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More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

nytimes.com

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Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#161

Post by lumost »

querez wrote: post #154
hayst4ck wrote: post #120

A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not true. People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing…

I'm sorry, but this feels like conspiracy-theory peddling and FUD. What the linked site calls "evidence", is are at best "hints" or "possible signs". No evidence anywhere. Instead, you have wildly weird texts like section 8.3 ("A Note on Biowarfare") that literally just reads "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program.". It's…

There doesn't appear to be any regional association with the WIV's research on Bats. WIV studied bats fro all over China and notably isolated the likely center of the 2003 SARS outbreak to a set of bats in Yunnan. The institute was founded in 1956, long before Coronavirus research started in earnest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology#SA...

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#162

Post by tomp »

stirfish wrote: post #150
adrianb wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you made statements like "this started in Wuhan, in the lab there, not in the animal market next to it," you were called racist, even though race had nothing to do with it. Honestly I always felt like "a scientist working with dangerous pathogens had an accident" is way less racist than "someone ate a weird animal from a wet market"... And yet the backlash was stronger for the lab leak scenario, almost as if the…

We went pretty quickly from "it started somewhere in China" to beating elderly asian people to death in the streets. I think the backlash was more against the justifications people use to be awful.

Didn't it only start happening, like, a year after people daring to wrongthink (that the virus wasn't of entirely natural origin) were persistently being called Trump-supporting Nazi conspiracy theorists?

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#163

Post by syshum »

querez wrote: post #154
hayst4ck wrote: post #120

A lot of people here claiming there is no evidence. Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look, they think the evidence is poor, or they can't imagine any authoritative evidence without the help of China it's just not true. People imagine Chinese social media as something that is completely locked down when in reality it was abuzz with information when a new mysterious disease was appearing…

I'm sorry, but this feels like conspiracy-theory peddling and FUD. What the linked site calls "evidence", is are at best "hints" or "possible signs". No evidence anywhere. Instead, you have wildly weird texts like section 8.3 ("A Note on Biowarfare") that literally just reads "This document does not make any attempt to link the work done at these laboratories as part of a 'bioweapon' or "bio-warfare" program.". It's…

>>Oh, how convenient. In other words, no-one with a serious research background could be convinced to put their name on this nonsense.

Appeals to authority are one of the failings of modern science, The data and facts should stand up to independent review no need for "credentials"

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#164

Post by dougmwne »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #148
dougmwne wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That viewpoint basically amounts to head in the sand. There is a plausible pathway to determine the origin. The lab could be openly investigated and the natural environment could be combed for an ancestor. If this was an unintentional release, it would vastly change the public perception and oversight protocols around pathogen research. Think what Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima did to nuclear energy. If w…

This is actually a good point. I think you changed my mind :) Thanks for the thoughtful post

I think that may be a first for me in 25 years on the internet. Thanks for being so open minded!

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#165

Post by ggm »

The sheer amount of the word "seems" and "plausible" here ought to tell you what is being discussed: what's being discussed is not primary evidence, it's interpretation of the meaning and impact, in the mind of the discussing parties

If you want to go all "judicial" on this, "on the balance of probabilities" in the context of an ongoing political and trade dispute between the parties, feels to me like an attempt to appeal to pseudo rational claims, more than an actual, dispassionate declaration of likelihood.

The article says "keep an open mind" which strongly suggests the "evidence" is equivocal. If you're not a virologist or scientist who works in the primary field, and I am not one either, you're at BEST attempting to interpret science at second or third hand. Science often uses words differently to colloquial speech. The word "must" for instance, has no normative force always. This "must" be because blah blah blah is not saying "causative" unless it actually says so. If it doesn't say WHY it MUST mean something, it's opinion. If it says MUST because of the balance of probabilities it's actually MAY in any case.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#166

Post by prox »

sharken wrote: post #140
Pepe1vo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses for shipwrecks. That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out

Your point about the lab is great, it's just very hard to dismiss the idea that a lab error was at fault. But i too think it all too likely that we won't be any wiser about the origins. Though it would be great if a timeline could be established, i don't remember seeing a good explanation on Covid in Italy being discovered in 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

I believe that Italy origin story was not credible. Snopes goes with Wuhan as the origin.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#167

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

What does it matter, beyond natural curiosity, whether it was released from a lab or not? It is of no real consequence because:

(1) if it *was* released from a lab, its highly suspect that it was intentional due to it infecting China's own citizens; if it was some kind of "attack" you would think they would plant it somewhere else.

(2) this is somewhat of the price we (as a society) pay for experimentation on diseases and viruses. It suffers from it-could-happen-here-ism where COVID or a COVID-like disease could be released by any other country and we'd still be in the exact same situation.

So, in my mind, the only definitive issue is whether it was released maliciously or by accident. If it was malicious, that's a completely different, crimes against humanity, type problem. If it was not, then I don't think it matters really how COVID happened.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#168

Post by andrewclunn »

prox wrote: post #155
throwkeep wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whether they think there was none because they didn't bother to look The origin was politicized in the US and taboo to even question it, so few did. It was labeled a crazy conspiracy theory by the media and that shut the door on open inquiry until recently.

This is why there is a big difference between skepticism and conspiracy. A skeptic digs deeper to gather more data and facts, a conspiracy loosely joins a few data points and makes a poor conjecture. Conspiracy is political ammunition, skepticism is healthy debate and gladly welcomes more data.

"Skepticsm" is when over educated pseudo-intellectuals want THEIR theories to have the ring of "science," while dismissing others as conspiracy theorists.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#169

Post by baja_blast »

fumbly wrote: post #14
mensetmanusman wrote: post #3

Part of me thinks that we should almost not waste the time to find out. Spend the effort on preparing for the next one, by improving air filtration etc. Politics is too deeply entrenched, it will be an impossibility to uncover the truth.

The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused the current one. The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and…

> The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention.

Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic and did nothing towards vaccine development.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#170

Post by AbrahamParangi »

Pepe1vo wrote: post #124
TacticalCoder wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no virologist but of all the places on earth we are supposed to believe that, by cheer coincidence, the outbreak happened in that one city that happens to do research and have patents on lab-modified bat viruses and that it doesn't have anything to do with that lab. I mean: you seriously cannot make that up.

To be fair, the reason the lab is in that place is precisely because it's close to a place where zoonoses has occurred multiple times. Kind of like how we don't blame lighthouses for shipwrecks. That being said, from what I've read it appears that a lab escape is a very real possibility. Though I doubt that we'll ever find out

I've heard this a number of times now, but is it actually true?

I find that argument hard to corroborate and there are other parsimonious explanations, like WIV was located in Wuhan because Wuhan is a major world city with high quality institutions of higher education.

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