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For anyone who wants to set their Bayesian priors to estimate the probability of a lab leak I recommend this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident... For example, the SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV-1) escaped from the lab twice, both in 2003 and 2004.
Regardless of its origin, what I cannot possibly figure out is why China didn't close its own borders while they were putting travel restrictions within.
1. Warn the world, lock your borders down, suffer economic damage whilst the rest of the world will prevent your citizens from entering their countries and can prepare for a proper response. Experience a setback on the stage of geopolitics and a loss of soft power.
2. Don't warn the world, suppress free flow of information, impose internal travel bans to stop the virus from spreading within your country, let your citizens carry the virus to the rest of the world, be the party with asymmetrical information advantage, exploit the situation to further strengthen your position on the global chessboard of geopolitics and expand your soft power.
What people in the West tend to forget is that Chinese strategic thinking is older than most Western civilisations. Chinese rulers study Chinese philosophy deeply, whereas Western rulers have little philosophical education. Chinese rulers think fundamentally different from Western rulers and have asymmetrical information advantage in politics as well: hardly anyone in the West really understands Chinese philosophy as it requires you to learn the language to grasp it fully; but it is easy to understand what motivates Western politics.
This situation reminds me of one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems.
Disturb the water and catch a fish (渾水摸魚／混水摸魚)
Create confusion and exploit it to further one's own goals.
- https://archive.vn/TG8zN#selection-999.29-999.84
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/business/media/coronaviru...
- https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-conspiracy-theories/
- https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/483354-sen-cotton-repeat...
- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/republican-senat...
- https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/politics/tom-cotton-coronavir...
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tom-cotton-coronavirus-china_...
- https://www.factcheck.org/2020/02/baseless-conspiracy-theori...
https://project-evidence.github.io/ I found this to be an extremely engaging read and compelling story. TLDR; The likelihood of it being lab related is high. The likelihood of it being directly malicious low. My Take form reading it: The lab in question needed to collect bats for research. A person who collected the bats did so with insufficient safety and is likely patient 0.
I agree that the leak was likely accidental. That said, I think you gloss over the fact that Gain of Function Research (artificial selection) was certainly taking place inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that US intelligence has concluded that the WIV was engaging in classified research for the Chinese military, unbeknownst to the rest of the world. So, its not quite as simple as a collection mistake.
Here is a direct link to some gain of function research being done at the lab for anyone interested: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2258702/
Relevant line in abstract:
> In this study, we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are indeed misunderstanding the point. Smallpox is also naturally originating virus. That doesn't prohibit it from leaking from a lab.
The author is irresponsibility propagating a conspiracy theory and elevating its status in the public’s mind. I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7
Make no mistake, I am super well aware that I lack all the grounding to understand the explanation.
But can you point me in the right direction? The context surrounding what you are saying must be learnable. At least to some level.
That we’re finally seeing some mainstream discussion around this hypothesis should not change the scary fact that months ago governments, scientists and media happily and immediately rejected it as a xenophobic conspiracy theory. The messaging and subsequent ease at which public opinion was influenced should make everyone pause and think hard about other ways they might be being manipulated.
I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about the virus since February, but of course how could my interpretation be trustworthy? I'm no expert, or anything. If something I read in a journal article contradicted something on the news, the latter always seemed to "win".
After all that, now that the lab thing is on the mainstream news, I'm afraid to even bring it up with my friends. They can figure it out for themselves.
Pretty incredible how far the US media will go to deflect attention from how bad the US response to the pandemic was to China. "Let me be clear: Labs in Wuhan might not have played any role in the origin of the pandemic. But a year later, no source has been found, and the world deserves a thorough, unbiased investigation of all plausible theories that is conducted without fear or favor." Okay. So basically this autho…
For one people actually believe Chinese's numbers, something no Chinese national will ever do.
China is a totalitarian country, they have the monopoly of the press. That means official numbers are not real numbers because if you go against the official numbers you just dissapear. You can not compare numbers given in a free press country against numbers being given by a totalitarian country.
That happened for decades with Soviet Russia, while Lenin and Stalin made tens of millions of people die of starvation, their official numbers were fantastic. They even exported grain.
There is no evidence because China made impossible for scientists to study the origin of COVID for almost a year. They closed their laboratories and removed all possible evidence with bleach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes diplomacy means you smile when you don't want to smile. WHO has to play politics until we get this virus under control (ie, vaccines distributed worldwide). If WHO blames China now, in the thick of things, it would damage the world's ability to further study the origins of the virus and the results of Chinese research. Chinese vaccines are being used and studied in many countries worldwide and that is a goo…
I don't understand why WHO is selling it's creditiblity in trade for politics. What is there to gain? Perhaps I am too short sighted but I cannot believe that this is ever the right compromise to take. I also don't understand why they even had the slighest faith in a reliable investigation. After all these months of pushing back on researching accessing the site, they still bowed to their whims. How does this help th…
The 1936 Olympic Summer Games are a good starting point in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is irresponsibility propagating a conspiracy theory and elevating its status in the public’s mind. I’m a bioscientist. It’s frustrating to respond with evidence and in good faith, and be downvoted by those who simply disagree. But sadly it appears that the loudest voice prevails over reason. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00599-7
Could you explain why evidence that the virus evolved naturally contradicts the lab-leak theory? I'm all ears and waiting to hear the reasoning. As others have pointed out, lab-leak does not imply artificially developed. > I’m a bioscientist. And I'm a Bayesian analyst. Surely your position is that it is a coincidence that: - the virus appeared to originate in Wuhan - genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% id…
There are a lot of bats in Wuhan. There are a lot of bats carrying coronaviruses. Coronaviruses have triggered past epidemics. Ergo, there’s an institute for virology in Wuhan.
Listen starting at 6:30 in the podcast I posted from Nature. There is indeed strong correlation but no causal relationship established.
Regardless of its origin, what I cannot possibly figure out is why China didn't close its own borders while they were putting travel restrictions within.