[tripletao]

Deigin has said explicitly elsewhere that if SARS-CoV-2 arose from a lab accident, he believes it arose from manipulation of a novel, unpublished virus collected by the WIV from nature. This makes any arguments based on distance from existing, published viruses irrelevant.

RaTG13 was such a virus (collected 2013, published post-pandemic), but it's very unlikely to be the ancestor for the reasons that you note. No one outside the WIV (and thus, no one beyond the physical control of the Chinese government) knows what other viruses they had in their freezer or database. Deigin has recently published an article claiming to have discovered a novel coronavirus in contamination of agricultural samples sequenced at the same facility:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

To be clear, the new virus that he "discovered" absolutely is not an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2, and he absolutely isn't claiming that is; but it's (more) evidence that the WIV had unpublished coronaviruses.

The WIV took their database of viruses down from public access in September 2019. They say this was due to repeated hacking attempts. They haven't restored access, or provided their database in another format (e.g., a dump on a flash drive) that obviously presents no information security risk. Do you believe their claimed reason for taking it down? If not, why do you think they're lying?

[jeduehr]

Hi, I address this idea in this comment over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26758597

[tripletao]

Thanks. That comment doesn't address the database, though. Do you believe their stated reason for taking it down? If not, why do you think they're lying?

[jeduehr]

Hi, I have no way to verify if that is the true reason, but also no reason to doubt it.

I will say DDOS attacks on scientific databases are not that uncommon. This is the same reason that a lot of scientific publication data are now hosted by the publisher and not the scientist.

It's rarely actually a malicious "hacker," though. Usually it's some grad student somewhere pulling a really crappily made wget script out and accidentally using all the bandwidth.

Scientists aren't actually that great of programmers, yours truly included. Have I done this before with an independently hosted database? I can neither confirm not deny. Lol.

But seriously I have no idea. I get why you find this suspicious, but to me it is extremely circumstantial and I can think of a lot of mundane reasons for it.

For one, I don't know that the translation of DDOS and hacker or idiot script kiddie is nuanced enough between Mandarin and English.

[tripletao]

This is probably the biggest database of bat-origin coronaviruses in the world, and we're in the middle of a bat-origin coronavirus pandemic. Even ignoring the question of SARS-CoV-2's origins, shouldn't this be of great scientific interest? (If it isn't, then what was the point of the research in the first place?)

Perhaps I could believe that a small group of virologists would have trouble keeping a website running, and that just by chance they gave up right around when a pandemic likely first entered humans, of the same type of virus that they studied in the same town--coincidences do happen. But now that this is a matter of international importance, do you really believe that no one in China has the technology to make this information available in any form? That seems impossible to me; so why don't they want to?

I appreciate the opportunity to discuss, and I do believe that you're sincerely convinced that the chance that virological research could result in such an accident is negligibly small. With respect, I'd suggest that your attitude seems typical of the profession, and that that's exactly when the worst accidents happen. Engineers are constantly taught that their work may bring catastrophe, and that it's their job to consider and manage every conceivable way that it could. I get the feeling that virologists aren't, perhaps because there are fewer past disasters to point to; though with the 1977 flu pandemic as a warning, that's not a great excuse.

[DebtDeflation]

>With respect, I'd suggest that your attitude seems typical of the profession, and that that's exactly when the worst accidents happen.

An RBMK reactor cannot explode.

[jeduehr]

Hi, difference is I actually admit these things are possible and have happened before.

But this event doesn't look anything like those other lab release events.

See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/gk6y95/covid19_did...

[soonnow]

That was a great writeup that I enjoyed reading a lot. It dumbed it down just enough that I didn't feel completely lost while still being deep enough. Now the only problem is that the people that spew Asian hate and call it Kung Flu are likely not the people who read 34 page virology for dummies documents.

[DiogenesKynikos]

The RdRp of RaTG13 was published years before the pandemic. The full genome wasn't published, but enough of it was published to identify the virus.

SARS-CoV-2, by contrast, is not among any of the sequences published by the WIV over the years.

[tripletao]

That's correct. The RdRp was published as RaBtCoV/4991 in 2016, and that's how the link to the Mojiang mine became known. The first publication on SARS-CoV-2 didn't mention that, instead referring to the virus by its new name RaTG13, but others made the connection:

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202005.0322/v2

Of course that's not evidence of anything malicious; the renaming and failure to reference might have just been inadvertent. But it's still a bit weird, and it unquestionably shows at least a 2.5 year delay between sampling and publishing even a fragment of the genome.

That delay isn't evidence of anything malicious either. Research takes time, and any group in any discipline has a backlog of unpublished work. The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.

[DiogenesKynikos]

RaTG13 was simply uninteresting before the pandemic. It only became worth writing a full paper on after SARS-CoV-2 was discovered. When they wrote a paper about it, they also gave it a more memorable name.

> The WIV didn't stop sampling in 2013 though, and no one outside China's physical control knows what else might be in their collection.

They upload sequences to Genbank (just like they did with RaTG13, years before the pandemic), they have international collaborators, and they give talks at conferences. Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.

[tripletao]

> Tons of people know what they work on and what they have in their collection.

If that's true, then why has the WIV removed public access from their database? It serves only to remove a valuable scientific resource, and to cast suspicion on China; so why would they do such a thing? Do you genuinely believe that even with the international importance of the topic, no one in China can figure out how to keep a simple database-backed website up?

And again, Deigin et al. report assembly of the genome of a novel coronavirus from contamination in other published reads sequenced in the same facility:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01533

As far as I can tell, this virus wasn't previously known outside the WIV. Am I mistaken? I emphasize again that their novel virus is relevant not because it's an ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 (it's not), but because if the WIV had one unpublished virus, it gets harder to claim it's ridiculous that they might have had others.