[barnacled]

The problem with this is it is full of utterly debunked nonsense that Ebright knows full well has been addressed.

It's Brandolini's law [0] in action, and no matter how many times virologists rebut these positions the same old tripe gets wheeled out again, and again, and again. If you ignore rebuttals and just repeat yourself + get 20k likes on twitter how many people are going to see a rebuttal like the excellent one from Dr Rasmussen here - https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15669764417361715...

The recent science papers which have been closely peer reviewed and none of these guys have been able to rebut (but oh have they tried, since they are VERY inconvenient for lab leak), instead it's the same tired nit-picking and misunderstanding.

For a break down of the science papers read https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/15519378265808240... which goes into painful levels of detail to explain what the paper discovered and why it's so compelling and why it all but rules out lab leak.

It's sad to me that somebody with a name and position and blue tick abuses that position to spread what amounts to misinformation, but that's where we are in society I guess.

If you want a test, see how these lab leak advocates have reacted to any paper or data that pushes back against their claim. It has been a mad scramble to attack, nit-pick, dismiss and smear (Ebright especially likes confict-of-interest implications). These are not honest people.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

[forgotpwd16]

>It's about a separate personal desire to regulate supposedly risky research.

Referring to: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787

So a paper on a lab-made coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells from Wuhan on topic about the origins of a coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells that caused the pandemic from Wuhan, is a separate personal desire?

>It's about a completely different study that didn't result in any pandemic.

Because after the article was published, Wuhan stopped working on this, right? Or is expected China (or any other country) publishes everything related to something delicate as this?

Seriously this "rebuttal" is anything but excellent. The ironic answers to good remarks makes it even worse. Sounds more like trying to evade the ~~points made~~ info given rather answering them.

As for the papers, origins of pandemic and origins of virus are distinct things. So, yes, we can all agree that evidence shows that pandemic started in the market, and as virus can infect animals sold there, this points towards that virus came from animals. But genetically is there anything that can distinguish a natural from a lab-made virus?

[tynpeddler]

What is often missed is that chimeric viruses are easy to detect. The viral genome will show clear evidence of manipulation from random base insertions and clear homology with all the ancestral viruses. Hiding the signs of manipulation would either require vast amounts of time and resources (the expense and man power would make it very difficult to hide) or straight up science fiction technology. The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

The other lab leak hypothesis is that a specimen collected and cultured by scientists, infected a lab employee and this patient zero then transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before.

The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab.

[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

[forgotpwd16]

That's a much better counter argument to the lab-origin. The

>The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

seems to be incorrect. By a simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/

Now the two distinct genomic lineages seem to indeed present a challenge to lab-leak hypothesis. It's explained in the original study[0] that the second lineage B came from A by intra-host evolution. Due to the molecular clock of the virus the single-introduction origin of the pandemic from a lineage A can be ruled out.

[0]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

[tripletao]

Have you looked at Pekar's full model, as described mostly in the supplementary materials? A typical molecular clock approach wouldn't give anywhere near the accuracy necessary to exclude evolution of lineage B (just two SNPs away) in humans. Pekar instead builds layer upon layer of complexity, with dozens of reasonable but somewhat arbitrary judgment calls, in the same general direction as econometrics. From the shape of the resulting modeled phylogenetic tree, he purports to exclude a single introduction into humans.

I'm not aware of any case where any similar model has been shown to have predictive power, and there's inherently no way to validate this one against any physical data. So I believe this result has been grossly oversold, per my comments and links at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32740568

[oasisbob]

> A typical molecular clock approach wouldn't give anywhere near the accuracy necessary to exclude evolution of lineage B (just two SNPs away) in humans

You're ignoring other data which is counter to the idea of B evolving from A in humans. Pekar's models are not the only evidence.

- Early cases were predominantly B - A shows less generic divergence than B, this is what Pekar is talking about with regards to the discontinuity in the early clock.

When we first started discussing this - I spoke up because I was annoyed by you trashing peer-reviewed papers when it was obvious you weren't even attempting to grok the phylogenetics involved. Still annoyed.

It's been genuinely interesting watching the scientific debate to root the SC2 tree over the past few years because of the involved paradoxes.

"Just a few SNPs" is just such a silly argument when stacked against peer-reviewed phylogenies in high-impact publications.

[tripletao]

Have you looked at Pekar's full numerical stack yourself, as described in their supplemental materials? If yes, then why are you confident that their choice of the Barabasi-Albert algorithm to generate a fixed infection network correctly models the earliest spread of SARS-CoV-2 in humans? In particular, why choose to study robustness against doubling time (which seems intuitively like it wouldn't affect the shape of the tree much), but not robustness against that connectivity (which seems intuitively like it would)?

The rest of their arguments depend fundamentally on the polytomy thing, because nothing else excludes an earlier (even September) first introduction into humans. With an earlier introduction and thus more extensive unsampled spread, it's much harder to insist that A and B would be first sampled in the same order in which they evolved in humans, or make any similar early claims with confidence.

You are correct that I hadn't fully understood their polytomy argument before you brought it up, and I appreciate you bringing it to my attention. I still don't think it's very good, though. I later found Erik van Nimwegen's criticisms, which roughly followed my own; so I don't think I'm taking a fringe position here. Indeed, I've never seen anyone citing or defending Pekar engage in any way with the numerical complexity of that model. It seems like anyone who's looked inside the box becomes a critic, thus my hope that you'll do so.

High-impact publications have shown unfortunate willingness to publish low-quality work that would exclude research-related origin of SARS-CoV-2. For example, I assume you followed Nature's publication, editor's note, and ultimate extensive correction of their pangolin paper, and that you agree pangolins aren't the proximal host. This makes me less inclined to trust in their reviewers here, and more inclined to trust my own judgment (or that of the two Twitter threads I've linked elsewhere).

[rvanlaar]

I've read the paper. What got my senses tingling, is that: - there has been no investigation on which strains were in the lab - if the data is to be trusted, given it's in China.

Till those questions have been answered I remain skeptical about the origin.

[gausswho]

To skip the Twitter noise and get straight to the paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

[phartenfeller]

Thanks for sharing this. For no expert in this field like me, peer-reviewed articles in a highly regarded publication like Science Magazine eliminated the lab theory. But I guess trust in science is unfortunately not as big as it was. And some people are biased as they want some theory to be true.

[forgotpwd16]

Here're some interesting parts from paper's concluding section.

>These findings suggest that infected animals were present at the Huanan market at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, we do not have access to any live animal samples from relevant species. Additional information, including sequencing data and detailed sampling strategy, would be invaluable to test this hypothesis comprehensively.

>The sustained presence of a potential source of virus transmission into the human population in late 2019, plausibly from infected live mammals sold at the Huanan market, offers an explanation of our findings and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

It doesn't eliminate or prove anything. Only makes a case that zoosis is a good hypothesis.

[LatteLazy]

Thanks, that's an excellent thread. Sorry you're getting piled on buy idiots...

[kick_in_the_dor]

Care to give us the spark notes of the paper?

[projektfu]

The Twitter thread is the SparkNotes on the paper.

[kick_in_the_dor]

Ah I didn't notice that.

[arisAlexis]

Actually all of his claims are facts unless proven otherwise. Do you have proof that these facts (Wuhan playing with these viruses, funding etc) are not true or you would like them to not be true?

[barnacled]

'Claims are facts until proven otherwise' is quite the take, I think Karl Popper would take issue with that.

I linked a thorough thread from a domain expert explaining in detail why the claims are false. These things have been addressed/debunked many, many times but still get repeated because the untruths get amplified and the rebuttals not.

[arisAlexis]

This is sophistry. The OP is stating facts. You are being "vague" by saying that these have been "debunked" relying on the long term "no conspiracy" theory which does really not apply in this case. This is a very clear Bayesian probability problem.

[barnacled]

No, you literally said 'all his claims are facts until proven otherwise'.

I am not being vague, I literally posted a link to a rebuttal thread.

This is why I don't post on hacker news any more.

[arisAlexis]

You guys are missing the point. Either you believe some unknown variable has zero probability or even if it is small you think ifs not worth discovering, for an event that is the most important since ww2. Is there proof of zero probability? No.

[forgotpwd16]

The "all claims are facts unless proven otherwise" is a wrong way to think about. You must prove a claim, not the other way around. What is perhaps better to say is that he makes no arguments but just lists observations (nitpick: therefore can be no such thing as rebuttal). As the commentary tweets don't call them wrong, we can assume they're indeed correct (thus nothing was debunked). That said, I'ld have preferred if he had correct citations such as the link to the Nature article.

[ubertaco]

I wonder if you take an "all claims are facts until proven otherwise" approach to religion as well, and if so, how do you reconcile the mutually-exclusive (but non-falsifiable) claims that various religions make counter to one another?

[BryantD]

It’s a fact that I had coffee with someone who grew up a thousand miles away from me yesterday. If I were to infer from that fact that there was something unusual about that, I would be wrong.