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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

#701

Post by refenestrator »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #637
agumonkey wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be pride over shame of incompetence maybe ? the wuhan labs are said to be lacking in standard safety biohazard practices.. so investigating may reveal that.

You gotta remember the culture, and that everything in China is political. You can't just say "oops" and learn the lessons. Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.

That's not a cultural thing, it's a universal human/organizational thing.

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

#703

Post by acdha »

wuwuno wrote: post #691
aeturnum wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Early on there was not a spike in cases, so that would not have sparked an interest. My understanding on this was that doctors local to Wuhan noticed a surprising and sudden uptick in pneumonia that did not respond to antibiotics. The Chinese government managed this badly[1]. Your timeline doesn't reflect how things happened at the time - there was a "slowly" (over two months?) growing problem in Wuhan that locals…

Not in November when the Chinese first discovered the virus.

You’re repeating this claim as if it’s well established - do you have a citation?

There are some indications that it might have been spreading possibly as early as September but the coverage I’ve seen was preliminary and researchers were cautious about concluding anything without more comprehensive tests to rule out things like cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses. The generally accepted patient 0 for the outbreak must have been infected in November to be symptomatic in early December but I haven’t seen any credible claims that anyone in China had identified this as a new disease until late December.

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

#704

Post by thewileyone »

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…

July 2019 - USAMRIID Fort Detrick shuts down due to a virus leak.

August 2019 - "Vape flu" appears in the US.

October 2019 - World Military Games in Wuhan, 300 US military men and women attend.

November 2019 - SAR-COV2 appears in Wuhan.

Let's not discount this sequence of events as well.

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

#705

Post by guram11 »

LdSGSgvupDV wrote: post #654
tkinom wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is no difference between WHO and China. For this problem, I don't think WHO would give any help. We would never know the true. IMHO, we shouldn't dismiss the possibility of leak, but sadly we could only dismiss it.

just a year ago on HN, we cannot openly speculate or discuss the viruses origins without first getting a barrage of downvotes, today it seems the tides are changing, it's not just WHO integrity or credibility is at stake, our entire future is

imagine another lab-virus just as contagious but one with higher infant mortality, we'd be extinct!!

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

#706

Post by acdha »

refenestrator wrote: post #701
marcus_holmes wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta remember the culture, and that everything in China is political. You can't just say "oops" and learn the lessons. Any investigations will have the goal not of finding the truth, but of minimising damage to the political powers that control it.

That's not a cultural thing, it's a universal human/organizational thing.

It’s certainly widespread but the cultural component is important to how strong the reaction is. China certainly isn’t alone in having it but the political stakes are a powerful amplifier.

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

#707

Post by abacadaba »

andreilys wrote: post #560
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…

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).

Also doesn't necessarily have to be that, maybe the guy who went in the cave to collect samples got sick on the way home. Or maybe some guy harvesting guano for his farm got sick on the way home. The only thing we know for sure is we'll probably never know, and also that the CCP is sketchy

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

#708

Post by freeflight »

andai wrote: post #670
ajross wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anyth…

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute [Wuhan Institute of Virology] published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12] https://en.wikipedia.o…

One of the sources for that part is: "A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence" [0]

The other source is a nature news article [1] which has by now following disclaimer:

> Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

It also states at the end:

> Without the experiments, says Baric, the SHC014 virus would still be seen as not a threat. Previously, scientists had believed, on the basis of molecular modelling and other studies, that it should not be able to infect human cells. The latest work shows that the virus has already overcome critical barriers, such as being able to latch onto human receptors and efficiently infect human airway cells, he says. “I don't think you can ignore that.” He plans to do further studies with the virus in non-human primates, which may yield data more relevant to humans.

So it might just as well be that these experiments warned us about that potential, and now that it actually happened, some people interpret the original warning as the cause.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

[1] https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat...

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

#709

Post by godmode2019 »

jmspring wrote: post #696
godmode2019 wrote: post #694

The cause of this virus while concerning. Is nothing to the hysteria created from this virus, remember how this virus was branded at the start. Basically brave yourself for death, a interesting study is to look at news articles over time. Its an example of bait and switch. This virus is not something that should have gained this much attention. A bayesian inference shows that death when looking at a age stratificatio…

Did your modeling take into account impacts on life due to lingering health issues for those that became seriously ill but did not die?

This was not known in march 2020, so no.

How can one even quantity that information?

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

#710

Post by kiawe_fire »

I look forward to seeing this article being retracted and taken offline, banned from being posted on social media, the author fired, and seeing people "cancelled" for sharing this article anywhere.

You know... as happened only a few months earlier to people who wrote similar articles and discussed similar theories with very similar hypotheses, but who were NOT writing for a certain publication of a certain leaning.

I also look forward to being down voted and told why "it's totally different now".

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