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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

#811

Post by mathw »

twelve40 wrote: post #790
TimJRobinson wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia, NZ and many countries in Asia did just fine. You just need a government that has its shit together and a populace that complies with the government. When you're missing one or both of those elements of course you're going to have problems with a pandemic.

So both China's government and 1.4B populace have their shit together, fully solved at ~0 infections pre-vaccine for one full year now, but the US, the EU, the newly non-EU UK, and (to a lesser extent) Japan all failed miserably?

It's not so much about having their shit together as having a terrifying autocratic government of the kind the UK government are still pretending (unconvincingly) they don't dream of emulating.

Also there may well be areas of China where the virus never reached. I gather internal travel isn't massively widespread, and the severity of the lockdowns they imposed exceeded anything seen in the US or UK.

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

#812

Post by La1n »

f430 wrote: post #435

I recall many people calling the Wuhan lab leak theory as conspiracy on HN. They were adamant that it came from bats. Interestingly enough, those accounts were all brand new accounts and some haven't been active on HN for several months all of sudden started coming out of the wood works.

If you want to call people shills, at least gives some evidence.

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

#813

Post by Pyramus »

twelve40 wrote: post #790
TimJRobinson wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia, NZ and many countries in Asia did just fine. You just need a government that has its shit together and a populace that complies with the government. When you're missing one or both of those elements of course you're going to have problems with a pandemic.

So both China's government and 1.4B populace have their shit together, fully solved at ~0 infections pre-vaccine for one full year now, but the US, the EU, the newly non-EU UK, and (to a lesser extent) Japan all failed miserably?

There is no silver bullet here - China is not exactly your friendly democracy.

Also beware that there are reports of China having started vaccinations long before safety and efficacy results.

The flipside of exponential growth is exponential fall: In the best case if you can eliminate all social contact for 5-14 days the virus is essentially gone. But very few Western democracies are able to agree on super strict lockdowns, and if they do, they need their neighbouring countries to follow.

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

#814

Post by SkyMarshal »

TrispusAttucks wrote: post #739
SkyMarshal wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been my impression too fwiw. There's now a large segment of people who are primed to immediately accept the conspiracy theory over the Hanlon's Razor principle: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity (or accident)".

Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as con…

Yup, though to nitpick, Occam's Razor actually says that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely the correct one. Subtle but important difference. Otherwise, /agree, especially with the media being confused.

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

#816

Post by ganafagol »

anothernewdude wrote: post #798
Izkata wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I saw was the opposite: proponents of "came from a lab" were generally clear about distinguishing whether they meant "escape" or "release", while anyone trying to discredit them were the ones conflating the two - by starting with the ambiguous phrase "came from a lab", ignoring the rest of the argument, and then debunking "created + deliberate release".

Some of the debunking relied on the analysis showing that it wasn't the result of Gain of Function research. Whereas an accident could certainly be a release of a natural sample they were originally working on.

The original article that our thread here is about cites a Wuhan researchers relief that the wild virus is not genetically close to anythibg they had in their lab. That's a complete contrast to what you are speculating.

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

#817

Post by SiempreViernes »

tripletao wrote: post #697
SiempreViernes wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we do have statements from the WIV that none of their samples closely match the earliest SARS-CoV-2, but we can just assume they are just outright lying, right? So, except for the fact that you must believe WIV did all these experiments in total secrecy (so that nobody outside heard of it while visiting, etc) and now won't admit to having done them, it's not a conspiracy theory.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume that they're lying, but neither is it reasonable to assume that they're telling the truth. When a lot is at stake, we don't usually take people at their word--financial statements are audited, nuclear facilities are visited by international inspectors, and so on. I don't see why this should be different, but the Chinese government has continuously obstructed any such attempt. A…

Any evidence they have been misleading in their responses to direct questions about their samples would be a start.

And you are making a claim about them lying, this comes unavoidably from saying that the VIW is the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as the VIW themselves are publicly claiming they have nothing closer than RaTG13.

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

#818

Post by FabHK »

cameldrv wrote: post #741
TrispusAttucks wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. We could also invoke Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. A coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan China miles away from a Virology Lab that studies coronavirus and has in the past exercised gain of function research on cornoviruses specifically with novel lung ACE2 bind may have had a lab accident and a live virus broke out if the lab. The problem is the media labeling common sense as con…

Exactly. If there were an Anthrax outbreak in Ft. Detrick, MD, everyone would be immediately assuming the lab was involved. Wuhan is the Ft. Detrick of Coronaviruses.

I wrote this on 2020-01-24 (when that speculation was fairly new), and wonder why that sort of simple statistical argument has rarely been made explicit:

It certainly is an interesting coincidence that the only lab in China that can deal with it happens to be in Wuhan. The question is, how big of a coincidence. If the disease hit a random person randomly uniformly anywhere in China, the probability that it would have happened in Wuhan is a bit less than 1% (as there are about 10+m people in Wuhan, and 1400+m people in China).

If you think it might have struck randomly any city above a million people in China uniformly, it’s also roundabout 1% (as there are about 100 of those).

So this is by no means proof that something fishy happened, but it is significant enough to warrant investigation.

If you assume that this could only have happened in a city with, say, more than 5m people, Wuhan is one of about 15 to 20 of those (so we're just above the "usual" 5% significance threshold).

Still, an independent investigation of that lab seems warranted. Of course it’s China, so unlikely to happen...

(I must say that I think the comment has stood the test of time, so far.)

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

#819

Post by j4yav »

bitreality wrote: post #766
ethbr0 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a liar a question, and they lie, then the strongest conclusion isn't that you asked the right question -- it's that they're a liar. China stonewalls pretty much every attempt by the international community to interfere with their internal control. So this is more "business as usual" than "Clouseau found the smoking gun."

The smoking gun is that labs in Wuhan were studying different coronaviruses in bats at the time the virus emerged. One of those labs was right near the seafood market which had one of the first documented outbreaks. It's all circumstantial evidence of course, but that's really all you're going to get with a country like China. We can be damn well sure that they would never admit to the virus originating from a lab le…

Can a smoking gun really be circumstantial?

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

#820

Post by yosito »

mrfusion wrote: post #384
cowmoo728 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

COVID-19 is one of the few serious diseases that can transmit when the carrier is asymptomatic. That could be a credible reason why a potential lab leak went unnoticed for long enough to begin uncontrolled community spread.

CNN sold us on asymptomatic spread but it’s actually highly unlikely: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

I've seen this study shared around anti-vaxer groups trying to claim that asymptomatic spread is unlikely. But this study does not prove that at all. They screened 10 million people with no symptoms, and found 300 asymptomatic cases. Then they re-screened 1200 contacts of those cases and didn't find any more cases that they missed. This doesn't prove that asymptomatic spread is unlikely. It proves that the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 when they did the screening was very low, and that 100% of the cases they found were asymptomatic. I'd be careful to draw conclusions from just one Chinese study, but if anything, this study suggests the opposite of what you're claiming.
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