
The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf] - 2a0c40
https://www.minervanett.no/files/2020/07/13/TheEvidenceNoNaturalEvol.pdf
======
jkhdigital
Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper:

1\. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when
compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and
infectivity among humans.

2\. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating
back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing
understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and
virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating
chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-
like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses.

3\. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in
this line of research.

4\. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city
where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research.

Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group
of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create
chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and
that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic.

The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial
evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human
intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.

They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human
and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis
being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the
most likely explanation.

~~~
sudosysgen
This isn't entirely true, though. SARS-CoV-2 is _much_ less virulent than SARS
or MERS.

For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for
one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low.

Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a
larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because
this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect
despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence.

Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely
than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of
magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.

~~~
holler
> A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems
> unlikely to say the least.

From what I gathered it’s not suggesting specific genetic traits were
engineered, but rather that they were experimenting and one of those
experiments could have accidentally been released(?).

~~~
sudosysgen
Yes, but is the theory is that one experiment, in the context of a gain
analysis, was made in order to see how the virus might evolve to be much less
severe?

Why would a gain analysis try to find ways in which a virus could be made
weaker? I don't doubt that an accidental release is feasible, though very very
unlikely, but why would an experiment make a less severe virus in the first
place?

~~~
curiosity42
If I were to make a great bio weapon that would do the maximum damage, I will
have these attributes: 1\. Spread it easily; 2\. Don't kill the ones who
spread it most easily (the young); 3\. Be lethal enough to overwhelm the
system. And so I have the Covid-19. Of course it is all post-fact analysis.
but it also answers your question of why would an experiment make a less sever
virus in the first place - to address the biggest problem of an infectious
agent as a bioweapon, i.e. a virulent virus ends up killing too many too fast
to be highly infective and 'effective'.

~~~
murgindrag
And if I were to make a bioweapon, I would think about long-term impact.

(1) Millions disabled is far worse than millions dead.

(2) Attacks can come in multiple pieces. The first virus might do damage to
make people especially vulnerable to the second virus. If I can protect my
population against the first one /or/ the second, my people are safe.

My opinion is it's just a matter of time before we see bioweapons, and we
should be ready. If not before COVID19, then now. Our vulnerability is very
obvious.

We should treat this as an emergency prep drill, and make sure businesses can
operate remotely, kids can learn remotely, we have PPE, and the infrastructure
is in place for essential work. That also wouldn't collapse the economy.

~~~
snowwrestler
Infectious bioweapons are a horrible idea in a highly connected world for the
reason we can all plainly see: they don’t respect national borders.

It is an old-fashioned notion of a weapon that only made sense when there was
little exchange between the citizens of states in opposition, like the U.S.
and USSR.

China, for whom international trade is a crucial part of their strategy, would
not work on an infectious disease weapon unless they simultaneously developed
a vaccine to protect their own people. The fact they are not currently
vaccinating their population, or even in the lead in developing a vaccine, is
extremely strong proof that COVID-19 did not originate as a Chinese bioweapon
candidate.

~~~
rvnx
Not a proof at all. It just shows that it can't be a planned release.

~~~
snowwrestler
If a lab in China had been working with this virus at all, they would have had
at minimum working cultures of it, and potentially multiple strains and
experience modifying them. Cultures alone would have put them ahead of western
pharma companies in developing a vaccine—even in the case of an unplanned
release.

The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as new
to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.

~~~
nkurz
> The fact that they’re not ahead is compelling proof that this virus was as
> new to Chinese medicine as it was to everyone else.

I appreciate your argument, but are you sure that they are not ahead? I don't
have personal knowledge, but (for example) there was a Reuters article last
week with a headline that included that claim "China leads COVID-19 vaccine
race": [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-
china-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-
vaccine-anal/at-war-time-speed-china-leads-covid-19-vaccine-race-
idUSKBN2481NO). If somehow it was proved that they are indeed ahead, would you
consider this compelling proof in the opposite direction? I think I'd consider
both directions to be weak evidence, but neither to be anything near proof.

~~~
sudosysgen
They are ahead by a few weeks, yes.

------
mjirv
Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote
her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly
low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!!

But _conditional on being in a pandemic_ the chance that the virus that arises
to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!

There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0]

That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to the Wuhan Institute
of Virology is certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that
doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.”

[0][https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21](https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21)

~~~
addicted
This is the same stuff that causes conspiracy theories around airplane
crashes.

The conspiracists go

“It must be a conspiracy because there are like these 6 redundant safety
mechanisms and the odds of them all failing at the same time are extremely
low”.

But the answer is obvious. If the 6 redundant mechanisms hadn’t failed, the
plane wouldn’t crash.

So as long as the odds of failure of each redundant system is not 0%, every
plane crash that ever happens will look the same, with multiple redundant
items with extremely low likelihood’s of failing, failing together.

~~~
dahfizz
This is not the same thing IMO.

Imagine Russia announced last week they had a airplane hacking tool that could
crash any 747 by using sonic waves to rattle some bolts loose making the wings
fall off the plane.

If tomorrow, 3 different 747s crash all because their wings fell off, would
that be suspicious?

You could say "well it was a plane crash, _something_ had to go wrong". But
things went wrong in a very specific and unique way that is directly linked to
another nation.

It's the same here. The researchers are showing incredibly specific
modifications to protein structure and DNA. It's not just "oh wow, this virus
is very virulent". It's "oh wow, this virus has a handful of never before seen
mutations, all of which were being studied in Wuhan, where the virus began".

~~~
muzika
Would it be any different if FIRST the 3 planes had crashed, and then a few
weeks AFTER that, the hacking tool was announced?

------
maest
This is a really big claim, so some background checking:

The paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics[0] (this
accepted version is materially different from the original link posted here).

Only thing I could find about Birger Sorensen's was his Linkedin page [1a] and
the Immunor page where he's listed as the Chairman [1b].

Angus Dagleish looks legit, although it's notable that he did stand for
Parliament in 2016 as a UKIP candidate, according to Wikipedia[2].

Can't find any primary sources for Andreas Susrud.

[0]: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527/S2633289220000083a.pdf/biovacc19_a_candidate_vaccine_for_covid19_sarscov2_developed_from_analysis_of_its_general_method_of_action_for_infectivity.pdf)

[1a]: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/birger-
sorensen-174a20b/?origina...](https://www.linkedin.com/in/birger-
sorensen-174a20b/?originalSubdomain=no) btw, if this is considered doxxing,
let me know and I can remove the link.

[1b]: [https://immunor.com/about-immunor/board-of-
directors/](https://immunor.com/about-immunor/board-of-directors/)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish)

~~~
chrisco255
Why do the background checking? Why not just consider the arguments on their
merits alone? That's what science is.

~~~
maest
I disagree. Or rather, I don't think this is about doing science.

In many aspects of our lives we rely on the advice of experts. Personally, as
I am not a trained biologist, I am unable to reliably decide if the arguments
here are right or wrong. I also believe the vast majoriy of people are in a
similar position.

As a result, the only options are to look at:

1\. The scientific consensus.

2\. The legitimacy of the people making the claims.

It's too early for 1, so 2 is what remains.

~~~
neilwilson
Who says an expert is an expert?

Catholic priests are all experts in catholicism. They write papers about
Catholicism, all peer reviewed by other experts in catholicism.

Most agree the Pope is infallible.

Groupthink is still Groupthink and belief is still belief. Hence why we have
debacles like the lipid hypothesis.

~~~
JohnStrangeII
It is very easy to find out whether someone is an expert, as long as you
really want to and don't just fool around. For example, an expert on viral
diseases will have a long track record of publications in highly acclaimed
journals for the past 30 years or longer.

For the purpose of validation or expert testimony, there is no need to
consider everyone who has a PhD and got tenure an expert. It is reasonable to
set the bar very high.

The expert on catholicism example is a needless distraction. Of course, there
are such experts on catholicism, and they can tell you best what catholic
doctrine says. Their opinions about virology are obviously irrelevant, though.

~~~
thu2111
It's not easy at all.

By your measure, Professor Ferguson at ICL is an expert in predicting
diseases. He's got a big team and has been doing it for more than 20 years.
Many published papers. Invited repeatedly to advise world government's due to
his expert status. Widely asserted to be the best in his field.

Guess what - it appears every prediction he ever made was wildly wrong. His
predictions for COVID were also wildly wrong. His code was released and it was
full of severe bugs. He told the world millions would die of COVID and then
when they didn't, claimed his expert recommendations had saved them, all in a
fraudulent paper that assumed as a prior that the virus in Sweden mysteriously
behaved totally differently to everywhere else and that only lockdowns can
possibly affect the course of an epidemic (despite knowing that it isn't
true).

This guy has been a failure and fraud his entire life. So has his entire
field. It's not just him. _All_ the expert epidemiologists produced models
that failed to track reality in any way at all.

Yet, he's an expert by any proxy metric you care to pick. His colleagues rally
around, his university protects him, Nature magazine published apologetics for
him. He's an expert, unless you pick the only test that matters - are his
papers correct?

I know it's scary. But decades, perhaps centuries of near sheep-like behaviour
towards science and academics has led to their institutions being saturated
with incompetence and fraud. They have no working institutional mechanisms to
detect or clear it out. That's why so many fields have "skeptic" movements
that "deny" the science. Usually they aren't actually science-deniers as
painted, they're people who expected the so-called science to actually care
about the scientific method and do their sums right. When they discover that
it isn't happening they blog about the errors they found, and the next thing
they know, they're being demonised by the press and the very self-same
scientists they're criticising. Not because they are wrong, but because they
are dangerously right.

------
hirenj
Of the five salient points they make here, I would argue that they are a lot
less strong than the authors believe them to be.

Point 1 can also likely be made for the original Sars-CoV, and probably is
irrelevant. If they show CoV-2 is _more_ human like than the earlier, then
they can begin to make the point.

Point 2 is a gigantic leap of faith - I don’t understand how they connect
amino acid inserts into the sequence to gain of function experiments. It makes
no sense!

Points 3 & 4 are related: The extra charge on the RBD. If you look at the
previous virus, it has a much smaller positively charged patch, and this
expands in CoV-2, which makes an evolutionary drift in this direction entirely
reasonable. It’s not a wholesale integration of a brand new feature. This
charged patch is actually important for binding to heparan sulfate, which gets
involved with a bunch of viral entry events (eg AAV, Chinkunguya virus, some
other coronaviruses I think). There’s a few recent preprints that discuss the
HS relationship with Cov-2, and can go a long way to explain the tropism of
the virus. The HS can overcome lower expression of ACE2, by possibly
supporting the attachment.

Finally, point 5 is where they throw out DC-SIGN as a receptor. While there
are high mannose glycans on the virus particle, I don’t know of anyone
proposing this as a receptor for the virus. There is no
biochemical/experimental evidence that they show to support this idea.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
I will add a few points which I read on a github page and I am unable to
verify, so I would be keen to have others review and sanity check:

1) The likely genetic source of SARS cov1 and cov2 is a species of bat in
Yunnan province, thousands of miles away, two provinces away from Hubei
(Wuhan).

Ref:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/)

2) The outbreak allegedly started in December in Hubei province when the local
bat population (which does not carry this SARS virus?) would be hibernating
(?)

3) Only 66% of the initial 41 COVID patients had exposure to Huanan _seafood_
market.

Ref:
[https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30183-5/fulltext)

4) A seafood market where you would have to have non-hibernating bats from
Yunnan thousands of miles away from Wuhan(?)

5) The seafood market is 13Km away from Wuhan Institute of Virology where
Yunnan bats were studied. And 1.4km away from Wuhan's Centre for Disease
Prevention & Control (?)

Are these points real or misinformation? If real, why is there no pressure for
an independent investigation?

~~~
srg0
5) We're talking about a dense urban area ~ 1580 km^2. A _lot_ of businesses
and institutions are within 13 km radius from each other. And there are 19
million people in this metro area. So a lot of things should e hapenning in
the same city and only few km away, but most of them are not related to each
other.

1, 2, 4) are probably irrelevant, because the researchers mostly agree that
there was an intermediate host (which one remains to be determined, might be
pangolin). So it doesn't matter if the bats were far away or hibernating.
Consider also that people often travel, and trade is not limited to one town.

3) It only confirms that we still don't know who was patient zero, and when
and where he or she was infected.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
I suppose my issue here is that, all the point I mentioned appear to be
inconsistencies with the current official statements and all the counter
arguments deconstructed them are probability based and arguably as speculative
as the authors claims on biogenisis.

------
i_cannot_hack
> A Norwegian virologist has made claims about the non-natural origins of the
> new coronavirus. These claims were, reportedly, in an earlier draft of the
> paper, and Dr Sørensen has since repeated them to Norwegian press.

> The final version of the research paper, which has undergone peer review and
> been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics
> Discovery, doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was
> natural or man-made in its current form.

> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially
> engineered.

[https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-
cla...](https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/)

~~~
roenxi
> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially
> engineered.

Artificially engineered isn't really the question; the questions are 'is this
a lab escape?' and 'if this is a lab escape, did the virus work so well on
mammals pre-experiment?'.

The scientists have a massive incentive not to believe that the virus is a lab
escape until the evidence is overwhelming. This is a global disaster, if it
was a lab escape there will be dire consequences for the funding and
regulation of level 4 biosecurity centres and potentially global trade &
travel for countries that have them.

~~~
matthewdgreen
Everyone has a massive incentive to look for actual, concrete evidence for a
lab escape before they draw any such conclusions. Leaving aside the
uncomfortable geopolitical angle (US policy is to respond to deliberate
biowarfare with nuclear weaponry), extraordinary claims require extraordinary
evidence.

~~~
roenxi
1) This clearly wasn't biowarfare. The coronavirus is so useless when viewed
as a bioweapon that there is no way it is even vaguely possible that it was
developed as one. The idea is laughable.

The Chinese military would have to be beyond stupid to go into a bioweapons
program and develop a virus that mainly only targets old people, usually
doesn't cause symptoms, spreads like wildfire and is therefore a huge risk to
countries with large, densely packed populations. If it was a lab escape it
would probably have been just part of studying SARS-like viruses for public
health reasons.

2) And there is nothing extraordinary about claiming "Standards in practice
were lower than the standards on paper". That is a pretty mild claim. Lab
escapes of viruses are a thing.

~~~
hobofan
> The coronavirus is so useless when viewed as a bioweapon

Considering the how it's playing out in the US, it looks like a great
bioweapon for an civilian attack. A big chunk of the population is old enough
to be at risk of death. Another non-negligable portion of young people
develops long-term disabilities (which is even more crippling to the economy
than short-term deaths). And as a nice side-effect of how bad job security is,
millions are now unemployed.

If you were to construct a civilian bioweapon you want to target against the
US, it almost looks like you would have new playbook now. I very much agree
though, that it's extremely unlikely that it was developed and planned in that
way.

~~~
Izkata
The variety of weird symptoms ("covid toes" and loss of sense of smell, for
example) also adds a lot of uncertainty and distrust on top of the actual
problems the virus causes.

------
iskander
This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's
embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of
bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the
nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is
meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human
similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse
events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE)"

(there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of
amino acid content)

~~~
mleonhard
Would you please explain more clearly?

~~~
iskander
Sure, what's your degree of bio background?

~~~
objektif
What do you think about this? [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-
Iug](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q5SRrsr-Iug)

Are these people also conspiracy theorists?

~~~
iskander
I didn't watch more than a few minutes, too much real research going on to
keep up with the more fringe stuff.

But tl;dr it could be a lab escape but most virologists think it's more likely
to be spontaneous zoonosis. In either case, the evidence for genetic
modification or "serial passage" is very weak and the virus's distinguishing
traits all fit in well with the background distribution of coronaviruses we
know about. So the fixation on lab escape seems like a distraction.

------
sradman
This paper is not evidence, it is speculation based on an inability to see a
path other than gain-of-function lab work. These coronaviruses are slow to
evolve due to their proofreading capabilities but they recombine readily. The
natural path, therefore, is a wild animal (likely pangolin, civet, raccoon
dog, or even human) that is simultaneously co-infected by two viruses that
recombine.

The problem with genome data centric analysis is that no distinction is made
between RNA samples and virus isolates. Key evidence for the gain-of-function
hypothesis, is one or more lab isolates that match long segments of the SARS-
CoV-2 genome, including non-coding segments.

------
Feolkin
Look, when most virologists/epidemiogists look at this "evidence" and consider
it too flimsy and flawed, then I wonder why people here are so eager to jump
on it as "I'm not a biologist, covid19 is so unusual, it's obviously man-
made". HN is embarrassing right now.

~~~
JohnStrangeII
The same happened with HIV, these kind of conspiracy theories are inevitable.
People always want to blame someone, even when there is overwhelming evidence
that a natural catastrophe occurred. Remember the Italian seismologists who
got sued because they didn't predict an earthquake?

Fact is that if the virus escaped a lab, the incident could have occurred in
any other lab, too. It likely evolved naturally, though, and another fact is
that it could have occurred naturally in many places in the world - e.g. in
the Middle East or in Africa -, and a more dangerous virus could evolve in
many regions of the world at any time.

Many people just don't want to accept this, especially those who reacted in
the wrong way to the pandemic initially. It's always easier to blame someone
else.

~~~
tim333
The HIV conspiracy theories were kind of silly though and they were able to
trace the source to chimpanzees. Things seem different with covid.

------
jupenur
Better link with context [https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgleish-birger-
sorensen-c...](https://www.minervanett.no/angus-dalgleish-birger-sorensen-
coronavirus/the-fight-for-a-controversial-article/362519)

------
cryptica
When Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier suggested that COVID-19 could be man-made,
I started taking this view more seriously. Now seeing additional papers coming
out supporting this, the case is getting stronger.

I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in
humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally
unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to spreading between
humans? Intuitively, that doesn't make sense.

Also the fact that the WHO has kept changing its story about this virus from
the beginning is not reassuring at all. At this stage, as crazy as it is, I'm
inclined to believe the conspiracy theorists because the official version
comes across as even crazier.

~~~
robbiep
By the same logic, was the H1N1 spanish flu designed to perfectly flourish and
kill possibly 10% of hosts?

You say it in your second paragraph. You're no biologist. But you find it
strange. Very few biologists find it strange. They have in fact been warning
of a ticking time bomb [0 for brevity, 1 for article].

May I respectfully suggest that you stick to your lane regarding the science?
WHO ups and downs and political bickering to one side, science is a messy
process of honing in on the right answer and lay-people have a hard time
wrapping their heads around that when other answers fitting in more closely
with their world view abound. It would be nice if scientists could come out on
day 1 and tell everyone exactly what to expect but that isn't how science
works.

[0] [https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warned-that-china-
was-a-...](https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warned-that-china-was-a-time-
bomb-for-novel-coronavirus-outbreak-in-2007/) [1]
[https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/660.full.pdf](https://cmr.asm.org/content/cmr/20/4/660.full.pdf)

~~~
nothal
I understand your impetus to tell others to 'stick to your lane' but I
respectfully disagree and cite their post and your response as why. OP had
what you deem a misapprehension and they deem a valid point. By voicing their
point as they believes it, you were able to retort with evidence you feel
should convincingly disprove it. To me, this is reasoned, diverse discourse
correcting for unintuitive misapprehensions, at the very least. Is this not a
medium like HackerNews is for?

~~~
robbiep
It’s taken me a little while to parse this one.

HN has always felt like a good/safe place (to me) to talk about interesting
things with a mix of experts and lay people.

When it gets down to science though, agree or disagree need to be left to the
experts. I can’t be the expert/final arbiter because my knowledge isn’t good
enough (although I have some capacity), and so I am encouraging OP to go with
the experts on this one. It’s too complex a field for people to have their own
opinions based on hearsays - science should not be politics and we’re seeing
that in the world now. It doesn’t matter what you believe coming in with
science, you have to be guided by (a best approximation of the evolving)
facts.

I’m not totally sure what you disagree on, is it the rudeness of ‘stay in your
lane’ or my argument?

~~~
tridentlead
Ben Franklin once said that the best argument against democracy was a
discussion with the average voter. But I think there is an equal risk there of
members of a society being unwilling to read what experts put out, and
evaluate it themselves as well. Once people start saying I don't know anything
about this and I can't make any determinations, democracy starts to make a lot
less sense. At the end of the day science is basically critical reasoning
backed by fact collection. If you can go read up on the facts, you can reason
based on them. If someone can explain to you why you are wrong that may be one
thing, but simply assuming you can never reason anything out is very
dangerous.

~~~
xdavidliu
I won't comment on the rest of your post, but I'd like to point out that
there's no evidence Ben Franklin said that. That quote is commonly
misattributed to Churchill, but that seems to also be a misattribution [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill)

------
chrisbrandow
Has this paper either been peer-reviewed or submitted for peer-review as a
preprint?

I have a PhD in chemistry and I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to
judge the quality of the work or the track record of the authors,
scientifically.

I think this paper’s deserves a thorough airing and evaluation, but I don’t
think Hacker news is a forum well equipped to produce a high signal to noise
evaluation on such a highly charged claim, to say the least.

~~~
pldr2244
Most of HN is not qualified either to judge the quality of AI, ML, opsec,
renewables or any of a whole host of topics that are actually deeply complex.

But that does not mean it does not classify as potentially substantial news,
that at least should be visible.

Nobody is arguing that it shouldn’t be more properly vetted when published via
normal scientific channels, as these things usually are.

~~~
chrisbrandow
I’m not saying anyone’s arguing that. But I’m just trying to establish if it
is being properly vetted anywhere. If so, it would be nice to amplify the
vetting as much as the claim itself, given its seriousness.

------
bwi4
So what would evidence, rather than speculation, look like in this case? A
SARS-CoV 2 genome sequence dated before December 2019? Somehow identifying
patient zero and corresponding records of their exposure at the lab? I’m
skeptical that any hard evidence will be found. It seems to me the origin is
likely to remain speculative indefinitely.

~~~
casefields
NSA/CIA intelligence catching them red handed discussing how it happened. Of
course, with the Iraq fiasco still in our collective memory, who knows if the
public would believe it.

------
jmull
This article is poorly argued.

For example, in their point 1 they feel that since an aspect of the virus is
well-adapted for humans it was not the result of evolution. However, viruses
jumping between species happens naturally... _because_ an aspect of the virus
happens to be well-adapted for the new host species.

In fact, in this argument they seem to misunderstand the fundamental mechanism
of evolution: a random aspect of a replicating organism provides an advantage
in an environment, allowing the organism to thrive. For any random aspect that
provides an advantage there might be thousands, millions, or more that do not.
The existence of a particular unlikely successful aspect is not an argument
against natural evolution. We expect many successful aspects to be highly
unlikely.

Another example is in the conclusion:

> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from
> zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious
> account is wrong

I think they rather significantly overstate how “parsimonious” their
explanation is, but setting that aside, they scarcely address the alternative.
In this article they address ways in which the virus might have been created
by scientists, but do not address the ways in which the virus could have
evolved naturally. You can’t conclude X is more likely than Y if you only
consider the likelihood of X but not Y. So, e.g., they would need to survey
the science around how viruses evolve and jump species naturally and show how
it does not explain this virus.

There are plenty of more flaws in this article. But I’ll stop here. It’s
probably pointless to argue with reason anyway, since the people putting
forward this kind of nonsense already don’t care about reason.

Anyway, if this is the best case that the virus was artificially created, we
can probably all rest assured it was not.

------
belltaco
Lets throw them a bone and say they're right, what do we do next? What actions
do or can we take? Secure the labs? Shouldn't that be done regardless?

~~~
dagav
At least if it was someone's "fault" we could push for reparations

~~~
abeppu
At this point, who could actually pay reparations on a scale that would be
even within an order of magnitude of the damage done?

~~~
RockIslandLine
For certain definitions of "pay", any nation with a fiat currency could
certainly place a number into a spreadsheet.

Making that number mean anything might take a while.But we could certainly
write a permanent bond and put it onto the books.

------
user_50123890
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/)

Just look at the prior chinese coronavirus-related studies, they did antibody
tests in villages near bat caves for SARS-like coronaviruses, some of
villagers had antibodies in 2015 despite no reported SARS infections ever near
the area.

Simplest conclusion: Zoonotic diseases sometimes jump from bats to humans in
Chinese rural areas. The case clusters stay inside the isolated communities
and stop naturally due to low population and lack of super-spreader events
that can kickstart an epidemic.

In 2019 it happened again, but this time a villager who was infected visited
Wuhan => pandemic

------
anikan_vader
It is interesting to think about the origins of Covid-19 with Bayesian
statistics in mind. We believe that the virus originated in Wuhan, and the two
competing "mainstream" theories are whether the virus came from a wet market
or a bio lab.

I don't know exactly how many wet markets exist in China, but I would guess
that there are thousands spread across China. A wet market is simply a place
where fresh produce/meat is sold (think farmer's market). "In Hong Kong, for
example, there is a widespread network of wet markets where thousands of
locals shop everyday for their meat and vegetables. There is one in almost
every district and none of them trade in exotic or wild animals." [1] Of these
$\Theta(1000)$ wet markets, probably a few are located in Wuhan.

Notably, there is only one level 4 bio lab in China, and it happens to be
located in Wuhan. [2]

You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of
probabilistic analysis, but this line of argument swayed me to seriously
consider the possibility that the virus originated in the lab.

And, of course, note that we do not have to assume any malicious intentions.
It's easy to imagine a virus accidentally escaping the lab, regardless of
whether it evolved naturally or with some human intervention to facilitate
research. A State Department cable from 2018 wrote that the lab "has a serious
shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to
safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” [3]

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/china-wet-market-
coronav...](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/china-wet-market-coronavirus-
intl-hnk/index.html)

[2] [https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-
levels...](https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-levels-new-
coronavirus.html)

[3] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-
depar...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-department-
releases-cable-that-launched-claims-that-coronavirus-escaped-from-chinese-
lab/2020/07/17/63deae58-c861-11ea-a9d3-74640f25b953_story.html)

Footnote: Yes, I know that $\Theta(1000)$ just means "some constant" from a
mathematical perspective. But I think the idea is clear, even if the
mathematical statement taken at face value conveys no information.

~~~
refurb
That's an interesting argument. I guess one critical piece of data would be -
is the probability of Covid-19 originating from wet markets the same across
all of China?

If every wet market had the same probability, then yeah, it's odd that the
alleged wet market is one of thousands, but just happened to be next to the
bio lab in Wuhan.

But if the probability was unevenly distributed and such a virus originating
was highly likely in only a few dozen wet markets, Wuhan included, then the
probability of it being a coincidence is much higher.

~~~
pldr2244
Interesting. But also to GP’s point, I never thought of that perspective.

It is quite unsettling to realise the strangeness of odds that it occurred
right next to the Wuhan lab...

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
"Right next to" being 14 km away, on the other side of a major metropolis.

Nobody knows where the outbreak actually began, though. Wuhan was just the
first place it was detected. It could easily have begun somewhere in the
countryside, only taking off when an infected person went to a major city.
Just look how long it circulated undetected in the US - for more than a month
- before anyone noticed.

------
vzaliva
Has it been peer reviewed? Otherwise not being an epidemiologist it is hard
for me to judge weather the scientific argument presented by this paper is
sound.

~~~
murgindrag
Unfortunately, peer review is roughly as good as a die roll these days. I've
submitted many scientific publications. I think only one was seriously read by
reviewers. Others -- both accepted and rejected -- had comments which
demonstrated the reviewers hadn't read it. One paper -- accepted -- it was
clear reviewers didn't even give a cursory skim (ACM venue too).

NIPS found peer review to be no better than chance, and my experience is the
same.

------
gowld
Impossible for non experts to interpret, but deserving of an equally careful
and thorough response in any rebuttal claims.

> Conclusion

> We have deduced the internal logic of published research which resulted in
> the exact functionalities of SARS-CoV-2,

> including the convergence of agreement from difference classes of source,

> the timings of the stages of the research,

> and the development of documented capabilities by named institutions and
> individuals.

> _These meet the criteria of means, timing, agent and place_ in this
> reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the
> account to reverse the burden of proof.

> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from
> zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious
> account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most
> especially when, as we have indicated, we note puzzling errors in their use
> of evidence.

> In our companion article, in a similar forensic manner we will explore the
> primary evidence used to sustain the hypothesis of zoonotic transfer.

> In neither this article nor the next do we speculate about motive.

~~~
Robotbeat
Just a side note, but this is uncharacteristically overwrought and
overconfident language for scientific discourse.

EDIT: It sounds less like a scientific/academic argument and more like the
caricature of a legal argument.

~~~
bnjms
Not sure he has any options there. The normal approach would need to be
overwhelming to be taken seriously without the protection of some political
language. You’ll need to defend your reasoning just for people to hear you out
once there are political implications. And that’s on top of the normal work. I
can’t interpret this though so I cannot say myself.

~~~
Robotbeat
I don’t agree. Political, overconfident language is not scientifically
appropriate, especially for a paper purporting to overturn the scientific
consensus.

Sounds like this is language that was in there before peer review but that was
removed before publication. Makes sense that part didn’t pass peer review as
it’s improper to make such overconfident conclusions and claims in a
scientific paper.

~~~
bnjms
You've won me over. This type of language belongs in accompanying text not
directly in a scientific paper.

------
ggm
Evidence is a very bad word to use here. It's a hypothesis from (mis)
interpretation of data. Virologists say it's not unnaturally evolved

[https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-
or...](https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-origin-of-
ncov2019/384)

------
barbacoa
Found a blog a while back where they linked to all the research papers the
Chinese lab in Wuhan was doing. Very interesting read.

Basically they were studying animal to human virus transmission by bio
engineering bat viruses to infect human cells.

[https://project-evidence.github.io/](https://project-evidence.github.io/)

------
etangent
That evidence looks weak IMO, but it's frustrating that the current culture in
science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy
it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus
unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."

~~~
belltaco
It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and
manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show. Take the 5G
conspiracy for example, 100+ cell phone towers attacked, and workers setting
up attacked as well. Lots of testable assertions made, none backed up with any
kind of evidence.

~~~
emsy
But this could very well be a result of priming people for a consensus (or its
opposition) I’m too young to judge but it wasn’t always like this or was it?

~~~
auslegung
Yes, things have always been this way and if you really want to see just how
long, look at speeches and other “news” from Ancient Greece.

The significant difference today is how quickly and widely falsehoods can be
distributed and redistributed, and how many different sources this can happen
to. Pre Internet, if I started telling my friends about this thing called
QAnon, how far and how quickly could it really spread? Not far and not
quickly. Today however it can spread across the world in a day and be picked
up by every major news outlet. It’s disturbing, and we should all be very
concerned.

~~~
jakeogh
Curious people can read the posts directly at qmap dot pub.

------
robbiep
This seems to me to be a dangerous paper. It's effectively an opinion piece,
pre-published, requiring a high degree of domain expertise to even read, with
a clear conclusion in the title that you can see being used to deflect
attention from the massive job the world has at hand (not that we shouldn't
ask hard questions)

Why am I qualified to comment? Well, I’m a medical doctor (which frankly means
jack shit for the ability to parse this paper) but got there through a major
in biochemistry and molecular biology (which is a partial toolkit).

Unlike their paper on Biovacc-19 (0) it has not been accepted or submitted for
publication yet (not enough to rule it out immediately because there is an
increasing trend to pre-publication with the rate of research publications in
this space as well as problems with traditional publication methodologies)

Without going too far the dissection, I would just point out that the
overwhelming scientific consensus is that SARS-CoV-2 is natural in origin,
this nature article describes this well (1).

Worth specifically responding to is their claim that

 _The co-receptor dependent phagocytic general method of action for
infectivity and pathogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 appears to be specifically related
to cumulative charge resulting from inserts placed on the surface of the Spike
receptor binding domain, right next to the receptor binding motif._

Inserts _placed_ is a poor choice of descriptor in my opinion. The Fox
Newsification of research findings. Well, you can see the 4 additional amino
acids that give rise to the change in isoelectric point in the spike protein
in the nature article, and much greater minds than mine have dissected this
genetically and decided that such a mutation is possible through evolutionary
methods alone.

They specifically say they disagree with the findings of the nature paper so
to go on any longer risks drawing my bow in this area further than I am
comfortable, but I would sum it up by saying that in science it is always good
to have dissenting voices (such as with climate science for all the good that
that does), but with just how fraught the world stage is at the moment I don't
believe this dissenting voice deserves much attenion

[0] [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527/S2633289220000083a.pdf/biovacc19_a_candidate_vaccine_for_covid19_sarscov2_developed_from_analysis_of_its_general_method_of_action_for_infectivity.pdf)
[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9)

~~~
cameldrv
I'd say that the "Proximal Origins" paper makes a very weak case especially
given what we now know. The essential argument is that it's more likely that
the RBD came from a lineage that includes the Pangolin-CoV than that it was
designed by a human. That does seem reasonable. They suggest that the virus
was the result of a recombination event. However, that recombination could
have occurred artificially at the WIV. The WIV and Shi Zhengli specifically
have recently published papers about performing precisely this type of work on
SARS like coronaviruses.

Now the closest known viruses to SARS-CoV-2 are RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV.
Pangolin-CoV is a very close match in the spike protein, and RaTG13 is a very
close match on the rest of the virus. RaTG13 and Pangolin-CoV were both
discovered by WIV but their sequences sat unpublished until after the pandemic
started. The grafting of the spike protein onto a "backbone" of another SARS
like coronavirus is specifically something Shi Zhengli has been involved with
and published with Ralph Baric in 2015.

Furthermore, the spike of SARS-CoV-2 is better adapted to humans than to any
other species, and it's better adapted to humans than any other published
coronavirus. This doesn't make sense unless the virus spent some time evolving
in humans or in human cells. Interestingly, passaging SARS like coronaviruses
in human airway cell cultures is also something that has been done in recent
years. Ralph Baric's lab specifically has published work on this. The only
real other possibility is that SARS-CoV-2 somehow spent many months
circulating in human populations undetected while it adapted to human ACE2.
There has been no evidence published that this occurred.

Finally, it is quite a coincidence that the lab where both Pangolin-CoV and
RaTG13 were discovered is in the same city as where the outbreak started. Yes,
both of those viruses were discovered in China, but Pangolin-CoV was
discovered about 1000km from Wuhan, and RaTG13 was discovered about 1500km
from Wuhan.

~~~
robbiep
So you've got a situation where the natural reservoir of the viruses is
geographically proximal to a lab that was set up to specifically study these
diseases. It's a conspiracy theorist's wet dream

~~~
cameldrv
The bats that carried RaTG13 are 1000 miles away from Wuhan. It's unclear how
it would have migrated to Wuhan given that horseshoe bats do not live near
Wuhan.

On the other hand, the one thing we know for certain is that RaTG13 was
present in Wuhan and was brought there by researchers at the WIV.

------
ak_25
I just showed this to a friend of mine who is a biochemist and he sent me this
—

[https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-
cla...](https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/)

------
heidegger
I am just astounded that anyone is taking this seriously. Epidemiologists have
been warning us for decades about the increased likelihood of infectious
diseases jumping from animals to humans with the exponential growth of the
population and therefore, industrial-scale farming of animal. The intense
proximity of animals and humans in these circumstances combined with the
shortened lifespans of the animals involved means a virus that both spreads
quickly and infects humans would thrive in such a situation.

This speculation is as irresponsible as it is baseless. You know as well as I
do it would mean World War III.

------
andromeduck
Between this and the active surpression of research on the topic in China
through intimidation and the ongoing denial and destruction of evidence, I see
no reason why we ought to give China the benefit of the doubt.

------
ArkVark
Its likely that Viruses like COVID-19 have come and gone over time, and been
completely unnoticed.

The difference being now that we have much older and elderly populations,
often with chronic health conditions and deficiencies, kept alive
'artificially' by modern healthcare.

For example, approximately 50% of COVID deaths are to people in nursing homes.
Without this population, the virus would be put down as regular
influenza/pneumonia, albeit an unusually virulent strain.

~~~
DennisP
That same modern healthcare is making the covid death rate much lower than it
would be otherwise.

We've had plenty of people hospitalized who were not so sick and elderly that
they depended on modern medicine to stay alive. Without modern hospital care,
more of them would die.

------
tklenke
[https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-
cla...](https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/)

Do we know that this is the final version of the paper that was published?

------
tklenke
[https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-
cla...](https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/)

Not sure this is the final draft of this paper. Do we know that it is?

------
lazyjones
I wonder if this is a good point to be made against the paper's claims, given
that viruses like MERS-CoV are not exactly proven to be natural in origin and
even about HIV a lot of similar claims have been made over the years:

 _Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of
the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that
what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development
of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can be
found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird flu"),
HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)."_

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controver...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-
coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts/)

------
biolurker1
What is important is that this needs to be investigated and the world needs to
take measures to protect us from total future annihilation in a similar
situation

------
yters
I ran a blast query against the cov2 glycoprotein that binds to human ACE2,
and it just pops out of nowhere in 2020. There is a difference of like 30
amino acids from anything that came before, which is much too great to be
explained by the coronavirus wild mutation rate of 1 nucleotide every thousand
years. So, possibilities are it is a strain that has evaded researchers till
now, some natural phenomenon vastly accelerated its mutation towards infecting
humans, or it is genetically engineered.

~~~
sradman
> some natural phenomenon vastly accelerated its mutation

Natural recombination [1] vs gain-of-function lab work. Some of the lab work
leverages natural recombination by artificially co-infecting lab animals with
multiple viruses and studying the resulting chimeras.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombinant_virus#Natural_re...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombinant_virus#Natural_recombination)

------
wsc981
A while ago (18 June) former biology professor Bret Weinstein said the same in
a Joe Rogan podcast [0], that there are several indications that seem to point
out the virus is engineered.

One of the most interesting point he brings up, at least from my perspective,
was the following:

\- Bats are outdoor animals

\- As such a corona virus that mainly targets bats should have little trouble
spreading outside

\- However if a virus has been studied in a lab, so perhaps the virus has
mutated to spread more easily indoors and "forgot" how to spread outdoors

\- Hence this could be the reason why at the moment this corona virus seems to
have trouble spreading outside

\- The virus originated very closely to a lab that is known to study virusus

But Bret also brings up other points.

Also, what I found very interesting about this podcast and related to the
development of vaccines, is his statement on lab mice and the possibility that
laboratoria currently use mice that might have been (perhaps unknowingly)
conditioned to produce desirable results in tests [1].

\---

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=6770s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=6770s)

[1]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRCzZp1J0v0&t=9597s)

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
The "spreading indoors" argument that Bret Weinstein made was mind-numbingly
stupid. I know he has a degree in biology, but this is just embarrassing.

He's making an argument that this virus has been selected in a lab for a
specific transmission mechanism. That means that the virus would have to have
undergone many generations of animal-to-animal transmission in a lab. There's
no reason why a virus would adapt to _transmit_ well if it were being studied
in cell culture - because there's no transmission involved.

So Weinstein's theory requires a large-scale operation in which scientists
keep large numbers of animals in the lab, and allow them to periodically come
into contact in order to possibly infect one another. This has to go on for
many generations, with the researchers constantly bringing in new animals to
be exposed, until the virus "forgets" how to transmit outdoors. Where does
Weinstein suppose this massive research operation occurred? The people he's
alleging did this research are well known (and highly respected) scientists
who publish their research in top international journals like _Nature_. Why
did they keep silent about this massive research program, and how is it that
none of their international colleagues had any idea about it?

Meanwhile, there's an obvious reason why the virus might transmit better
indoors than outdoors: many respiratory viruses do. That's one of the
explanations for the existence of "flu season" \- people spend more time
indoors during the winter. Indoors, people are closer to one another and there
isn't as much air circulation.

You don't have to invent completely unsupported theories about scientists
carrying out large-scale, secret animal infection experiments in order to
explain why a respiratory virus might transmit better indoors than outdoors.
But Bret Weinstein is doing that, because he likes attention. I was on his
side in the whole Evergreen saga, but now that he's become a celebrity, it's
gotten to his head and he's saying stupid things to get attention.

------
causality0
Do viruses closely related to SARS-Cov-2 do all the "unusual" things it does?
Do they cause brain damage, reproductive damage, anosmia without congestion,
strokes, and unusual clotting activity? If not, I would be reassured by
someone explaining to me how a natural pathogen could pick up all these
features at the same time.

~~~
nthj
If the natural pathogen causes blood clots, everything else you described
naturally occurs as a side effect.

~~~
dustinmoris
Precisely this. I can't understand how so many people are so dumb that they
can't add one plus one and understand that all the scare stories they hear is
just normal consequences of a single issue. It's like saying that people who
have a salmonella infection also have other issues likes diarrhoea,
dehydration, headache, dizziness, tiredness, etc. Well of course, if you have
a stomach bug which gives you diarrhoea then you shit water and you get
dehydrated. When you dehydrate then you get headaches, can feel dizzy and your
energy levels drop and you feel tired.

------
La1n
This version has not been peer reviewed, the peer reviewed version has many of
these claims about it's man-made-ness removed

[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/qrb-
discovery/articl...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/qrb-
discovery/article/biovacc19-a-candidate-vaccine-for-
covid19-sarscov2-developed-from-analysis-of-its-general-method-of-action-for-
infectivity/DBBC0FA6E3763B0067CAAD8F3363E527)

[https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-
cla...](https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-claims/)

------
avs733
Even the title seems intentionally written in a misleading way...the OP
correctly kept the original title but it is by design misleading with that use
of which

------
bnjms
I’m open to this idea but I cannot imagine a goal for this line of research.
It doesn’t appear to benefit anyone.

~~~
hdjrkrmfkt
"Gain of function" is regularly done to make various viruses "better" so as to
study then how to defend against that potential mutation happening naturally.

See the big scandal from some years ago when the H5N1 virus was modified in a
lab to be airborne, and the accusations that such research on such a dangerous
virus is just reckless.

~~~
bnjms
That’s interesting but I still don’t understand the motivation. There are
plenty of currently successful viruses for research that making one airborne
seems like it should be taboo. But again I’m not part of that community so
maybe it’s just natural for virologists you want to play with viruses.

------
xbar
Very compelling.

------
jmcgough
The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that
because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been
intentionally created.

There's a reason we haven't seen a virus like this in a century - because it's
so unlikely that a new virus will appear in any given year with both a high
rate of transmission and a high fatality rate.

~~~
bitcurious
>The argument is identical to arguments supporting intelligent design, that
because it evolved in an unlikely or complex way, it must have been
intentionally created.

I think intelligent design would be a pretty plausible explanation for
humanity, if we already knew there was a god.

~~~
hatsunearu
Intelligent design is kind of stupid because life is clearly not designed very
intelligently.

The "evidence" that sars-cov-2 is designed with a guided purpose is kind of
there in the paper, though. And that we as a species (and the bois in WIV)
clearly had the capacity to do so.

------
solvorn
There’s evidence but not proof. People confuse these words all the time.

------
chaostheory
Can't be coincidence

[https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-
throu...](https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-
lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748)

[https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-
wuhan...](https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-
millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741)

~~~
kbaker
I really hope anyone with a genetics background, or the desire to go really in
depth about what makes a virus 'Lab-made', read through the above posted first
article.

[https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-
throu...](https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-
lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748)

It takes a long time but explains why the source is not very likely to be an
evolved combined bat x pangolin virus, and has curious markers similarly used
in other gain-of-function research, even similar techniques as used in past
research by Dr. Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Natural origin
not ruled out as being impossible, but not likely.

Combining it with this possible explanation looking at the possibility of
RaTG13 being entirely fabricated altogether by Dr. Shi in January 2020, and
you can at least definitely see where the conspiracy arguments come from, and
why the CCP has an overwhelming need to create and play up a 'natural origin'
argument, along with passing on mountains of misinformation.

[https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-
fake.html](https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html)

Very convincing articles, scary times if this is actually true.

------
haecceity
My first step in filtering crank papers is to ask is this written with
Microsoft Word.

------
AsyncAwait
I just wonder if the same questions would've been asked if the virus
originated in the west.

It seems Orientalism is still very much alive.

------
vertbhrtn
Wait, didn't Chinese authorities said when this all started that there was a
minor outbreak in the BSL4 lab, but it's under control? It's just when the
"under control" didn't work, they started to cover things up.

------
eunos
This forbes blog piece contains a compilation of refutations attempt for the
said theory
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controver...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2020/06/07/controversial-
coronavirus-lab-origin-claims-dismissed-by-experts)

~~~
DominikPeters
This seemed mostly fluff and argument from authority to me, with the main
substantial counterpoint this:

> Gunnveig Grødeland, vaccine researcher at the University of Oslo, is one of
> the scientists voicing their disagreement with Sørensen. She explains that
> what Sørensen referred to as "inserted sequences" can enable the development
> of a more serious disease, but this is not unusual in nature: "Examples can
> be found in other viruses including subtypes of influenza (including "bird
> flu"), HIV, and several human coronaviruses (MERS, OC43, HKU1)." Grødeland
> also says that Sørensen's paper offered no biological confirmation on the
> relevance of positively charged patches.

~~~
eunos
To be fair, this claim (the main paper) is released for a month. I even
remember encountered a HN submission for it. However, the claim doesn't really
attract much attention. A few UK media mention it, but focus mainly on the MI6
chief. Googling the researcher names also found mostly Norwegian sites. Since
the traction of this claim is quite low, then not much further discussion by
other scientists as well.

------
yters
Also weird is Fauci both promoted this sort of research and oversaw the
funding line that went to the Wuhan lab that funded a very similar research in
2019. My theory is this is an accidental lab outbreak, and Fauci is advising
because he knows the cause and is trying to undo his mistake.

------
jakeogh
A unrelated(?) repo of material about Covid-19's source, last update was May
2: [https://project-evidence.github.io/](https://project-evidence.github.io/)

Regardless of the source of this one, it is only getting _easier_ to engineer
these extraordinarily valuable weapons. The 24x7 induced fear response is the
real threat, not the virus.

Excess deaths are the only real measure:
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm)

------
Gatsky
This is very unlikely. The technology to design a virus reliably just isn't
there.

What is much more likely is that a lab was studying coronavirus isolates from
animals, and had a failure of containment. This has happened multiple times
before (eg. with small pox).

But even then it is a moot point, because there is no way China, or any
country for that matter, would admit they unleashed a global pandemic. Can you
imagine the fall out?

~~~
ReflectedImage
The technology to design a virus has been around for a decade. You need a
computer, a biology degree and 8 dollars. 8 dollars is the cost for a lab to
synthesize your virus and put in a container (you may also have to pay
postage). It's really really cheap.

~~~
Gatsky
You are confusing ‘making’ a virus with designing one with particular
virulence and transmission characteristics. The latter is what I am talking
about.

~~~
hatsunearu
Other guy said it but looks like the scientists figured that exact thing
out...

------
wolfspider
The evidence is pretty compelling and I’ve suspected something was up the
whole time in fact I began social distancing November of last year after
hearing reports of a mystery virus. At some point in my life I met a
mechanical engineer while helping out a friend who lost his job. This guy
happened to be his neighbor and was the only one who was willing to run an
electrical cable to my friend’s unit for a small sum since his electric got
cut off. This guy explains he was working in a lab that did continuous culture
experiments and explained how it worked. He had the blueprints in his unit so
I had no reason to doubt him and paperwork from the lab. Long story short he
quit due to military influence on the project and was pushed out over his
concerns which were ethical in nature. He opened my eyes to the fact a virus
can be evolved rapidly and made extremely resistant without specific genetic
modification. A little bit of googling and I could see the same company was
involved in research going on in that Wuhan lab. The point here is how do we
define “modified” as it is certainly possible through rapid continuous
cultures and selective survival of strains any virus can be modified. This
happened in the early aughts and so it’s been nearly two decades this research
technique has been in play. If it wasn’t for that chance encounter I’d
naturally be more skeptical about possible modifications of the virus but just
so happens that I’m not as a result.

