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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

#591

Post by ggggtez »

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…

I'll not conclude anything, but I will say that engineering a virus is an order of magnitude easier than a vaccine.

It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.

Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).

Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.

To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.

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

#593

Post by rssoconnor »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #575
nradov wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative hypothesis is that a human was infected near the bat caves, then traveled to Wuhan and spread it to other humans and animals at the seafood market. There's no specific evidence for that, but we can't rule it out either.

Roll a dice representing all the locations of possible human bat interactions. How many of those land next to research labs that study this.

That's not the correct calculation because you've selected the research lab hypothesis post-facto. The correct calculation is to roll a dice representing all the locations of possible human bat interactions and see how many of those land next to some landmark that you can form some sort of conspiracy about.

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

#594

Post by sparrc »

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…

Flagged for misinformation. There definitely was an uptick in deaths and pneumonia. Scans of patient's lungs showed new symptoms not normally associated with pneumonia. This happened over the course of a few months and is what tipped off doctors in Wuhan that there was something new spreading.

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

#595

Post by rhodozelia »

tkinom wrote: post #580
mensetmanusman wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will never know the truth to the extent that China would admit this. It’s obvious in hindsight that what you say is likely true, but there is no feasible political route for the CCP to take blame, as their lives would be at stake due to unrest.

WHO should sequence all the Virus DNAs from that lab in 2015-2019 compare that with all the Covid sequences.

I can’t find the link but the virus they took from sick miners to study and what is now called covid-19 were 95-99% the same. A fellow did their masters thesis on it in 2016 or so

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

#596

Post by minblaster »

ch4s3 wrote: post #37
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…

I don't really have a stake in this, and no real idea how plausible the lab accident theory is. That said, don't you think that the location of a lab like that would be highly correlated with the location of dangerous natural viral reservoir? Or put another way, if you wanted to study zoonotic viruses, wouldn't you put your lab in a place like that?

If I wanted to study zoonotic viruses, I would put labs in places filled with universities or government agencies focused on disease, like Boston, Atlanta, Maryland.

Tell me about that lab in the Congo again.

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

#597

Post by ggggtez »

Aeolun wrote: post #577
DrJaws wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

an immediate immunization of your population would drive to a raise of suspicion and if someone found china guilty of that, would mean a world war against them.

Given how many people died of the virus VS how many would die in a world war that seems like a highly illogical course of action.

By that sort of reasoning, when a nation rolls tanks into your borders, you should just let them do it because more people would die if you fight back.

If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.

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

#598

Post by ajross »

gregwebs wrote: post #397

This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1] This article points out that a lab outbreak could…

There is no requirement that bats be transported to Wuhan. It's close to a known bat virus, and that's all we know. There are local bats in Wuhan, needless to say. Other species can easily be involved. The truth is that there is nothing particularly surprising about the way this virus evolved. Fundamentally this is a pandemic like any other. They happen in some species or another every year.

And that, more than anything else, is why we should be suspicious of "exotic" theories like human intervention. It's an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary proof. You seem to be arguing the opposite, when Occam is clear that we should be betting on natural evolution.

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

#599

Post by temp8964 »

dang wrote: post #470
temp8964 wrote: post #140

Wow. Why every comment questioned your argument is downvoted or even dead? > is-ought 34 minutes ago [dead] [–] > Can you link to something that proves this is the criteria used for lab placement? How is this even dead? It's only asking for a reference.

That comment was killed by software, similarly to how comments by banned accounts are killed. It was later vouched for by other users, which unkilled it. Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents. They never go anywhere interesting, and people invariably just imagine scenarios that confirm whatever they already believe and get even more upset about it. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycomb…

> Please don't take HN threads on these lame meta tangents.

I genuinely don't understand what you are talking about.

Now am I being offensive or breaking some rules I am not aware of?

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

#600

Post by codezero »

dillondoyle wrote: post #548
lamontcg wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest difference between all of those and this virus is that those were leaks of already-known viruses. SARS-CoV-2 wasn't known to exist before 2019 and there's no known precursor virus. There's a somewhat closely related virus that infected the miners in Yunnan but it was only 96% similar. There's nothing at all in this article on how SARS-CoV-2 was discovered or created. The problem I have is that China isn't…

CCP would also not release serology from blood banks and other blood from before dec which from what I understand would be a gold mine showing earlier spread. Which wouldn't that be in China's interest? I don't get why the 'cover up' (maybe i'm too biased with that term, utter lack of cooperation) beyond just the top down controlling nature of the CCP. Their actions don't lend us any trust so we do have to ask why..…

I’ve come to terms in understanding China’s actions by this assumption, which is made up by me, but seems true enough and maybe even true for most nation states when pushed against a wall:

They are acting without any concern for the outside world - not for how they are perceived, not for any consequences. They are acting with pure self-determination. This works because they know they can be self sufficient and have a long term plan to get there.

Controlling the information/narrative domestically is the only variable they need to manipulate that matters. So as an outsider, it all seems quite inexplicable, but if you see it as a way to achieve long term political and infrastructure goals while maintaining social harmony locally - most of their actions make sense, even if they may not be morally justifiable to some/many/all people in some/many/all situations :)

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