Science is needed to find how sars-cov2 reached humans
thelancet.comEcohealth Alliance with another "peer-reviewed" published paper attempting to quell the lab-leak hypothesis.
Peter Daszak being one of the authors of this paper basically removes any shred of credibility for what is effectively an opinion piece.
Chris Martensen's analysis of the dump of Fauci's emails is pretty damning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNxoVFZwMYw
The coordinated lying and censorship from leading institutions and media over the last 18 months does not make me hopeful that this time it will be different.
Wow, super transparent with all the primary sources walkthrough and the links to everything in the description. Nice find.
Martensen called the pandemic on Jan 26, 2020. The WHO called it March 11.
For the next 6 months he produced videos every weekday analyzing the covid news of the day and relevant published papers, always citing the primary sources. Since then his covid videos have been less frequent, but always data and science oriented.
YouTube immediately demonitized his videos, and may have banned a couple. He uses made-up names for 2 notable off-patent drugs because he claims YT will censor him if he mentions them by name. He has a PhD in pathology from Duke University and has published in Nature. You would think he is qualified to discuss this stuff.
Lancet is still publishing paper from this guy? It seems the ethical standard of the viorlogy scientific community is shockingly low. Maybe I just don't understand "how science works".
> Ecohealth Alliance with another "peer-reviewed" published paper attempting to quell the lab-leak hypothesis.
It would be interesting to look at who's funding these organizations and individuals. Is some of the funding tied to entities that are under the control of the CCP?
> Is some of the funding tied to entities that are under the control of the CCP?
Per Sam Husseni's reporting[0]:
"""
Meticulous investigation of U.S. government databases reveals that Pentagon funding for the EcoHealth Alliance from 2013 to 2020, including contracts, grants and subcontracts, was just under $39 million. Most, $34.6 million, was from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), which is a branch of the DOD which states it is tasked to “counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks.”
Most of the remaining money to EHA was from USAID (State Dept.), comprising at least $64,700,000 (1). These two sources thus total over $103 million. (See Fig).
Another $20 million came from Health and Human Services ($13 million, which includes National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control), National Science Foundation ($2.6 million), Department of Homeland Security ($2.3 million), Department of Commerce ($1.2 million), Department of Agriculture ($0.6 million), and Department of Interior ($0.3 million). So, total U.S. government funding for EHA to-date stands at $123 million, approximately one third of which comes from the Pentagon directly. The full funding breakdown is available here and is summarized by year, source, and type, in a spreadsheet format.
"""
If this was a lab leak, it's an international issue caused by the hubris of at least two countries working together on a footgun (e.g. at Wuhan lab, and Ralph Baric's previous gain of function research on bat coronaviruses [1])
[0] https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/peter-daszaks-ec...
[1] https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1361175723407527939
This doesn't attempt to quell anything, it just points out that being certain of origins is probably going to require rigorous investigation. This is the same as with SARS and MERS which both took around 15 years to fully understand and also did not have full cooperation from the governments involved.
Like most science all of the statements here can be verified with respect to the sources cited. Saying that the origins of SARS-CoV2 have not been conclusively established but are of great interest is not controversial.
If there is any lack of credibility here it is with lab leak hypothesis enthusiasts failing to supply solid evidence and then claiming that criticism amounts to both censorship and a kind of indirect proof of their assertions.
> failing to supply solid evidence
How, if all data from Wuhan is off limits?
My complaint is that this letter should be addressed to Mr. Xi. But instead they make it sound like this is a global issue.
It is only China that is blocking all research into the origin. No other country has placed any blocks or limits on the research.
Most research into viral origins is driven by sampling and sequencing of genetic material. Even without cooperation from China there is still a record of virus samples preserved for research and also found in the environment. It is not clear that China has the ability to block the reveal of SARS-CoV2 origins. It is also not clear that a revealed origin would actually change anything about efforts to deal with COVID-19.
Furthermore, your focus on China is revealing. Other nations botched their response to COVID-19 and that is their responsibility. There is no good reason for COVID-19 to have become so deadly. The blame for the impact of COVID-19 belongs with all the developed nations that had every reason to know there would be more coronavirus outbreaks after SARS and MERS and decided instead to focus on politics or on ineffective strategies such as hosing down streets with bleach instead of responding coherently to the pandemic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w&t=6s
He knows what he is talking about though. And he knows its the end of his field and career if he yields.
Moreover: no statement on conflicts of interest (at least not readily available), possibly because it is “only” a letter (wish I could get one published in the lancet…).
Rubbish.
You might not agree with what is stated, but the final paragraph is full of clarifications of interests.
> PD's remuneration is paid solely in the form of a salary from EcoHealth Alliance, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organisation. EcoHealth Alliance's mission ... Funding for this work comes from ... EcoHealth Alliance's work in China was previously funded by ... PD joined the WHO–China joint global study on the animal origins of SARS-CoV-2 towards the end of 2020 and is currently a member. As per WHO rules ... includes collaboration with a range of universities and governmental health and environmental science organisations, all of which are listed in prior publications, three of which received funding from ... All of EcoHealth Alliance's work is reviewed and approved by ...
And so on. This is the longest paragraph by far and goes into considerable detail regarding the contributors, their sources, and the intentions and revenue sources for all involvements.
Everywhere I publish, conflicts of interest appear under a specific heading though.
Thanks anyway.
> Peter Daszak being one of the authors of this paper basically removes any shred of credibility for what is effectively an opinion piece.
It does come across as completely shameless. But why include him if not for transparency? Obviously publishing without his name is a boost in credibility, so why not do so?
In any case, it's not a very well-written or convincing letter, so it's even more puzzling. This part really got me:
> Recently, many of us have individually received inquiries asking whether we still support what we said in early 2020.1 The answer is clear: we reaffirm our expression of solidarity with those in China who confronted the outbreak then, and the many health professionals around the world who have since worked to exhaustion, and at personal risk, in the relentless and continuing battle against this virus. Our respect and gratitude have only grown with time.
Christian Drosten is a big name in Germany’s covid efforts. His name on this statement with Peter Daszak is quite a message.
No doubt Drosten is a great scientist, but he seems to be very naive when it comes to Chinese politics and nationalism:
In his podcast he said: "...we basically do not consider Chinese scientists to be influenced...".
This might be have been true before September 2019, when this virus research was just an average research topic out of many, but it is certainly not true since the pandemic started.
"It is time to turn down the heat of the rhetoric and turn up the light of scientific inquiry if we are to be better prepared to stem the next pandemic, whenever it comes and wherever it begins. "
This statement sounds very disingenuous. Science should look at all aspects of the virus and consider if it leaked from a laboratory, in addition to other means of transmission. Dismissing one as simply "rhetoric" is antithetical to science.
> This statement sounds very disingenuous
I don't agree. The lab leak theory has a disproportionate share of the public discourse's space compared to it's scientific plausibility. So it's time to turn down (not off) the rhetoric, and evaluate all hypothesis in a scientific way. You will notice at no point in the article do they say that non-natural hypothesis should not be investigated, quite the opposite:
> "[...] whether it occurred wholly within nature or might somehow have reached the community via an alternative route, and prevent future pandemics."
Awhile back there was an article on the front page of HN which seemed to support the lab leak hypothesis. This was before that hypothesis gained traction. I checked back shortly thereafter and it was gone. I went through the history (scrolled through pages) and couldn't find it.
Maybe it was a BS / questionable article. I don't know. But it seems we were eager to squash that line of thinking early on, whereas now it's at least debatable.
This is why I'm suspicious of moderation.
There are about a dozen[1] HN submissions from February 2020 alone about a potential lab leak.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=4&prefix=true&que...
imagine the bullshit people submit when there's no moderation.
That's also true, and that's the problem that has yet to be solved IMO. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? As far as I can tell it currently involves a lot of personal opinion and prejudice, and that may be unavoidable at the moment.
A request for 'solidarity' is a soft corruption of the scientific method. The word suggests that we pursue something other than the truth. It's intrinsic. That the Lanclet publishes such a request, on a topic of public interest, by authors who are implicated in serious lapses and negligence-- this reflects a shocking lack of judgment by all involved and most notably the journal.
> Careful and transparent collection of scientific information is essential
Sure, I agree. But they make it sound like this is a global issue. But that is not true, and they know it. Nothing and nobody stops these scientists to check blood samples/animals/whatnot all over the world.
The only country in the world that does not allow an open and transparent research into the origin of the pandemic is China - and yet these scientists are afraid to call the Chinese government out for it. I find this very disingenuous.
Yeah, and if China is so confident about the Wuhan lab not being the source, why prevent an investigation at massive costs to your reputation?
Most people now assume that China is "guilty" because they've figuratively "fled from the trial".
Can someone substantiate this idea that it's improbable for a virus to surmount these two evolutionary obstacles highlighted below? I'll copy the quote for the idea I've seen circulating, the bold part is the idea I'd like to hear challenged and would like to learn more about what its foundation is predicated upon.
For ultimately, in order to create a human pandemic, an animal virus has to accomplish **two very difficult things**. First, it has to successfully infect a person, and then it needs to jump from one person to the next rapidly enough to get ahead of the rate at which sufferers recover or die. SARS2 is a master of this trick, but the closest wild relatives seem to be neutralised, with spike proteins built to invade horseshoe bat cells, not human cells. To trigger a pandemic in people they need substantial evolutionary retooling.Sars and bird flu both did it in that part of the world quite recently. It's not like the phenomenon is unheard of.
Maybe it's unlikely but when you also have a billion people in third world conditions.. it's not that unlikely after all.
I like to think of such unlikely things in the context of winning the lottery, that I find gives a perspective based upon however large the odds are - somebody does win in the end.
I didn't see any numbers in the article to give some weight to any probability word usage.
If you must think of it as a lottery, there are millions of bats, and millions of people in this draw. The probability isn't so remote.
60% of infectious diseases in humans are zoonotic[1], meaning they originated in animals.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html
It's rare in the global sense, but really nasty infections are sort of known for jumping from another mammalian species. AIDS, original SARS, Ebola, etc. all fit that pattern.
When it comes to odds in mammalian species, you can't but help be reminded of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
this statement is true but meaningless...
Majority of pandemics in history are a result of this rare in absolute terms occurrence.
In general diseases that are already highly evolved for their host, mostly innocuous... everyone gets the common cold like 2 times a year, 80% of people have herpes, etc... in most cases the pandemics are caused by diseases that have crossed the infection boundary but arent evolved enough to appropriate limit themselves, this commonly occurs because the disease recently jumped from one host to another..
Let's grok these carefully constructed statements.
"SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory... We believe the strongest clue from new, credible, and peer-reviewed evidence in the scientific literature, is that the virus evolved in nature..."
This can be completely accurate, yet does not exclude the possibility that the virus, originally from nature, was then imported into a lab that studies Coronaviruses and accidentally leaked from there. They are trying to obscure the latter by focusing on the original origin. This appears to be intentional misdirection and conflation.
I don't think anyone should be absolutely sure one way or another, but China is a pretty big place and the country only has two labs at that level. Coincidences happen, yes, but this one seems pretty unlikely.
On the other hand where does it make sense to build a lab that studies a pathogen? As far away as possible from pathogen's natural reservoir or close by?
The Wuhan lab is more than 1000 km away from related pathogen's natural reservoirs.
Shi Zhengli said this herself:
Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...
Call to action:
“”” We welcome calls for scientifically rigorous investigations.10, 11 To accomplish this, we encourage WHO and scientific partners across the world to expeditiously move to continue and further extend their initial investigation with experts in China and the Chinese Government. WHO's report from March, 2021,12 must be considered the beginning rather than the end of an inquiry, and we strongly support the G7 leaders' call for “a timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based WHO-convened phase 2 COVID-19 origins study”.13 We also understand that it might take years of field and laboratory study to assemble and link the data essential to reach rational and objective conclusions, but that is what the global scientific community must strive to do “””
They also call to move beyond rhetoric with a goal of ending this pandemic and enacting systemic change to sense and halt the next one.
“”” Having robust surveillance and detection systems in place across the globe is essential to detect and report new or evolving pathogens that can potentially unleash the next local or global threat, as required by the International Health Regulations. Equally essential will be ensuring that the field workforce, laboratory facilities, and the health-care community can all work under the safest conditions. Until this pandemic ends, we ask, as we did in February, 2020,1 for solidarity and rigorous scientific data.
“””
I'm pretty cynical about this. The CCP hasn't been very forthcoming so far and I don't suspect that to change.
Why limit your cynicism? The US has plenty of motivation as well.
I assume you're referring to the grants issued by the US to China to work on GoF research?
No, I'm referring to generic geopolitical rivalry plus cover for mismanagement of the crisis domestically.
If we can make it all China's fault, that's a win for us. Facts, evidence or lack thereof aren't material compared to interests and arguments.
But what is the alternative?
Short of some sort of global sanctioning I'm not so sure there is one. Hopefully the data that comes out will be useful and honest.
They must be dreaming if they think the CCP will help a fair investigation. If Ecohealth wants to investigate Covid on Norwegian Salmon they might get support, but since Chinese state media now denies that Covid even began in China, they won’t investigate the lab leak, that much is certain. There are good scientists in China who would want to investigate this, but the government will not allow it, and from what we know they are actively working to erase the evidence needed for the scientific process.
Here's a thought experiment.
Let's pretend that the virus did origin in the wild. No lab leak, no gain of function.
Why would the Chinese authorities try to conceal information about it's origin, apply pressure on the WHO and silence researchers in Wuhan?
China is trying really hard to gain a good international reputation right now through "vaccine diplomacy". Giving all available data to international organizations from day one would have given China an excellent reputation. After all, if it did originate in the wild there's nothing to hide; they simply stumbled upon it first.
Why is it not the behavior we're seeing from the country's leadership?
> SARS-CoV-2 most likely originated in nature and not in a laboratory
Why either or, why not both?
Peter Daszak, conflicts of interest, Ecohealth Alliance. That is why.
Science doesn’t happen in a black box. There are no ways to search for answers if powerful governments don’t want certain questions asked.
I recommend reading "Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century", at least the COVID chapter.
so you're telling me for the past 1.5 years, ppl haven't been using science?
Science is not an appropriate epistemic tool to answer an historical question.
> Science is not an appropriate epistemic tool to answer an historical question.
Historical questions are questions of material fact, science is an appropriate epistemic tool to answer questions of material fact, and, so, I disagree.
Some historical questions may not be convenient to investigate scientifically given available tools, but that's a different issue.
Do you care to elaborate? For example, it was science ex post facto that established Luc Montagnier and not Robert Gallo was the first to isolate HIV [0]. Interestingly, Luc Montagnier has a role in the lab origin theory of SARS-CoV-2.
> Do you care to elaborate?
Not really because my viewpoint is not permitted on HN. Further discussion will likely draw moderator attention.
> Science is not an appropriate epistemic tool to answer an historical question.
But it is used to validate, and without validation you would not have history, only opinions.
Strikes me that "radiocarbon dating" is the only thing which need be said to robustly disprove this.
It's not?
For example, "Did a nuclear power plant meltdown in Kansas yesterday?"
We use science for all sorts of stuff like that.