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The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

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Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#381

Post by jcims »

roenxi wrote: post #360
unanswered wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does this justify moral superiority to those of us who understood from the beginning that the lab hypothesis was the most likely? Or was that not true until you decided it was true?

People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future. A body wandering around saying "I was right" is likely to get ignored, because people assume they were unreasonable and lucky, and therefore unlikely to be a good source of information in the future. Besides, it doesn't really matter. Lab accidents were going to happen and are going to happen re…

>People aren't interested in whether you were right or not, what matters is the probability you will be right in the future.

All of this is speculative re: COVID right now, but in the general case how would (royal) you know the probability of someone being right in the future if you don't investigate why they were right in the first place? Or, maybe more importantly why you were wrong?

For example, if Fox News and Alex Jones come out in 4 hours after the first outbreak screaming "IT ESCAPED FROM A LAB IN WUHAN!!!", does that in any way influence what the scientific and medical communities are likely to explore? If you're directing resources for the WHO and you're 50/50 thinking of sending investigators to the lab or the wet markets, does this bias your decision at all?

My guess is yes.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#382

Post by allturtles »

thu2111 wrote: post #209
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #75

Earlier 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. 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 ne…

It's not poorly written, it's a rhetorical use of irony. Like Mark Antony repeatedly asserting that Brutus and Cassius are "honorable men" as he describes how they brutally and unjustly murdered Caesar.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#383

Post by flavius29663 »

xjlin0 wrote: post #352
zby wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you misrepresented the linked paper - as it was clearly about checking some cross-immunity and not recombining genes - but then I found out deeper in the abstract: """ Since SHC014 could not be success fully isolated, a recombinant virus (rWIV1-SHC014S) was constructed based on the WIV1 backbone with the replacement of SHC014S gene, as described previously (Zengetal.,2016). The S sequence of SHC014 was ampl…

Recombination virus is commonly made everywhere, including US or China. Researchers made it mostly for getting genes for later use, antibody/antigen analysis in this case. Using virus/BAC is a very common lab technique and is very different from "intentionally making virus as a weapon to kill human". You can reconfirm with any of your wet-lab biotech majored friends. Please run an sequence analysis between rWIV1-SHC0…

you are right, except sars-cov-2 happened to appear 500 meters away from said lab...

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#384

Post by yonaguska »

zpeti wrote: post #356
gonehome wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me about it is not only did it take a long time for the “truth to win”, but mainstream media orgs actively suppressed it because of tribal stupidity. It was used as an example of “fake news”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-... > “ Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republ…

Amazingly succinct post. However I think the CCP are overplaying their hand now. They are doing too much too fast too aggressively. Hong kong, NBA, now going after Australia. It's going to backfire IMO. Especially if you start to think about non first world countries. What's india going to do once they're massive covid wave is over? Is it going to improve india-china relations? You are going to have 1bn people with a…

Unfortunately, I don't think it will backfire. Conspiracy theorists like to talk about heavy metals in the atmosphere being used to brainwash us, however, this past year has shown us it's way simpler than that.

If you just repeat the same thing over and over from different sources, people come to accept it as true. Whether they believe it or not doesn't matter, behavior is still dictated by what we're told, and no one wants to be the nail sticking out.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#385

Post by omgwtfbbq »

XorNot wrote: post #250
darkerside wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a false dichotomy between natural and manmade. What about a virus that naturally occurred in a bat cave, was studied in a lab, and escaped from the lab later? What if that virus mutated unintentionally while in the lab? And what if its mutation was encouraged by researchers in the lab? Occam's Razor, to me, suggests that it's more likely the virus came from the nearby infectious disease lab than from the wet mar…

Why couldn't it have been transported into the city on trucks and vehicles coming from sampling sites? Or hitchhiked in bat guano on a worker's boot who visited the wet market? You've generated 2 possible outcomes and gone "yes these are the only possibilities". But why? There was a whole train of transportation bringing things into the city for the lab. Of course, if it was from that timeline, then the whole "lab es…

>Why couldn't it have been transported into the city on trucks and vehicles coming from sampling sites? Or hitchhiked in bat guano on a worker's boot who visited the wet market?

So in answer to occams razor you construct convoluted transmission scenarios?

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#386

Post by gdubs »

throwaway210222 wrote: post #366
thepasswordis wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even amateur OSINT people in the US were making the (imo obvious) connection between WIV and what at that time was called the wuhan flu. What is the likelihood that a novel SARS virus happens to emerge in the same major metropolitan area that also happens to host a BSL4 lab, which happens to be in a couple try with a long history of labs leaking SARS viruses?

> What is the likelihood that a novel SARS virus happens to emerge in the same major metropolitan area that also happens to host a BSL4 lab, You have the causality the wrong way around. The lab is there [Wuhan] because that is where the coronaviruses reservoirs are.

Except it’s not, and the fact that it arose in Wuhan made the director of the lab herself incredibly concerned:

“Shi was surprised that the outbreak was local, she said: “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” The bat hiding places that she’d been visiting were, after all, as far away as Orlando, Florida, is from New York City. Could this new virus, she wondered, have come from her own laboratory? She checked her records and found no exact matches. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink for days.””

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-wo...

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#387

Post by tryonenow »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #379
Gatsky wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an entirely unsatisfactory investigation. Given the colossal incentive to absolve themselves of any responsibility, what possible value is there in asking the Chinese scientists questions and looking at what they give you? What would any rational entity do in this situation of causing a global pandemic?

Admit it and say sorry? Or at least say "it is regrettable".

That's not how things work in authoritarian states with cultures that strongly prioritize face.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#388

Post by fiftyfifty »

Bayesian_bro wrote: post #300

The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01A…

Neither scenario for how Sars-Cov-2 came to infect humans looks good for China, it's interesting that they are pushing one over the other.

On the one hand we have unsanitary food markets and the questionable production and sale of exotic animals for human consumption.

On the other extreme we have the potential escape of a genetically modified virus from a research lab.

Honestly I find the second scenario more reassuring, if it did escape from a lab then the Chinese and the international community can put measures in place to prevent it from happening again.

If the virus made the jump from a wild animal somewhere in China's exotic animal industry then what is the recourse? Can the Chinese Government clamp down on that industry enough to prevent it from happening again? Will the Chinese culturally be willing to give up consuming animals like bats and pangolins that are frequent reservoirs for coronaviruses?

I think the world should demand more openness from China on the matter and demand a plan to prevent another outbreak like this from happening again. The latest estimate is 7 million people dead world wide and trillions of dollars lost. Surely that should justify some hard lines drawn and the threat of economic sanctions if the world can't be given some kind of re-assurance that this won't happen again.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#389

Post by caffeine »

gonehome wrote: post #326
followtheplot wrote: post #294

"... proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence." "The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities." This is a fantastic article, but amazingly almost all of it is year-old news. Most of this was known in March 2020, and nearly all of it by the end of 2020. How does it take so long for the trut…

What bothers me about it is not only did it take a long time for the “truth to win”, but mainstream media orgs actively suppressed it because of tribal stupidity. It was used as an example of “fake news”: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/technology/biden-reality-... > “ Hoaxes, lies and collective delusions aren’t new, but the extent to which millions of Americans have embraced them may be. Thirty percent of Republ…

Wow, well said and well summarized.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#390

Post by caseysoftware »

I think the media successfully conflated four separate questions:

a) Did it form in nature or in a lab?

b) Did it become more communicable via nature or via the lab?

c) Did it make it to humans through nature (or wet market) or via the lab?

d) If it came from the lab was it on purpose or an accident?

as simply "OMG IT CAME FROM A LAB" and then claimed it's all a conspiracy theory.

The media as a whole shot themselves in the foot on this one and we'll all be worse off for it.

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