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The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

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Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#411

Post by jonahbenton »

chrisco255 wrote: post #29
jonahbenton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." Always how it has been, since beginning of the thing we call "science."

Yeah but maybe the fact that science and politics and media have become so interwoven and in some cases march to the same drum, it does feel like something is quantitatively different about science in 2020.

Agree both that 2020 is completely effed and that important issues from political perspective right now are unusually science driven.

Having to go through the process Kuhn describes but where both the brains involved in paradigm transition are not trained in evidence, and, the accumulating evidence is...people dying from COVID...is just so grim.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#412

Post by eanzenberg »

cstross wrote: post #408
curiosity42 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

You missed out one critical element of a highly contagious bioweapon: you have to be able to protect your own population . Otherwise it's a self-own. (This is why nobody has really used bioweapons in warfare to date, with the exception of some questionable reports that the USSR had a really lethal weaponized smallpox strain on some of their ICBM warheads, as a balance-of-terror multiplier.) While this doesn't prove t…

Not if you’re a communist regime. Remember, in communism, there is no individual. Everyone belongs to the state.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#414

Post by jerome-jh »

jkhdigital wrote: post #127

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 m…

The summary is very much faithful, unfortunately followed by comments from commenters who obviously did not read the paper. I would just add this item, paraphrasing the paper:

In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#415

Post by salawat »

sudosysgen wrote: post #255
salawat wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fritz Haber wasn't exactly super popular well... anywhere for contributions to WWI or WWII. Doesn't mean he was any less credible as chemist.

Luc Montagnier lost credibility due to making incorrect claims and general quackery. Not comparable to Haber. He has made claims supporting homeopathy, and claimed to have evidence of DNA teleportation. That's reason enough to lose credibility.

Hmmm. Looked into it some more. Unfortunate that. I'll give his stuff a read to be sure it says what everyone else seems to say it does, but I can see your Point if other people's assessments I've read are accurate.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#416

Post by op00to »

Aeolun wrote: post #379
wokwokwok wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a tough call. If you read the actual paper, what they say is: "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 a…

How you interpret their data is up to you (e.g. whether it gives you a high level of confidence). But they’ve clearly given you proof that the virus is artificial. Personally I think the circumstantial evidence in this case is fairly strong. But I’m hardly impartial.

> But they’ve clearly given you proof that the virus is artificial.

They've made conjecture, but not incontrovertible truth.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#417

Post by op00to »

fabbari wrote: post #171
throwaway326429 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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!! This statement is a distraction from the main question. The question is: conditional on being in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what is the probability that the virus arose through purely natural processes, vs. the probability that it escaped from a lab. I am not equipped to assess the biological evid…

There is something about this way of reasoning that seems faulty to me.The reason the Wuhan laboratory was studying coronaviruses in the first place is that there is a large reservoir of the virus in the area. In other terms: diamonds are hard to find, but where you find diamond mines you also find diamonds, ergo: diamond mines must create diamonds.

> I am not equipped to assess the biological evidence [...] I would argue this puts the probability of a lab escape above 50%.

That's exactly the faulty reasoning right there.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#418

Post by jmull »

anikan_vader wrote: post #198

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 i…

Comparing wet market vs. lab escape based on numbers of each isn't that useful to analyze.

For one thing, those are far from the only places the virus could have jumped to humans. (In fact, investigations of early cases in Wuhan show that while the market appears to be the site of a super spreader event, it wasn't the origin of the spread of the virus in humans.)

Also, by comparing counts of wet markets and bio labs, you ignore that the likelihood of spread from each are not comparable -- they'd have to have something like the same order of magnitude of likelihood for your analysis to have meaning. Obviously, that's rather unlikely to be true.

> You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of probabilistic analysis

I don't think you can conclude anything from your analysis considering all the holes in it.

Re: The evidence which suggests that Covid-19 is not a naturally evolved virus [pdf]

#420

Post by 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/

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