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Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

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Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#71

Post by redis_mlc »

throw3848 wrote: post #64
raphlinus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should clarify, neither I nor Dr. Rasmussen are claiming that we know what the true origin is, or that zoonotic spillover is definitely what happened. There is not enough evidence to make such a definitive conclusion. I can see how people might read my comment as implicitly asserting that if people did understand the empirical facts they would come to the conclusion of zoonotic origin. That said, there are facts, a…

Human share 98.5 percent of DNA with shimpanzee. Percentage is just a pop science. Find the missing link and you have a proof. But for start we could explain how south china wild bat got into wuhan meat market, 500 km from its origin. I am not from US or China. From my view Wuhan lab was sponsored by US. My concern is how often will current crisis repeat, every 10 years? Nobody is answering this question. And we do n…

Well, SARS-1 was in 2002/2003, and China didn't tell anybody then either. It took 3 months for other countries to learn about it.

According to China reporters, the CCP will always wait for it to hopefully die out by itself.

I've heard that bats weren't sold in the Wuhan wet market, which is interesting either way.

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#72

Post by sudosysgen »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #55
jariel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a political statement if it's factual. Or rather, it's 'always political between states' but the legitimacy of the facts give it credibility. China's initial dismissal and coverup of the spread of the virus, and their subsequent misinformation and lack of transparency, and finally, their attempts to stop an investigation into COVID origins are really seriously bad things . To boot - they've made a political…

> It's not a political statement if it's factual. I think “The COVID-19 pandemic was avoidable. Any responsible country would have invited world health investigators to Wuhan within days of an outbreak.” is counterfactual by definition.

It's also a non-sequitur as we know the virus already left China in November.

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#73

Post by sudosysgen »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #25
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #9

Great claims require great evidence

Absolutely. The great claim that SARS-Cov-2 has a zoonotic origin requires evidence of an animal with a virus similar to SARS-Cov-2. Unlike SARS-1 and MERS, we have not yet found such an animal.

No, it really doesn't.

Every single other virus ever has had a zoonotic origin. SARS-CoV-2 has a 96.3% homologue.

The default, as with literally every other of thousands of viruses, is that like all the others it is the product of zoonosis.

For most viruses too, the exact intermediate animal hosts aren't precisely known.

It's really akin to find a new species of bird and trying asking for evidence that it specifically came from evolution and not genetic engineering. Sure, it's possible that it didn't, but every single other species of bird came from it and it's fully expected to happen.

And by the way, the exact intermediate host for the original SARS was also never determined conclusively until fifteen years after the first outbreak.

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#74

Post by thu2111 »

cameldrv wrote: post #61
raphlinus wrote: post #20

I like Carl Bergstrom's take on this: I have reason to believe that if the outgoing administration claims to have reason to believe something but refuses to provide the evidence behind it, they are lying. https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1350292056782954498 Here's a very serious, legitimate review of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01205-5 Unfortunately, from my e…

This is her entire argument: "Gain-of-function research is also subject to intense scrutiny and governmental oversight, precisely because of the high risk involved in conducting it safely; thus, it is extremely unlikely that gain-of-function research on hard-to-obtain coronaviruses (such as bat SARS-like coronaviruses) could occur under the radar." This research was not happening under the radar. WIV has been openly…

That seems pretty typical for a paper published in Nature. I thought it was meant to be good but basically every paper to do with disease or biology I've read in Nature over the past 12 months has been like this: it looks superficially scientific and when read carefully it just falls apart. They've also been suppressing critical commentary sent to them. The Flaxman paper was atrocious and they sat on a formal response that was sent to them about it for like 6 months.

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#75

Post by gnusty_gnurc »

rllearneratwork wrote: post #31
SlipperySlope wrote: post #4

The new part is the assertion that lab researchers got sick in the fall of 2019. This is consistent with evidence of the virus in Italy in the same time period. Due to the large number of Chinese working in Italy, there was a direct flight between Italy and Wuhan at the time. The new Biden administration has no reason to cover this up further, due to the obvious danger that another pandemic results from a lab acciden…

"leaked from lab" claim absolutely does not imply "designer". The virus could have been natural, collected for study (possibly in animal) by a lab which studies such viruses and still leaked via an accident (unexpected human transmission). To prove that it is "designer virus", additional, different kind of evidence is needed.

It may not be designer per se but the idea is that seemingly perfect human tropism could mean they were changing it and infecting humanized animals or something.

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#76

Post by kbaker »

raphlinus wrote: post #58
kbaker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for writing this, I was just about to start writing up something similar. The linked paper might be 'serious' in tone but the claims are not convincing. One of the best articles I have seen on the lab-made hypothesis is here: https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug... If you want to go down a more skeptical route, closer into conspiracy theories and Chinese politics, you can read some o…

Here's one such rebuttal: https://medium.com/@stoilov_77462/response-to-yuri-deigin-th...

Great! Thank you!

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#77

Post by raphlinus »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #66
raphlinus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of anecdotal stories like these, but the idea that Covid was circulating widely in the US before January just isn't consistent with the evidence on the ground. Trevor Bedford has written about this several times [1], and he would know, the phylogenetic work he and his team have been doing is one of the most sensitive instruments we have in figuring out how this thing spreads. So this basically boils d…

It baffles me that we can't scrutinize the claims of "highly regarded" people when they run counter to the someone's experience or even intuition. I'm not saying we should base policy or decisions on this scrutiny, but it's not unreasonable to have doubts. Highly regarded virologists were tweeting earlier in 2020 about how stupid masks were because they couldn't be effective in preventing the spread of a disease whic…

Of course we can and should scrutinize the claims of highly regarded people. For example, Michael Levitt has a Nobel Prize and I've publicly criticized him when I was convinced he was utterly wrong: https://twitter.com/raphlinus/status/1297182969514270721

The mask issue was a debacle from a scientific communications point of view. In the early days, there was legitimate debate among scientists regarding the value of masks. But I think the main thing that went wrong was a paternalistic attitude, trying to address supply chain issues of N95 mask usage by medical and other frontline workers by convincing people that masks weren't effective. That, I think most agree, was a huge mistake.

Of course, your actual statement that highly regarded virologists tweeting that masks were "stupid" and "couldn't be effective" is false, and you probably know that.

Re: Ensuring a transparent, thorough investigation of Covid-19’s origin

#78

Post by raphlinus »

brippalcharrid wrote: post #65
raphlinus wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is bullshit and real virologists are angry it's getting so much attention: https://twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/13462321954305105... You may or may not have noticed, but there are some real problems we should be thinking about, including the very real probability that the B.1.1.7 variant is going to be much harder to suppress, and how to get our vaccination program on track. Instead we end up talki…

I'm curious as to why the arrival of developments like a new variant would make it appropriate to halt investigations into the original issue (like where can we find a physical sample of RaTG13, and why wasn't its sequence published until the beginning of last year?).

I don't think we should halt investigations. But the Baker article is not a serious investigation, it's a piece of pop-sci that is quite careless about scientific details. It is not helpful to those trying to understand the truth, but it might be an entertaining read or useful for other purposes.
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