The article claims "the Lancet statement rejected the lab-leak hypothesis", which is a bit misleading considering what the Lancet statement actually did was reject a human origin of the virus, based on genome sampling and other evidence.
The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?
The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.
It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.
>the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
That's absolutely true, but one of the main corollary claims is also that SARS-CoV-2 may have resulted in part from gain of function research. People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet and that a natural virus leaking from a lab would be less likely to spread so widely. They've also cited the fact that the lab does do gain of function research on coronaviruses.
If it were true, that definitely wouldn't imply it's a bio-weapon (such research happens everywhere all the time, etc.), but it would be important to know.
We weren't talking about gain functions 1.5 years ago. That term has just recently appeared in the media. And now that phrase is the new "scape-phrase".
"Gain function" now means there's now a great way to confuse man-made and natural. I find it both a more concise scientific term, but anathema to politics.
> People making that claim have said that the virus seems to be particularly effective against humans despite no intermediate forms discovered yet
But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].
Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
>But such forms were already discovered back in 2015 as a result of the research that's now labeled as "GoF research", even tho it didn't actually fall under the GoF moratorium back then [0].
I think I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean. Your link is referring to an engineered SARS hybrid virus. If SARS-CoV-2 is indeed also an engineered virus or a descendant of one, then this 2015 virus wouldn't be an intermediate form; just another example of the same sort of thing.
>Imho the whole thing has a very "shooting the messenger" vibe to it; The evidence we had for this being a very real possibility of happening is now turned into the alleged cause of it actually happening.
Do you mean "gain of function-like research is what warned us this could happen"? If so, if SARS-CoV-2 is a result of that sort of research, wouldn't gain of function research be both the messenger and the source, here?
Isn't that the whole crux of the debate and dilemma in the first place? That such research can help us discover, study, and mitigate risks, and can also potentially create new risks.
> Isn't that the whole crux of the debate and dilemma in the first place?
It's not like researchers are "engineering a virus to do exactly what they want it to do", what they do is observe the evolution of cultures of viruses, in an environment that's conductive to it, to see where that ultimately leads.
All of that also constantly happens in nature, but in a controlled lab environment we can accelerate and observe this process, like in a simulation, to see what viruses might be capable of evolving to be dangerous to us in the long term.
Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
>It's not like researchers are "engineering a virus to do exactly what they want it to do", what they do is observe the evolution of cultures of viruses, in an environment that's conductive to it, to see where that ultimately leads.
No, I think some researchers are trying to do that. From the article you linked:
>In an article published in Nature Medicine1 on 9 November, scientists investigated a virus called SHC014, which is found in horseshoe bats in China. The researchers created a chimaeric virus, made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them.
This isn't merely observing viruses in a lab environment. It's combining parts of different viruses to create a new, more effective virus. This is gain of function research, and there's an allegation that SARS-CoV-2 may have been created in a similar way.
>Sure, an argument can be made how that's one way of how we could end up creating and releasing such a virus ourselves, but even then: Wouldn't it be preferable for that to happen in a controlled research environment, instead of it just emerging in some remote obscure place? At least then are in a way better position to understand why and how it happens, giving us an edge in fighting it.
Let's hypothetically assume SARS-CoV-2 was created through either this lab-monitoring method and/or gain of function methods. (Not saying it was or even that it's likely; just for the sake of argument.)
The two are not equal, the virus could be of natural origin but leaked from a lab, that scenario is still very much possible even in the context of the Lancet statement.
Gilles Demaneuf, a data scientist, then is cited as saying there is no evidence in the statement, when actually there are around 12 relevant citations in there. I guess a dozen is just not enough data for a data scientist?
The actual context of that statement also gets quite a bit embezzled with an off-hand remark about "xenophobia and climate denialism": Since the first case in the US, there had been a concentrated and very nasty effort to politicize the virus.
It was US senators and US new pundits who at first floated the claim of it being a bio weapon [0], that's what triggered said Lancet statement in the very first place. It didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason, as some people like to claim, to imply the statement itself is already evidence for a cover-up.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_misinformation#Wuhan_...