Zlaxer wrote: ↑Tue Apr 14, 2020 5:15 am
Plausible based on what we know - but what does Occam's razor say?
If this came from NC lab, I think NC would have been epicenter - not seeing that.
Occam's razor is a heuristic. It is actually called parsimony in science. It essentially says you should look first at hypotheses that require the least assumptions (it does not mean the simplest explanation as many people misuse the heuristic do).
In this case, the genomic data for some reason shows that the pandemic actually began in the United States. The virus comes from bats that live in caves in Yunnan province in China. For this to begin in China, your assumptions have to include weird chains of transmission that start in China, but really spread across the US, and then land in Wuhan where it mutates to type B and then we all notice something is going on. If you assume it escaped the lab in North Carolina, then there are no such additional assumptions. It escapes the lab, spreads across the United States as type A and causing our strange "influenza" season, hopping across the Pacific to mutate into type B and the rest is history. Much less assumptions.
Montegriffo wrote: ↑Tue Apr 14, 2020 5:34 am
Speaker to Animals wrote: ↑Tue Apr 14, 2020 3:27 am
Yet another reason to be suspicious of common assumptions..
RaTG13 is the name, rank and serial number of an individual horseshoe bat of the species Rhinolophus affinis, or rather of a sample of its feces collected in 2013 in a cave in Yunnan, China. The sample was collected by hazmat-clad scientists from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan that year. Stored away and forgotten until January this year, the sample from the horseshoe bat contains the virus that causes Covid-19.
The scientists were mostly sampling a very similar species with slightly shorter wings, called Rhinolophus sinicus, in a successful search for the origin of the virus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2002-03. That search had alarming implications, which were largely ignored.
In Shitou Cave, south of Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, they found viruses in the bats’ droppings and anal swabs that were more similar to human SARS than anything found in palm civets, the small mammals that until then were presumed to be the source of human infection. Back in the laboratory, they found that one of the viruses from bat droppings, called WIV1, could thrive in monkey and human cells specially engineered to activate the gene for ACE2 receptors, the lock to which a coronavirus’s spike protein can fit as a key. This suggested that people could catch SARS directly from a bat dropping.
Then in 2016, Ralph Baric and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill showed that the same bat virus could infect live mice that had been engineered to express the human gene for the ACE2 receptor. The virus was “poised for human emergence,” as the title of Dr. Baric’s paper put it.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.co ... 1586440959
So if you go back to that chart, the original bat virus they used as the precursor to type A coronavirus, if I am not mistaken, came from bat RaTG13. Sure, that bat was collected from a cave in Yunnan province, but it also made its way to that research lab in North Carolina. Now, given that the first cluster of mutations (type A) are monopolized by Americans, and it is mostly found in samples taken here in the United States, I would argue for the possibility (maybe even the higher likelihood) of this actually starting from a lab leak in North Carolina.
Obviously the genomic data is sparse. But I think there are too many coincidental interactions between humans and this virus to dismiss a lab leak, and the assumption that any lab leak
had to be from a Chinese lab unsupportable based on evidence. It is possible it leaked from one of these two labs, but also possible it leaked from the lab in North Carolina.
Seems to me that this paper just adds credence to the theory that it may have started in a wet market that illegally sold live bats.
Back in the laboratory, they found that one of the viruses from bat droppings, called WIV1, could thrive in monkey and human cells specially engineered to activate the gene for ACE2 receptors, the lock to which a coronavirus’s spike protein can fit as a key. This suggested that people could catch SARS directly from a bat dropping.
Theories about the virus escaping from bio-research labs are fun n'all but Occam's razor still suggests that poor hygiene in a crowded market full of live animals is the most likely source of the spread.
Wouldn't even need to have patient zero catching it at the market. The guys who go into batshit filled caves to catch the bats could have caught it first and then spread it person to person when they went to the market to sell their wares.
If we are going to speculate we might as well start at the most likely explanation rather than worry about those which are far less likely.
Right now, simple probability says that it is much more likely to have escaped a lab than jumped from bats to humans. The fact that we already sampled this virus in 2013 and were playing with it in labs in China, Canada, and the US leading up the pandemic does not bode well for the idea that it is somehow a "conspiracy theory" to suggest this actually leaked from a lab. These things leak from labs occasionally. It's not some bizarre conspiracy theory.
If this were a random virus that hopped over from bats, I would not expect that the random virus that just happened to hop over just happened to have been collected by humans in 2013 and has been experimented on for nearly seven years in labs distributed around the world.
That's not to say it is impossible it as all a coincidence and it really did make the jump AND we just happened to have been experimenting on it. It's just that "OMG the lab theory is a conspiracy nutcase ideas" is on par with "This is the CHINA virus!!". You don't know either way and the evidence we have right now kind of indicates you could very well be wrong.
Prepare yourselves for the possibility that at some point it comes out the virus leaked from the UNC Chapel Hill lab. It certainly is NOT a crazy hypothesis and it actually requires less assumptions than anything else. If you adhere to parsimony then this is the hypothesis you should check out first.
If this is indeed what happened, I suspect they will find the antibodies for type A in blood samples across America going back to late Summer. That's step one. Eventually they will work it backwards towards some connection to that lab.
That's not to say it is impossible it didn't leak from labs in China, made it's way to the US, circulated, and then migrated back to China to mutate into version B and start the epidemic in Wuhan. It is also not to say that the genomic data might not change (it's extremely sparse) and this would alter the probabilities. You'd expect, if this begins in China, for type A to be prevalent somewhere in China. Start with that problem.
And everybody should stop misusing "Occam's Razor". It's one of the most annoying errors out there. I can tolerate all sorts of shit, including misusing their/they're/there no problem. Something about people using the term "Occam's Razor" but not really understanding what parsimony actually means bugs me.
