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Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

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Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#551

Post by ricksunny »

ricksunny wrote: post #507
musicale wrote: post #445

Most of the media coverage and consensus, from the Washington Post to Nature, seems to be that: - the lab escape theory has been thoroughly debunked by science - the WHO investigation put the final nails in the coffin of this theory - therefore, lab escape continues to be a fringe conspiracy theory at best - coverage of the lab escape theory is politically motivated rather than scientifically motivated - continued co…

Not sure which WaPo articles you're reading - - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/05/coronavir... I'll give you that Nature is steadfastly on the zoonotic side of things. But even Nature News journo has retweeted the USAtoday article: https://twitter.com/NidhiSubs/status/1374002441780391940?s=2...

There's an extensive list of lab-considering origin articles as curated at US Right to Know (recommend starting under Most Recent Articles):

https://usrtk.org/biohazards/origins-of-sars-cov-2-risks-of-...

As you can see, besides WaPo, WSJ editorials & op-eds also figure prominently among those calling for investigation inclusive of lab-associated pathways. New York Magazine, Politico.

Then you can see Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists right in there.

Even an nytimes piece that didn't make that list: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/health/covid-virus-origin...

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#552

Post by dillondoyle »

watertom wrote: post #452

A lot of smart people in this forum. Someone please explain to me how the Chinese were able to identify that that had a new virus. I’ve done pandemic drills with homeland security. They said they way you know you’ve got a new virus floating around is either new symptoms; significantly more “flu like” cases; significantly more cases escalating to pneumonia; increased deaths. Covid presents like the flu, so much so you…

So many great replies answer/correct some of these assumptions.

Want to add that I highly recommend the frontline doc it has so much great reporting that gives the background needed here.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/chinas-covid-secrets...

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#553

Post by spurgu »

snicksnak wrote: post #503
ckardat123 wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the reason that people calling COVID the "China virus" are accused of racism is that there is really no reason to use that term for the virus outside of trying to offend others.

Can we call it the chinese variant then? Because we do that with the new mutations: the brazilian variant, british variant, south african variant

In that context "the original Chinese variant" certainly makes sense.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#554

Post by totalZero »

mrob wrote: post #352
dvt wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In ten to twenty years, China could easily rival the US Navy. People said this 20 years ago. We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK), and I'm quite bearish on the Party going forward. Jinping is 67, and I expect to see a major power struggle which will leave the Chinese Communist Party crippled when he dies.

>We've already started to see the CCP losing ground (see HK) How is violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration and getting away with it "losing ground"? The Hong Kong protests failed and Hongkongers now have less freedom than before.

Foreign investment in HK was down 34.4% in 2019 versus the prior year [0]. Apart from the immediate ramifications of a year of protests, Beijing's effort to clamp down on HK was an economic self-own that opens the floodgates for Western hawkishness on Taiwan, Xinjiang, and every other area where China's expansionism overlaps with its economic ambitions. Beijing could have allowed HK to remain as it was, using it to entice the West. Instead, their authoritarian tack has reminded the frog to check the temperature of its bath.

I don't think they got away with much. Even if foreign investment rebounds in HK, Western complacency toward China will not find its voice again for many decades, and in that time, every Chinese treaty negotiation will be viewed as a bad-faith caricature of real diplomacy.

[0] https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/wir2020_en...

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#555

Post by arcticfox »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #508
kittiepryde wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is about collecting data, verifying, collecting more, in a repeating never ending cycle. Stopping science (especially in areas of active present day research) in the belief that we know and are done with it, just isn't sound logic. Viruses are not yet solved.

I am not arguing to stop science, I don't see the benefit we're hoping to get out of aggressively researching various theories about how exactly the 2019 covid virus spread to humans.

Why would we not "aggressively" research it? What if we could have stopped it by catching it early?

Knowing whether it was a lab leak or zoonotic would be a massive hint in the direction to invest in. N=1, but it's a big 1 that would have massive public support.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#556

Post by foxhop »

Nav_Panel wrote: post #236
asmint3 wrote: post #151

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.

It's amazing how much ridicule I took for seriously suggesting this theory last year. My friends twisted and exaggerated the extent of my claims (implying I thought it was an intentional action on China's part, or an engineered virus, and not a result of mundane research + accidental containment failure), and called me a crazy conspiracy theorist. I had been reading every journal article I could get my hands on about…

Same happened to me. Now I'm searching for a new tribe of people who think critically.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#557

Post by IgorPartola »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #539
IgorPartola wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to…

> Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude. "Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false. Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.

I know my argument is not solid at all. But you seeing a headline that is demonstrably not what we are even talking about does not convince me. If it took two days to create a cure and manufacture a billion doses we would be all fine now. Clearly nobody had a leg up on anyone in the race to a vaccine otherwise someone would have come out with “we have the vaccine and all the doses ready to go” in mid 2020.

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#558

Post by tripletao »

Ancapistani wrote: post #24
crx07 wrote: post #21

This has honestly been my unbiased opinion since essentially day 1. I believe that the release was almost certainly a complete accident, but there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. The denialists, including the WHO and CDC and everyone else, need to get real and own up to what happened and figure ou…

> there's just no realistic chance a novel virus coincidentally originates in the same isolated place as a lab that specializes in that exact same type of virus. I think that it is at least somewhat likely that it was the result of the lab's activities, but your assertion here has a huge dose of selection bias. If the virology labs studying coronaviruses were placed randomly around the world, you'd be correct - but t…

People keep saying this, but it's not true; SARS-like viruses haven't been found in nature near Wuhan. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#559

Post by cassalian »

danudey wrote: post #347
zozin wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, just maybe you can care about two things at the same time? Maybe, just maybe, a Wuhan lab leak was concealed by the Chinese gov't to save face, thus shrinking the amount of time we had to respond fast in order to save lives?

Western nations had plenty of time to react, relatively speaking. The US was hit especially hard, though, by policies which dismantled the government's ability to handle this sort of event, the discarding of a practiced playbook for responding to this sort of event, and government and right-wing lies and conspiracy theories. Given that the US government's response was basically to do nothing until it was too late, an…

The EU was hit especially hard too, is that somehow the US's right-wing's fault too? Maybe the fact that the virus is incredibly contagious is at fault for there being a global pandemic...?

Re: Why the Wuhan lab leak theory shouldn't be dismissed

#560

Post by andreilys »

IgorPartola wrote: post #516
strogonoff wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An eerily prescient quote from a paper[0] published in 2015, two of the authors of which are with Wuhan Institute of Virology: > Understanding the bat origin of human coronaviruses is helpful for the prediction and prevention of another pandemic emergence in the future. China has clearly contributed valuable research into bat coronaviruses. They had all the motivation to look into these after the first deadly SARS. I…

My naive reasoning on why China didn’t create COVID-19 with the intention of using it is that I suspect (unburdened by education or the thought process) that engineering a virus is as difficult as coming up with a vaccine or treatment. If you are developing some kind of super virus to shut down the world economy and then immunize your own people to take advantage of the situation, wouldn’t you have the cure ready to…

It's not about creating a virus from scratch, but taking an existing virus and performing gain-of-function research to select for certain things (like transmissibility).
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