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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

#891

Post by School-Cotton »

twelve40 wrote: post #774
unishark wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conspiracy theorists are always going to weave conspiracy theories, though. That doesn't absolve the media or the rest of us from being the adults in the room.

But some things make no sense at all. The most populated country on the planet - a vast, vast population across the area almost as big as the US - has been inexplicably reporting almost zero infections since like March 10, 2020 (way before any vaccines) while the rest of the world (except small and isolated regions), the richest and presumably the most advanced societies still can't get their shit together, are still…

It took NYC, which is much richer than any part of China, 100 years to build the Second Avenue subway line, whereas China can build several new subway systems every decade.

Wealth doesn’t necessarily translate to organizational agility.

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

#892

Post by esja »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #883
esja wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proper investigation would not include Peter Daszak at all, due to his immense conflicts of interest on this topic, and his behaviour since the outbreak occurred.

The whole thing is a bureaucratic cya masterpiece. We deny the wuhan lab leak but, just in case, we also deny we had any means to actually investigate it

It certainly looks that way.

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

#893

Post by wayoutthere »

codezero wrote: post #600
dillondoyle wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is an oversimplification. Chinese culture places a lot of value on saving face — so low and mid-level bureaucrats will massage the numbers so as not to appear to be the weak link in the chain. Do this at every level of an enormous country and you can see how hard it is to even know the truth when the first instinct is to cover everything up, even if it’s a scandal that won’t be published outside China.

Of course, all this allows the media to disclaim the party’s responsibility for basically everything.

Also, yeah; they view China as a self-determined empire stretching back 5000 years. The Chinese generally view Americans as arrogant children and not that smart. I suggest any white person who doesn’t understand racism go to China — they don’t give a fuck that you’re white and in many places will actively disdain you. If you tried to date a Chinese woman outside the large coastal cities you’d likely be literally run out of town. They are reaching the point where they don’t really need us; their own internal consumption is overtaking their exports to the US.

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

#894

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

garmaine wrote: post #843
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they didn't. The ancestors of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 diverged decades ago. RaTG13 is not the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.

You have no way of knowing that it diverged decades ago. That's a guess based on the number of mutations. But as we've seen with COVID-19, these viruses have more of a punctuated equilibrium behavior around mutations. "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks. (And fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim. The strains are much more closely related than tha…

It's much more than just a "guess." Calling it a "guess" is trivializing quite well established evolutionary biology.

> "Decades" worth of mutations can happen in a single immune-compromised host in a matter of weeks.

SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating for a year now. The number of mutations it has undergone is a tiny fraction of the number of mutations separating RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2.

> fwiw I'd love a source for that "decades" claim.

A paper in Nature Microbiology estimates the most recent common ancestor of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 to be in the 1960s. The latest possible time of divergence is 2000.[1]

> RaTG13 is the closest virus found in the wild to SARS-CoV-2. Samples of it were shipped to the Wuhan lab, which does so-called "gain of function research"--AKA experimenting with artificially sped up mutation rates.

First of all, gain-of-function does not mean "artificially sped-up mutation rates." It normally refers to specific, targeted changes to the genome, done in order to test a particular hypothesis. What you're describing is a type of experiment never done before: passaging a virus thousands of times in order to generate a massively different virus. This would be an massively time- and labor-intensive experiment, with no apparent motivation.

Second of all, RaTG13 has never been isolated. It exists as fragments of RNA in a fecal swab. Its genome has been reconstructed from sequences of RNA samples, but actually extracting a replicating virus from a fecal swab is a major undertaking. To date, the WIV has only isolated three SARS-related coronaviruses, all of them much closer to the original SARS than to SARS-CoV-2. Before 2020, nobody cared much about viruses that are 20% different from the original SARS. If you read papers from the WIV before 2020, they're all about viruses like WIV-1, which is closely related to the original SARS.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4

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

#895

Post by scotty79 »

What evidencewould be sufficuent to disprove this theory?

And if no evidence is good enough is it really a theory?

How does it fit the detection of the virus in the material collected months before officual discovery in places far away from the place of official discovery?

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

#896

Post by Hoasi »

neolog wrote: post #576
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…

Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency.

> Don't sanction for the mistake, sanction for the nontransparency.

Sanction the CPC for non-transparency and their constant lies to their and the world's population. Demand liability.

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

#897

Post by mbg721 »

wayoutthere wrote: post #893
codezero wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is an oversimplification. Chinese culture places a lot of value on saving face — so low and mid-level bureaucrats will massage the numbers so as not to appear to be the weak link in the chain. Do this at every level of an enormous country and you can see how hard it is to even know the truth when the first instinct is to cover everything up, even if it’s a scandal that won’t be published outside China. O…

It doesn't take very many steps of face-saving to reach an absurd outcome--compare CYA culture in the US.

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

#898

Post by astura »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #112
0-_-0 wrote: post #4

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.

Lab 257 is an amazing book about germ research labs. It fascinated me both with how hard it is to contain diseases under ideal conditions (lab 257 was on an island miles from anything inhabited) and how poor of a job people who should have known better, the actual virologists and people with MDs, did at containing diseases they were researching. https://www.amazon.com/Lab-257-Disturbing-Governments-Labora... Warning:…

That book is a work of fiction. The summary on Amazon itself is incredibly laughable (Plum island is not "unmarked on most maps").

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

#899

Post by mandmandam »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #773
Nav_Panel wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What bothered me is when a few scientists came out and said the virus showed signs of human manufacturing I posted to a few forums like reddit askscience about how from a science perspective was there any validity or was this unfounded conspiracy and there was no discussion. Ive no axe to grind politically, simply think its interesting to explore and understand what indicators/benchmarks there would be etc. One of th…

I'll second this on both counts.

I've seen my supposedly smart and well-read friends dismiss the lab-leak theory out of hand; rejecting all discussion and labelling me with the right-wing conspiracist label despite the fact I'm heartily left-leaning.

And, I have a lot of experience with political posts on Reddit being "ninja-banned"; appearing in New but not in the main feed; disappearing even from new for an hour and then re-appearing, comments ninja-removed without trace, even from their OP's direct comment feed.

Poor Aaron Swartz :/

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

#900

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

acdha wrote: post #882
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't Li Wenliang's post that activated the Taiwanese response. It was the Chinese government's public alert on 30 December 2019 about a cluster of patients with "pneumonia of unknown etiology" that triggered the response.

That announcement came after top Taiwanese medical officials had seen those social media posts, realized how serious they looked, and started asking China about them. https://www.ft.com/content/2a70a02a-644a-11ea-a6cd-df28cc3c6... https://www.ocacnews.net/overseascommunity/article/article_s... > In the wee hours of Dec. 31, 2019, CDC deputy chief Lo Yi-chun could not sleep and was scrolling his phone when an online p…

> That announcement came after top Taiwanese medical officials had seen those social media posts, realized how serious they looked, and started asking China about them.

The first announcement from the Chinese government came on 30 December 2019, one day before the events described in your second article. ProMED-Mail sent out an alert on 30 December 2019,[1] and the next day, the outbreak was even reported on CCTV.[2] Social media posts gave additional information, but the existence of an outbreak of likely viral pneumonia was publicly declared before those posts, and people who follow emerging infectious diseases were following the story.

1. https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=6864153

2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-pneumonia-id...

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