541–550 of 578 posts
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Wouldn't they have located the cave by now, and a load of bats infected with the virus.
There's a lot of bats, caves, and viruses. Virologists find new viruses all the time , why would you expect that they have surveyed enough that the fact that they haven't found a particular one is evidence it's not present?
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If there's a 50/50 chance there is an intruder in your house, wouldn't you act as if there was?
If it was 50% likely that people would break the speed limit when driving, should they be banned from driving? It's easy to make false equivalences all day long but it is of no benefit to anybody.
Speeding is common (difficult to prevent) and exhibits low downside risk. An intruder in the house is rare and carries an enormous downside risk. Which one is more analogous to the escape of a dangerous virus from a lab?
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It could have. There's irony in the tone of your response to a post that started with calling out a false dichotomy. There are many more possibilities and that was my point. On your latter point, I'll just say that the virus likely needed some time to mutate into a human infectious form, and most of what we're talking about is, where and how did that happen?
And yet the only possibilities you managed to generate were variants of "but it definitely somehow escaped from a lab". You're not taking a logical position, you're starting from one conclusion "it was a Chinese lab!" and iterating around that, for the sole reason that the only reason the lab is being considered was the usual suspects of conspiracy theory began pushing "Chinese bioweapon" from the outset (and we all…
Forgive my preference not to generate verbal diarrhea into the page for your reading pleasure. It should be simple to extrapolate many more possibilities from what I stated if someone were willing to put an ounce of thought into it. Which you already did.
Anyway, I presume you are reacting to my summation of comparing the wet market vs lab theories and stating that one, when expanded to include several closely related possibilities, seemed far more likely to me. I stand by my framing, which doesn't preclude that there is another third possible factor, or many more.
I'm not starting from any conclusion like that, and in fact, my whole post was saying that it was likely NOT a bioweapon even if there was a lab escape. Please stop imputing talking points you have heard elsewhere to my argument. It's actually quite rude.
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you are right, except sars-cov-2 happened to appear 500 meters away from said lab...
Maybe the reason the lab exists there is because wild coronaviruses appear in that region. Which ever way you frame it, it is correlation, not causation. Poor evidence at best.
Out of all the wet markets that serve that much population, the coronavirus just happened to appear at the market nearest to the lab studying coronaviruses. To have such a coincidence is like winning the lottery.
It's not evidence, sure, it's correlation at best. But this alone should make you investigate that lab much much better, it should be the first possible cause you research.
But looking at the lab first might be hard if you have a severe conflict of interest https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4119101
I am not saying this to "make China pay". After all, the US itself was sponsoring coronavirus research at that lab. But we should establish a worldwide safety standard in dealing with such research, and establish periodical inspections. Just like we do with Nuclear power plants, only better.
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He's literally not. I don't have the book, your other link is a podcast. And (this is the really important part) literally no one else, not even Breitbart or conservative link farms who would slurp this up like candy, is reporting that Rogin said it. So I choose to believe that you're just wrong about what he said. Again, Fauci covertly directing funds to an area of research that the medical community has recognized…
As claimed by Rogin, the medical research community is privately divided but largely unwilling to speak out publicly because they don’t want to be labeled conspiracy theorists, don’t want to be associated with supporting a position tangentially aligned with trump, and first and foremost don’t want to jeopardize their grants or careers. According to Rogin, Fauci did not so much covertly direct funds, but rather, quiet…
So there's a hidden truth that happens to confirm the priors of a bunch of highly-on-the-internet people, but without any evidence in public. And the fact that the evidence doesn't exist is being cited as an argument that it must exist because of asserted suppression.
Well, for sure someone's going to be labelled as a conspiracy theorist. Seriously: it doesn't surprise you that the same folks that were so into Q a few months back are suddenly all aflutter with this omg-Fauci-created-covid nonsense?
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Because Americans were helping to finance something, does not make them directly culpable. More importantly this is raw populism, not details. If there were conclusive evidence that mapped COVID to the lab ... I think literally Chinese people would be murdered the same day in violent outbreaks in Philippines, Malaysia and India for example. There would be anti-Chinese riots literally the world over, every Chinese bus…
> Because Americans were helping to finance something, does not make them directly culpable. Yes, and the same can surely be said of Chinese- we must consider whether to allow this kind of research in the future however A conclusive "reveal" is unlikely given the variety and saturation of information channels- and with respect although your description of the risks is overstated imo the level of detail you go into ma…
No - if a Chinese lab/company let the virus out, it's not really comparable to America's involvement. It would be 'mostly that agency's fault', objectively speaking.
Internationally, people would see it as 'China' not the specific agency.
If we did in fact find that this is a 'Wuhan Lab' issue - it would be a seminal geopolitical event - on par with the dropping of Nuclear Weapons.
It would be a major global realignment in so many areas, even without the populism.
The issues around populism are not a 'threat' it's a 'concern'.
3 Million people have died from this, there are grieving families all around the world - there are 100's of millions unemployed - and they will be told 'It's China's fault' - what do you think is going to happen? Since we're already seeing light anti Asian sentiment around the world, what will happen when we are told that 'China' is culpable?
On the day after 9/11 the only flights out of the US allowed were those back to Saudi Arabia. G. Bush basically told the Saudi Embassy and many student nationals etc. to 'get everyone out in 24 hours' for fear of populist reprisals.
BLM protests broke out, billions in damage and several dead over a police shooting ... and that's in the US.
So I don't think it's that much of a stretch to say it would be dangerous to be Chinese in many places in the world. It's certainly not a threat, it's the reality of the world we live in. There are ethnic riots all over the world, all the time.
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The species of bats allegedly involved are not near Wuhan. Bats — aside from the few blood-drinking bats which aren't implicated, and aren't they New-World species anyway — don't tend to interact much with other mammals or with birds. Without human intervention, there's not much opportunity for them to infect humans or any other animals. Carnivores (raptors, felines, to a lesser extent maybe even canines) do eat bats…
> The species of bats allegedly involved are not near Wuhan. This is incorrect. Bat (Rhinolophus) sarbecoviruses have been isolated and sequenced in Hubei: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/DQ648856 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/DQ648857 The closest KNOWN bat sarbecovirus was found in Yunnan, but it was only 96% identical. That doesn't preclude the actual 98-99% identical progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 from…
> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.
https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zhengli...
Anyways, the point isn't that a natural zoonotic jump in Wuhan is perfectly impossible. Even if we assumed (wrongly, at least if you believe Dr. Shi) that natural zoonosis was equally probable in any city in China, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan is still evidence in favor of a lab accident. To a good first approximation, the WIV does 100% of the research on novel SARS-like viruses in China, so an outbreak due to a lab accident would probably emerge there. So whatever your Bayesian prior was for natural vs. lab accident, its emergence in Wuhan should update that by a factor of ~100 (i.e., the population of China divided by the population of Wuhan).
And I'm not sure why you think farmed animals are likely intermediate hosts? China has been sampling extensively, and while it's not necessarily easy to find the intermediate host (e.g., for Ebola), that should be far easier in a factory farm than in the wilderness. So why haven't they found that?
Finally, I don't think anyone brought up weapons here except you? That seems like a deliberate conflation, introducing outlandish theories for which no evidence exists ("SARS-CoV-2 was designed as a bioweapon") to discredit the more likely theory actually being discussed ("SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab accident during internationally-funded basic research").
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Sure, > The prior probability of a lab escape is low but the prior probability of "a pandemic from natural causes envelops the world" is also low, say below 1% a year. But now, given that "a pandemic does envelop the world", the posterior probability of lab escape and natural cause of course rises dramatically... and then saying "we didn't see much evidence for it" on a superficial tour organised by those responsible…
It is incorrect to consider only one year. If the probability of an event is 1% each year, you expect the event to happen every 100 years or so. In fact with probability 1 it will happen at some point.
“ It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If the SARS2 virus had indeed escaped from research he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. This acute conflict of interest was not declared to the Lancet’s readers. To the contrary,…
For example, here's another one of those odd coincidences that gets easily dismissed as a conspiracy theory: September 2019 there was a pandemic wargame called "Outbreak 2019", specifically based around an infectious disease that causes respiratory failure.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/04/01/naval-war-col...
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> The species of bats allegedly involved are not near Wuhan. This is incorrect. Bat (Rhinolophus) sarbecoviruses have been isolated and sequenced in Hubei: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/DQ648856 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/DQ648857 The closest KNOWN bat sarbecovirus was found in Yunnan, but it was only 96% identical. That doesn't preclude the actual 98-99% identical progenitor virus of SARS-CoV-2 from…
For what it's worth, you're disagreeing with Dr. Shi herself here: > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province. https://www.sciencemag.org/sites/default/files/Shi%20Zheng…
And again there's the SARS-CoV-1 where bat viruses in Yunnan jumped to people in Guangdong, 700+ miles away. And you'd have to look at the whole population around Wuhan where it is the closest major city (and Wuhan itself is the largest major city in central China, which makes it comparable to massive cities like NYC).
The probability is likely closer to 10%, and SARS-CoV-1 already lost that die roll and wound up in Guangdong. This time you rolled and got a 10% result. That isn't very unsurprising. Your p value is not significant.
And, yeah, I don't think that they've done everything they can to survey broadly. The studies that they've done tend to collect a bunch of bats from a particular cave and sequence the viruses in them and then draw broad conclusions about the whole province. There's only two sarbecoviruses sequences they've found in Hubei. I'd be much more comfortable with statements that SARS-CoV-2-like sarbecoviruses aren't found in Hubei if they'd sequenced 100 of them.
EDIT: Yeah so Wuhan is 6% of the population of all cities in China of roughly its size. But Shanghai is father away so its 24M should be weighted less, so with Tianjin and Nanjing. Beijing is way further away and its weighting should be fairly negligible. Chengdu and Chongqing are slightly closer. Of the top 10 Guangzhou and Shenzhen are both similarly close and in Guangdong where the SARS-CoV-1 spillover happened. My 10% gut estimate still looks pretty good -- "pick a random top 20 city in China somewhat near Yunnan where the bats are" and Wuhan is not that improbable at all.