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The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
201–210 of 578 posts
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the lab origin theory is flawed based on the scientific reasoning, not the meta analysis. I agree that the meta analysis is inconclusive as it is not emphasising the science enough. The feeling I get is China doesn't really want to talk about it because it encourages ideologically motivated people to attack China, and serious scientists are mostly not convinced that this is a lab escape and so don't feel th…
I find it hard to take seriously any “scientist” that dismisses an idea as a “conspiracy theory” (i.e. a concept developed by the CIA specifically to discredit political opponents) as opposed to using actual rational / scientific arguments. At best, it demonstrates intellectual laziness, at worst a political / ideological conviction, neither of which is a hallmark of a good scientist.
Conspiracy theories are as old as humanity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conspiracy_theories
What makes you think that they are a concept developed by the CIA?
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... Here is a paper that states that the furin cleavage site appears naturally in a number of viruses. I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science…
The natural origin hypothesis is also pushed for ideological reasons - at this level of meta analysis we are at a stalemate. The article was good at revealing that there is not just ideology - but also material interests involved and that the two prestigious letters that were so categorical in dismissing the lab escape hypothesis were quite a bit tainted by conflicts of interests.
My colleague, an evolutionary biologist's comment on this: the virus is unlikely to prevail if manually tweaked since evolution does such an amazing job that it's very unlikely it alone could dominate and infect large populations.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.
I'm not trying to quibble on the wording of your comment, but the thing is maybe you find it easy/obvious/whatever to combine those factors to explain this, but to me it's a fair bit of a jump. Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had know…
Swift response in China is easily predictable by their experience and dictatorship. Taiwan reacted similarly, taking the disease seriously, because of their prior experience with SARS.
The suppression of information and subsequent deflection, I find much more problematic. They can also be explained by China’s dictatorship and their aggressive PR management, but still... one of the easiest ways for China to dispel any “lab leak/release hypotheses” would be full transparency. So far they haven’t done that. But refusal to do so can again easily be explained by accidential lab leak / accident hypothesis, whereas the original parent was proposing that China had superior information in advance... again, possible, but not necessary to explain the current sequence of events.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.
I'm not trying to quibble on the wording of your comment, but the thing is maybe you find it easy/obvious/whatever to combine those factors to explain this, but to me it's a fair bit of a jump. Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had know…
China responded because they had already suffered from a previous outbreak of SARS.
They probably were aware the risks of a highly infectious disease and possibly had contingencies drawn up for this very thing.
The UK had planned for what would happen during a global outbreak and the Conservative government scrapped them and 140,000 people died.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I should have written “obviously” instead. Basically, no need to invent “non-obvious” factors like “China had prior knowledge of the virus”. It’s definitely possible, but you can explain China’s success vs Western failure without that “hidden” factor as well.
I'm not trying to quibble on the wording of your comment, but the thing is maybe you find it easy/obvious/whatever to combine those factors to explain this, but to me it's a fair bit of a jump. Here's one way to look at it: if we had asked "how will China respond?" back in the beginning, how well would you have been able to predict their response if you had known the virus was of zoonotic origin? What if you had know…
OP made the argument China acted more competently than the west, and that this is suspicious and supports the lab leak hypothesis. Another explanation is that the west simply acted incompetently, while China acted "normally". Unfortunately it's not conceivable to many westerners that their governments are hilariously incompetent. Unfortunately, because it precludes improvement.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's important to know and it's important not to know. Both paths have mostly negative outcomes. The best path is for it to have been natural, second best is accidental. Intentional is unfathomable and has unlimited downside. We should all hope that's not the case here.
I see very little incentive for China to release covid intentionally . What could they possibly have gained from that? Mind you, I'm becoming increasingly convinced it was an accidental lab leak due to negligence, so this isn't my attempt at defending China in any way.
>What could they possibly have gained from that?
Global power shifts to their favor by slowing down democratic economies, sacrificing parts of their own population and economy in the short term. As a collectivist dictatorship tracking every move of its population a pandemic is easier to handle.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... Here is a paper that states that the furin cleavage site appears naturally in a number of viruses. I looked into these lab origin theories for the furin cleavage site last year. The problem with it being a laboratory insertion was that although performing an insertion is relatively easy once you know what to insert, generally it’s beyond current science…
> generally it’s beyond current science to independently create mutations for a specific purpose. Labs are the places where people go to push the boundaries. If we go with lab-leak, it is extremely possible that they had figured something new out. They were doing something novel in there, because they were paid money to do novel things.
It's true that labs were pushing boundaries, the Wuhan lab as well. But every time they succeeded in doing something novel, they were celebrating it in the media.
If they really had been able to reach this major technological breakthrough, one would expect that they would have made this one public as well.
I would say that it's more likely that this was a natural mutation that got its chance to survive natural selection because of the lasting and intense contact with human researchers in the Wuhan lab. There are some media sources that show that researches didn't take too many precautions with avoiding this contact. E.g. there are pictures of researchers without wearing gloves and one that's even showing bites from bats.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing. And at any rate, the attempted smearing of anyone who points to problems in establishment thinking as a racist is trivial, completely expected of a certain segment of society and of no importance relative to the topic at hand. Wade's article not only builds an extremely stron…
> You're citing an article that literally has as its first sentence, "Nicholas Wade is not a racist". As citations go that's not very convincing. I'm not sure you read past the first sentence of that article, since the second sentence makes it clear that Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science." It's pretty clear the reviewer -- in Scientific American, which I beli…
I did but the article is very poorly written.
The explicit statement that Nicholas Wade is not a racist appears both as the first sentence - unquoted i.e. this is not reported speech but a statement by the article author - and in the abstract at the top, also not in quotes. But then it starts by mis-representing his argument by saying he "explains why white people are better because of their genes" and in the very next sentence admits that "to be fair" that's not actually what he said at all.
We are left deliberately confused about both what the author of the article and the author of the book actually think. For example you wrote:
Nicholas Wade is the one making the claim he's not racist. "It's not prejudice; it's science."
and you put that statement in quotes to imply that Wade is the one who said it, but in fact, it's the article author who wrote that statement, not Wade!
I don't fully understand where you see a racial tinge in the lab creation theory. The lab is in China but beyond that it has nothing to do with being Chinese. And as Wade and others document, the money came from US research agencies and GOF research is done in multiple countries, so again, I don't see any racial connection. If Wade was actually a racist I guess he'd not miss this golden opportunity to blame the apparently lax Chinese lab practices on their DNA, but he makes no such argument anywhere, not even about culture.
Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research. I could not care less about author's worldview and whether he eats babies for breakfast.
>I only care about one thing whether that virus came out as the result of aforementioned research Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists. If you can't actually understand the science, which is perfectly reasonable given that most of us are laymen, you can read scientific journalists, but then you need to acknowledge that you operate on trust, which would mean you need to take the authors…
Then you should read what scientists write, not science journalists
You can read both. In this case science journalists are both explaining the science (quite well, in this case) and also alledging bad behaviour by scientists, and if he's right (which again, seems to be the case given the evidence presented) then only reading what those very same scientists have written would leave you less well informed.