newspaper summary:
"The Department of Justice announced today that the Chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and two Chinese nationals have been charged in connection with aiding the People’s Republic of China."
...
"Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017. China’s Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese Talent recruit plans that are designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security."
I did and so much was going on (US politics-wise, and Brexit-wise), I was kind of sloppier than I generally am. I will try to recover and post within a day.
EDIT: Because it was me hypothecating (generating hypotheses), it will be more than one link that may turn out to be unrelated.
The market resides in the heart of the city so it could be that there was some other route of transmission through carriers without symptoms, animals etc.
To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.
I didn't read anything in the posted article that indicates that the China-based researchers think it came from a lab or looks synthetic. So I didn't understand why you are responding to a claim that they aren't making.
The virology lab thing is a very popular conspiracy theory. Really the only evidence is that the virus started in the general viscinity of the lab, and that the lab was (somewhat vaguely, but not completely implausibly) suspected of doing bioweapons research.
It's worth rebutting. The nonsense is a little out of control.
I'm sure there is more to find about that, but for the purpose of rebutting your nonsense i deem it sufficient.
What do i mean by that? The theories aren't unfounded when looking back, because they happened! It doesn't really matter where, when, by whom, and what exactly. Just that it did happen multiple times.
I don't get it. Why are people knee-jerk adverse to this idea? We're not arguing with flat earthers or moon landing skeptics. It's entirely plausible. With people putting their reputation on it, too. Dany Shoham (Israeli biological warfare expert) put his name on the line point this out before a lot of people.
It's not out of the realm of possibility and shouldn't be disregarded out of hand like it has been. Could be from there or maybe not. We really need more information from China to settle some of these discussions.
The tricky part is that we have zero evidence. It’s not that it’s not a reasonable hypothesis, it’s that it’s nothing more than speculation. This is fine in general, but many people do not generally understand the difference between a hypothesis and pure speculation, and may attribute more weight to a guess than it deserves.
It is important to remember that there is zero evidence of this theory, and yet despite that it is spreading through the Internet populace faster than the virus itself.
So the same guy that claimed ISIS have biological weapon? Other than public information, so what does he know that others don’t? this guy has no credibility to begin with.
The odds are fairly slim. Wuhan is a large Chinese city that has a greater population than most countries.
There is going to be an (X) in Wuhan for any value of (X) anyone cares to name. The fog of uncertainty is still thick; nobody has much of an idea what is going on. Anyone claiming that they have a theory on where the virus came from is fantasising. The knee-jerk people probably don't want them drowning out a weak signal with useless noise.
There is only one Biosafety level 4 laboratory in China, and it opened... last year in... Wuhan. I am not saying there is a link, but I would not dismiss it too fast.
There'd be a bunch of BSL-3 facilities all over the place. It isn't like the Black Death or the Spanish Flu needed a BSL-4 facility to incubate in.
It is possible; but a lot of things are possible. It is a mighty leap from a starting point of basically no primary evidence and all the people who have on-the-ground access to evidence are very busy managing a rapidly growing crisis.
There's also that time the USG tested the effects of bioweapon spreading on San Francisco and other US cities. It's not like countries don't have a history of this.
They have happened at some place at some point in the past seems pretty weak to go on. A lot of things have happened in the past, doesn't mean they're all potential causes this time around. Seems to me we need a bit more than we've had bio lab incidents before.
I mean by this measure any time someone crashes a car it could be an assassination attempt. It's happened before.
I didn't mean to say that something like this IS the cause, just that it could be. Right now we don't have enough data and facts to confirm or dismiss either.
What rubs me the wrong way are the people instantly dismissing something like this as unlikely, or even impossible ignoring history.
A conspiracy theory is a symptom of what people already suspect and believe about those in positions of authority. In this case the suspicion is that the epidemic is a result of a preventable accident and the incompetence and corner-cutting of the lab is being covered up to save face. People believe it because safety endangering corruption, saving face, and covering up industrial accidents are all very prevalent in Chinese society. In recent memory there's been high profile cases like the tainted milk powder, the HSR accident (that was literally buried), the explosion in tian jin etc.
Well, there's one pre-print paper that goes as far as saying that because some segments of the RNA resemble, closely, parts of HIV, that those may have been inserted by human efforts. Of course, there's been a lot of pushback to this assertion; detractor say that this "inserted segment" actually shows up in all kinds of things and it also being in HIV is not significant here.
For the article and the pushback, see this link and its comments:
The lab theory seems unlikely but out of curiosity, how would a lab approach creating a dangerous virus? Presumably they would iteratively try modifying an existing RNA, synthesize it, then breed the virus and test it on mice?
A couple of days ago I posted a link to the BLASTN sequence alignment between the 2003 SARS virus and the Wuhan virus in a comment on one of the other discussions here.
You can see they are closely related, at about 88% sequence identity. There are point mutations spread more or less evenly over the entire genome. This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers would perform specific localized changes to specific proteins, or contiguous insertions of genetic material from evolutionarily distant sources.
Source: Go over to NCBI and do the alignment yourself, also am PhD biologist.
PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
> The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
I believe this is generally the case with most topics outside the standard focus of this site (which I would posit is computers generally). There tends to be a mixture of intelligent, accurate commentary, and intelligent but misled commentary (and my observers bias would further distort the separation between those two categories). It tends to get better as discussion continues, but not always.
That said, this topic is more likely to be sensationalized than most.
When you know enough about something, there's horrible misinformation on it everywhere, even on HN.
But one of my favourite things about HN is the rebuttals, deep-dives, and 'well, actually's of informed commenters discussing niches I know little about.
If you’re an expert in this area, it would help everyone else if you compose and put up a top level comment explaining things. It could get upvoted to be among the first few comments, steering the conversation accordingly. Replies to specific comments with limited information won’t help as much since they won’t bubble up.
(They actually bubble up their parent comment thread, if they're upvoted highly enough. I've seen comment threads where the #1 post has negative point values, but is on top because the response is from someone with firsthand knowledge of the issue which gets upvoted to 100s of points.)
> Source: Go over to NCBI and do the alignment yourself, also am PhD biologist.
> PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
On the flip side, I've seen lots of "experts" chime in and say things that prove to be wrong. For example, during the early stages of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, I recall reading comments by lots of "experts" explaining how there's little to worry about and they referred to things like core catchers and all the other mechanisms that are supposed to protect a (modern) nuclear power plant in emergency. As is evident, much of their expertise did not apply and things that weren't supposed to go wrong went wrong.
I don't remember specific cases but I'm pretty sure I've witnessed a similar pattern over and over again here, and just seeing news of coronavirus outbreak immediately brought back memory of -- and prediction of -- experts chiming in telling people why it's nothing to be concerned about and why all the pop news scare is overblown. I'm getting kind of a dejavu feeling here.
>The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
HN is good when it comes to technology, and that's what I browse it for. When it comes to genetics or biology...not so much. Engineer's disease runs definitely stronger than coronaviruses here.
>This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers would perform specific localized changes to specific proteins, or contiguous insertions of genetic material from evolutionarily distant sources.
Honest question: if this is common knowledge of people in the field, why wouldn't people genetically engineering a virus (and trying to hide it) do so in a fashion to make it look more like evolution in the genomes? Is that not possible to do?
Given that modifying an RNA virus to obtain specific results from an infection is very hard to begin with, also working with the limitation that your changes to the virus have to look "natural" makes it essentially impossible by being impractical.
On top of that, there's no reason to do it for a military weapon. For military use you don't infect a few people and hope it spreads, you infect a whole bunch and hope the whole thing spreads quickly enough that the virus can't be stopped, and it overwhelms an entire population by incapacitating or killing them.
Dispersing virus over a significant fraction of a population isn't easy or quiet, so whether it's a natural disease or GMO doesn't matter, because they'll know who did it.
The only scenario in which it makes sense to evolve a genetically engineered weapon in a way that hides its origins is for bioterrorism... and bioterrorism is very rare because it's a lot harder technically than terrorism that consists of shooting up a military base or running an exploding motorboat into a ship.
Doing a bunch of point mutations that "look" like a normal evolutionary process seems awfully expensive just to engineer a virus that's less threatening than, you know, the flu.
>a virus that's less threatening than, you know, the flu.
How can you say this as fact when we don't even know the morbidity rate of the coronavirus? The story isn't over yet, but it looks like it could be twice as deadly as influenza.
i looked up the discussion you mentioned, and a comment right next to yours came to an opposite conclusion, also based on some BLAST result (all of them now expired). I am just a confused laymen.
Lobste.rs looks cool but I see you can only join if you're invited by an existing member. Would you mind sending one to me, or letting me know where I can go about getting one? :)
We need smart people. The topics are only ever software development but none the less I’ve reviewed your comment history and you can have an invite if you want.
This kind of “Gmail Beta” thingy that makes the service a premium and doesn’t allow people to join in good faith is why I didn’t join said site. I once waited there for an invite on chat, was polite and everything, but didn’t get invited. I also didn’t see many comments on most posts there. So the exclusivity, as I saw it then, was a drawback to the quantity and quality of the site and discussions. I’m no longer interested in begging around for something that wouldn’t be as valuable as HN.
You have a very lax definition of “Information”.
There is absolutely nothing suggesting that Wuhan is man made. I expected a little more scientific perspective from this forum.
"Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First,
we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any
other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to
It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.
bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871. The copyright holder for this
short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 gp120 and Gag among all annotated virus proteins in
the NCBI database. This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to
HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous."
Quote: 75 815 individuals have been infected in Wuhan as of Jan 25, 2020. The epidemic doubling time was 6·4 days. We estimated that if there was no reduction in transmissibility, the Wuhan epidemic would peak around April, 2020, and local epidemics across cities in mainland China would lag by 1–2 weeks.
To my layman's ears, some of the conclusions in the cited Lancet article sound chilling, e.g. "...given the substantial volume of case importation from Wuhan, local epidemics are probably already growing exponentially in multiple major Chinese cities. Given that Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen together accounted for more than 50% of all outbound international air travel in mainland China, other countries would likely be at risk of experiencing 2019-nCoV epidemics during the first half of 2020."
Any comments on the soundness of the methodology used?
Yes, 75815 individuals in Wuhan on Jan/25, with 4-6 day doubling is a more reasonable number. Better fits end of January, 3/200 of Japanese evacuation statistics and 4/400 of the Korean one. Assuming ~11M Wuhan population.
Gao Fu, the director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. I believe this was based on the activities of those first infected along with matching environmental samples at the market. Hope this helps explain the attribution better.
Have they seen this strain among animal populations? It seems logical to establish that animal populations can carry it, and in doing so it should be traceable there.
It seems in the avian flu they had established very early on the lineage of it. It seems very unlikely that they will not be able to identify patient zero.
There was a very far out article on zerohedge (not making any claims as to the legitimacy of the article or the publication) which had some interesting references about recent coronavirus research in facilities outside of China. I wouldn't normally promote it but there are some interesting references in there. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...
This coronavirus is close to some found in bats and 80% similar to SARS which came from bats through civets. Wouldn’t expect exact strain to be found in wild cause have to mutate to jump to humans. The question is how got to humans from bats since don’t think was direct connection. One paper suggested snakes but others don’t think that is likely.
I've more faith in the bat origin theory than the others so far.
Don't know if the science is solid, but given how riddled bats are with all kinds of nasty stuff, you probably don't want to be eating that unless you're particularly keen on developing an exotic disease.
“The initial focus of case detection was on patients with pneumonia, but we now understand that some patients can present with gastrointestinal symptoms,"
Yeah I have a hard time believing it has been definitively proven that the market was the source of the virus. Wouldn’t that mean they have the carcass of whatever animal transmitted the virus in their possession? And did the first person known to have contracted it actually say they went there?
It's pretty simple. You ask all the first people who got sick what they were doing over the past couple weeks. It's the same way they identified that Chipotle had an E Coli problem.
It's just not that clear-cut. Last time around, they apparently culled the wrong animal population. Scientists still dispute to this day whether the action effected anything resembling change. The book "Spillover" (highly recommend it) goes into this in excruciating details, but in particular draws attention to the distinction between a host animal and the amplifier animal. In Hendra's case (Australia), it was a bat -> horse -> human -> random survival recurrence. In other outbreaks, it was not very clear what was what and health officials and some scientists tend to jump to conclusion too early.
What might seem like a rising concern is that there's documentation that the new virus may have made two hops between healthy carriers and infected others.
I’ve seen nothing reported on what actually happened, including the allegation someone actually ate something. It could have been transmitted by just walking near something.
I'm not a fan of this title. It's verbose without being explicit. Should be "Wuhan seafood may not be source of coronavirus outbreak". Everyone already knows it's a novel virus spreading globally, just call it by its name.
Its name is novel coronavirus or more specifically "2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)". There are many coronaviruses that just cause colds. There's also SARS, MERS, and now nCoV that are a lot more deadly.
Major ongoing stories, especially sensational ones like a new epidemic, lead to tons of copycat and follow-up posts. In order for the front page not to fill up with coronavirus stories, or some other sensation du jour, we try to downweight follow-up posts unless there is significant new information. Otherwise the threads fill up with repetition of what's already been said, wild speculation, or both.
We hit on the "significant new information" test after the Snowden storm of 2013, when users justly complained that the front page had become inundated with too many articles that added nothing substantial and were just triggering repeat threads. As a discussion becomes repetitive, it also tends to become wilder and more flame-prone—as if the mind has to resort to that to amuse itself, since there's nothing new to sink its teeth into.
Since HN's organizing value is intellectual curiosity, repetition and groundless speculation are among the things most to be avoided here. That's why we moderate that way.
There is a recently opened P4 biolab in Wuhan within miles of the seafood market in question, with researchers who have recently been working with and publishing on the topic of Corona viruses, including research on human transmission. Not to be sensationalist, and personally I think the title is alarmist, but are a number of suspicious elements to this story that are worth examining:
- Every laboratory exposure-related outbreak I've encountered has been trivially easy to trace back to that event.
- Most high-end virology labs are doing research on human to human transmission of corona viruses. They're a major emerging type of virus we don't understand, and a Chinese lab working on them is even less surprising.
Points one and two are originating in a lab as a general principle. Only point three is addressing the mutated version of this rumor, which is that it's a bioweapons lab.
There are very, very few outbreaks where we don't eventually figure out the source.
Like, can you spin the theory that we're missing them? Sure. But there's a pretty strong absence of evidence there, despite a field that's actively looking constantly (and where showing that would further the political and scientific careers of a number of people).
Bioweapons aren't all that effective in general for the reasons seen here: they're too slowly acting, to easy to treat, and not as lethal as, say, chemical weapons (which are also not that effective as weapons). Biological weapons are most dangerous as terror weapons.
I am not sure I agree completely. Yes, the panic they induce ( and that media happily augment ) is in itself dangerous, but.. well, weaponized ebola has apparently been in existence for a while. What makes you think progress was not made since then to.. add new traits to existing strains?
I hate to say anything more, because we would easily move into wild speculation territory.
Currently reading a (French) book regarding France-China industrial espionage and relations that was published well before the virus outbreak. Funnily enough, the author describes quite extensively how this P4 in Wuhan came into existence and all the subsequent problems faced by France to get China to honor the deal.
I quote/translate: "In the course of these fifteen years, China has several times failed to live up to their engagement, staying relatively vague about the existence of an offensive biological program. Chinese officials had, for example, previously certified they had no other P4 and no plans to build any, but we now know they do have many, some being quite suspicious, a France official said".
The book is "France-Chine, les liaisons dangereuses" by Antoine Izambard, for those curious.
Yeah the whole thing is basically a shitshow. The majority of the French administration was against the deal as well as many other countries but the president at the time forced the deal to go through.
The allegation that the virus originated in a lab is appealing but unfounded. Everybody would rather believe that our problems come from circumstances humans understand and control rather than the cold randomness of the universe. Though the virus and death it has caused is terrible, at least the fight against it unites humanity in a limited way. The groundless assertion that it originated in a lab recasts coronavirus into a human vs human problem and amplifies our political differences.
No. From a new, anonymous account where I intend to post my opinions without them being tied to my identity. At least until I post enough for stylometric analysis to work...
Unfortunately, saying rational things about China—instead of demonizing it—can be seen as defending the Chinese government and bring a lot of grief in this current “Yellow Peril” environment.
A new account is the same as a fake account. I didn't see any reason for not tieing it to a identity. I express my opinions also, only if it is really sensitive I would use a throw away. I think being pro/contra China is not that sensitive, except if you are in China and contra.
China is literally ground zero for what will be a global pandemic if we do not contain it. I implore you not to bring nonsensical allegations of racism into this.
There are 23 genome publicly available, And it’s closely identifies with existing coronavirus from bats and are further away from SARS. I am not a biologist, tell me should I trust the existing science or your story? It was said that the virus might not have originated from the market itself, people who actually raised or caught these wild animals might have gotten it first. But to make a jump from that to the biolab is exactly like how the US flag looked like wind blew on it and we never went to the moon.
I’ll believe it when NIH or CDC publish corroborating evidence.
Article's still up for me and in the comments you have a bunch of people stalking some researcher the article mentioned. It's the Boston Marathon Bomber all over again.
Must still be a cache somewhere for you. When I try to view it, it says "This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules."
Interesting, I visited it from IPs from all around the world through different desktop browsers and it's available everywhere BUT there is no author and no author bio.
If that's (kind of) on purpose that's really weird, to suspend somebodies account but leave the article up and remove all the author references. Anybody from medium on hn :)?
At first it was like that for me too. After a reload, because trying to click on that Adrian Bond icon to see what else he posted, it's now gone completely like parent poster described.
The funny thing about that is when you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology the geocoordinates there lead you into the same forest on all major mapping services, while the pictures are recent or
even from this year.
“Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found in any other coronavirus. They hint at the possibility that this Chinese virus was designed ["not fortuitous'].” [1]
“BOSTON (CBS) – Three people tied to universities and a hospital in the Boston area were indicted on charges they lied about their ties to China or tried to help the Chinese government. Among them was Dr. Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
Prosecutors said Lieber had a contract with Wuhan Institute of Technology. He also ran a group that had contracts with the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health” [2]
What also leads me to believe this may be the case is that there was (according to the article) experiments on bats being run, and in China, people often find random animals, in drainage ditches, etc., and then go on to sell them for meat. It's possible that the bats they were working on were improperly disposed of, and then picked up and sold at the wet market.
> Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.
> Or at least start with an email: Dr Peng can be reached at [...], and his phone# is [...]
Have they no shame? They've found a bat immunologist (a different one than the virologist in the Medium post upstream; it's almost as if there are many experts on bat viruses), strongly suggest that this makes him the one responsible, and then ask people to contact him? This is basically orchestrating a harassment campaign. I hope they can be sued for that (defamation? IANAL).
Nowadays, what source is completely reliable? The best you can do is sample a bunch of them and try to piece together the whole truth from that, because everybody seems to have an angle.
Forget the local content, but follow the links and make your decisions with those additional resources - discard them or not. Even a click-bate site can have links that help dis/prove a hypothesis.
Here is an article from CBC[0], the source of the original article that sparked this theory. It claims to debunk the sensational claims, going as far as to call them fake and a conspiracy.
No coronavirus was sent to Wuhan from that lab, it was a henipavirus and Ebola. It also wasn't sent by Dr. Qiu.
That doesn't prove the coronavirus didn't escape from the Wuhan lab. But it does debunk this popular theory that it was Dr Qiu.
Even if it did escape from the lab, it doesn't mean it's a bioweapon. Although the CCP are almost certainly working on them, possibly in their only known level 4 lab in Wuhan. I imagine there is a research overlap between bioweapons and treating people. They both require a deep understanding of how the viruses function.
There is an interesting unanswered question: what is the RCMP investigating Dr. Qiu for? They are very vague. It could be nothing, or it could be related to her helping setup the lab in Wuhan. The RCMP is a vain, inept organization IMO.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Did you read the article before you dismissed this? The links are a little more substantial than 9/11 conspiracies.
And the mechanism is far less far-fetched, considering that on at least one instance SARS was confirmed as having escaped a research lab much like the one in question.
There are 23 genome publicly available, And it’s closely identifies with existing coronavirus from bats and are further away from SARS. I am not a biologist, tell me should I trust the existing science or your story? It was said that the virus might not have originated from the market itself, people who actually raised or caught these wild animals might have gotten it first. But to make a jump from that to the biolab is exactly like how the US flag looked like wind blew on it and we never went to the moon.
I’ll believe it when NIH or CDC publish corroborating evidence. Or are they part of the ‘system’ to you?
The part about not going to the moon that always baffles me, is when I start asking questions like "Were the Saturn Rockets fake? were the satellites launched fake? Do you believe the ISS is currently being faked? the Space Shuttle? Any of the SpaceX stuff that is currently happening?" and they believe that stuff is real.
If that's all real, then why couldn't they land on the moon?
Because anything which currently involves humans in tin cans in earth orbit happens below the van Allen Belts, which is one point the non-believers are holding up.
Their point being to cross the Belts in tin cans even going fast would have toasted them nicely and afterwards being toasted further by having no protection from cosmic rays or solar winds at all.
Which won't happen if you stay in LEO where every human space flight happened afterwards.
To return back to the current topic, there was a (good!) movie about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One
from 1978 where they faked it to proactively saving face
in case of any real mishaps. Though that was for traveling to Mars, not the Moon.
I don't think that the author of the parent comment has some "i don't believe the system" sentiment, tinfoil hat style.
For example, I definitely trust CDC (the US one). However, I am vary of trusting Chinese authorities and agencies when it comes to this issue, as they have shown before that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to hide the truth when revealing it casts a bad light or reveals some info. I have no strong opinion on the true source of the virus, as there isn't simply enough info and time to do a proper investigation by CDC, but it is easily imaginable how much the reputation of China will get damaged if it gets discovered that the virus was born out of one of their labs.
Yes, I hate conspiracy theorists who ridiculously claim that governments tested out things like toxic chemicals, radioactive substances, and pathogens on civilian populations throughout the entire 20th century:
This conspiracy idea is quite far fetched. And it was probably spread as fake news, by someone with a political agenda to smear the reputation of China worldwide. (And if you’ve been watching closely, this is a very well funded campaign, that has been very active for the past 3 years.)
But let’s try to think this through.
If they (China) were researching it, then it is possible that this could’ve accidentally escaped the lab. Although that is some serious professional incompetence. And if they are intelligent and skilled enough to work with dangerous diseases, then I’m sure they have proper containment and stringent decontamination processes in place.
However, if this was a bioweapon, then a few arguments fall apart.
(1) If they engineered it, then they should’ve had the genome already. Instead, they had to capture the strain, and sequence its genome, and it took them three weeks to complete the sequencing. And then, they shared it with the world, the CDC, the WHO, in order to help foreign countries contain it.
For comparison, the CDC took over 2 months to sequence the Ebola virus. The Chinese sequenced this virus in 3 weeks. Granted, technology and techniques improved in the intervening years.
So that begs the question: If this was a bioweapon, then why would they quickly share its genome with the world? Why not just keep it for themselves, while they work out some cure, and let the rest of the world flounder and die off?
Their strength comes from their economic engine, and their exports to the world. They can’t make things for foreign markets, if those other countries are dying from some bioweapon that was unleashed on the world.
(2) If this was a bioweapon, and then they ‘accidentally’ released it on themselves, which makes no sense, then what is the goal? Because the economic fallout from this thing will cause billions in economic damages. As well as potentially causing social instability, for a country that prizes stability over all else. And the political fallout will be even higher.
(3) The Chinese are not suicidal. They were attacked with biological and chemical warfare by the Japanese in the 1930s. They were threatened with nuclear annihilation by MacArthur (to drop 50 atomic bombs) during the Korean War in the 1950s, and were also likely subjected to biological warfare too. The rest of the Western world prefers to ignore this, but they can never forget, because their people actually died from biological warfare.
So given all that, they have first hand experience of what biological warfare will do. So if they are researching bioweapons, then I’m pretty certain that they will have stringent procedures in place to contain it.
(4) And then there is the most logical argument, that this is a very poor bioweapon.
The goal of a bioweapon is to maximize immediate casualties, while minimizing uncontrollable transmissions to others. Basically, there is no point in using a weapon, if it ends up killing yourself.
China is, contrary to what media might want you to believe, not a sinister empire of evil. They are, however, a culture with a strict requirement to save your face at all cost.
Following Hanlon's Razor, never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. IF, and that's a big if, this virus was somehow bio-engineered, the most probable explanation is that it escaped from the adjacent lab due to humans making mistakes.
Now what do you do in that situation? A virus you're legitimately researching escapes from a state sponsored lab. You try to cover it up, of course, which isn't even hard because it might have developed in nearby bats anyway.
That way, nobody looses their face and you can try to fight the virus with everyone else.
That is an easier and more logical explanation than some "bioweapon".
I wouldn't even call this a Chinese trait exclusively. It's definitely more pronounced there, but when didn't governments and companies all over the world lie about mishaps until it wasn't possible to hide the truth anymore? Look back no further than Iran shooting down that plane. That thing was crystal clear, yet they tried to deny it at first.
The difference is that the Chinese government can mostly hide the truth when it comes to their own citizens though...
>And if you’ve been watching closely, this is a very well funded campaign, that has been very active for the past 3 years.
I would love to hear more about this "well funded" campaign to smear China's reputation. Are conspiracies only "far-fetched" when the don't align with your beliefs?
I love laughing at conspiracy theories like the fake moon landing, the flat earth theory, and ancient astronauts built the pyramids, but this insinuation is a step too far.
Claiming that this is a synthetic virus is pretty much the height of racism and is deeply unscientific. I hope sciencemag rescinds this story after the backlash.
> [ABSTRACT] We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus.
Table 1 shows four alignments. The first two are only six contiguous residues, so can easily happen by chance. Three has multiple mistmatches as well as the gap (red). Four has an even larger gap to get the alignment.
Take any two viruses and there's a decent likelihood of finding similar alignments.
They don't appear to even be matching entire sequences. An analogy might be "these two web pages both contain <div>*</div>! oh no!" while completely disregarding everything in the middle.
I don't know, nor am I in a position to really have an opinion on this, but it might even be as small of a reason as "hey I want to get published"
The PDF itself is MS Word, has numerous typos/little care (words like 'alingment'), random font changes back and forth between Times New Roman and the default MS Word font (Calibri?))
FWIW, https://old.reddit.com/user/BurrShotFirst1804 is claiming that this (preprint, unreviewed) paper is very misleading, speaking as (supposedly) someone highly familiar with at least one of these HIV proteins. Not sure what to make of either the paper itself or this response to it.
Copying /u/BurrShotFirst1804's main response here for easier reference:
=====
This study is crap.
My comment from another thread. This paper isn't peer reviewed or published. It's just an online journal.
I've worked pretty closely with gag in my PhD thesis. Gag is the conglomerate protein that gets cut by the protease to generate the hiv capsid, matrix, and carrier proteins. Gp120 is the receptor protein.
This is a really fucking dumb study and these scientists should be ashamed. Those amino acids are so short. They just went and looked for a virus to match. You can go and blast the amino acids yourself. Just copy and paste from the journal entry into NCBIs BLASTp. I did it and there's hundreds of matches to those sequences. HIV didn't even come up in the first 100. The 4th residue is missing like 6 amino acids. There are conserved regions in viruses. Their "gp120" match compares 6 amino acids out of 850 in the whole protein for example.
They found 4 sections that were in the new virus but not SARS. They then took these differences and ran them against all known viral proteins. They only looked at proteins with 100% matches, but if you look at the table they didn't match 100% for alignment. So like one is ABCEFG and they match it to an HIV protein that is ABCXYZEFG and they are calling those total matches. There's also tons of viruses that match these tiny sequences, they just noticed all 4 have HIV matches so they ignore the other matches and only looked at HIV.
A significant part of my postdoc training involved carefully determining what BLAST hits are likely to be true or not. However, I saw some scientists (often bored, or inexperienced) who would set their E-value threshold to 10 (IE, expect 9 false positives for every true positive) and just sort of mine the results until they had some other data that seemed "significant" and published. A lot of science is done this way :(
I’m think they might be aiming at HIV because China has also been in the news for genetically modifying two babies to prevent HIV. Disinformation designed to send people down a hole, linking stuff together to make it seem more plausible.
Plenty of things are being peer reviewed properly with this outbreak. But you can't take preprints in biology as any more holy writ than you can the occasional post on arXiv where someone claims to have come up with a complete unified model for physics, or solved a previously intractable problem.
Virus's mutate and with how climate change is affecting everything; wouldn't it be tragically ironic if climate change accelerated how fast the common cold (for example) mutates
There are several links between climate change (of any origin) and the spread of pathogens. Not mutation rate that I know of, but the ability to break out of existing 'reserve' locations which persistently harbor them into areas where they're not normally found.
Case in point: the plague. Still very much alive in some areas of Asia and Africa, and localized outbreaks still occur today. But displacement of carriers species (e.g. rats) from those areas to others due to various climate-shift-induced pressures (such as too much or too little food, or human intrusion) can trigger outbreaks far and wide. The original plague period and spread was in many ways a perfect storm of factors but a re-occurrence is feasible (albeit today's improved knowledge of the cause, hygiene and containment measures should prevent it reaching anything like the scale once seen).
Another example: A few years back Myrtle Rust made its way over to NZ for the first recorded time, and one theory of how it got here was being carried on unusually warm/humid air currents from Australia which allowed it, as a kind of mold, to survive the journey.
Another vector: Melting permafrost releasing preserved pathogens to which today's populations (human and otherwise) have no immunity is another 'fun' climate change scenario. I find that one less plausible mostly because it would require human intrusion or some other means of transmission from the thawing site to hosts. But eh, maybe.
News at 7:00 the first African AIDS carrier may have not had sex with a monkey.
We really need to upvote this old racist meme?
It's from poor people. Poor people who live amongst wild animals. Aka farmers. It came from a rural location. Ie from a bat shitting on their rice while it dries.
Does noone get what the meme about lightning deaths reducing each year means? It's about with wealth, nature has less of a catastrophic effect on our lives in part because people move to cities.
However, the Wuhan pathogen research laboratory is still a worthy source to consider relating to this virus. Accidents DO happen, and China has a history of making mistakes leading to dangerous pathogens escaping their labs.
In 2004, SARS escaped a BS-3 lab in Beijing, infecting several and killing at least one:
" In April 2004, China reported a case of SARS in a nurse who had cared for a researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology. While ill, the researcher had traveled twice by train from Beijing to Anhui province, where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill and died. The nurse in turn infected five third-generation cases, causing no deaths.
Subsequent investigation uncovered three unrelated laboratory infections in different researchers at the NIV. At least of two primary patients had never worked with live SARS virus. Many shortcomings in biosecurity were found at the NIV, and the specific cause of the outbreak was traced to an inadequately inactivated preparation of SARS virus that was used in general (that is, not biosecure) laboratory areas, including one where the primary cases worked. It had not been tested to confirm its safety after inactivation, as it should have been."
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/how-dangerous-viruses-c...
Were a lab accident the source of this outbreak, you can bet your last dollar that the CCP would go to extreme lengths to hide that fact.