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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

#171

Post by [deleted] »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #116
kossTKR wrote: post #112

What i find weird is the extreme and very unscientific agression among certain virologist: "If you think SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab, please unfollow me. " https://twitter.com/macroliter/status/1390720308265508871 Then you have other academics in the comments saying nothing is certain yet, and other prominents labs like Gupta Labs at Cambridge and Bloom Lab from Seattle saying there could be multiple explanati…

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.

[deleted]

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#172

Post by jrochkind1 »

If scientists believe a leak like this is plausible, then I don't think we need to wait for proof to push for international treaties against doing this kind of research that can have these disastrous accidental consequences. Developing super-viruses should not be allowed by the international community, including in the USA. It is too dangerous.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#173

Post by smolder »

astrobe_ wrote: post #128
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…

To be fair the lab escape scenario looks a lot like a conspiracy theory. One should remember that around that time the "flat earth" theory was still going on (IIRC), and there are similar lab escape theories about AIDS.

No, a lab escape scenario is an accident theory. The Chinese military sending infectious people to our country on purpose sounds like a conspiracy theory.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#174

Post by bigpumpkin »

lumost wrote: post #161
querez wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Wuhan is, however, in the range of Horseshoe Bats. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_horseshoe_bat So people who suggest that it's far from Yunnan are missing the point.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#175

Post by daenz »

rossdavidh wrote: post #141

I know this sounds odd, but at this point I don't think it matters, as far as what we need to do next, and more pressure on this point may just make that harder. 1) Regardless of whether or not this virus came from a lab, could such a thing plausibly happen in the future? Unquestionably yes. 2) Do we have international bodies to do inspection of the safety standards of any lab doing this kind of work? Ones that have…

>I know this sounds odd, but at this point I don't think it matters

I know the quote "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" and all, but if we deem it important to get to the bottom of individual deaths, accidental or not, than it is important to get to the bottom of millions of deaths.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#176

Post by 99_00 »

I'm convinced that it's a lab leak. I'm also convinced the slow reveal is a psyop and I don't disagree with it's objectives.

The sudden revelation that China screwed up and lied to the world is too shocking for the vast majority of people. The global public's response would not be optimal.

The slow reveal gives societies around the world time to adjust to the new reality.

If we were all thrown into that reality overnight it would get messy.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#177

Post by pishpash »

tristanj wrote: post #25

Not surprising at all considering Wuhan Lab scientists admitted on video they were bitten by bats and they had lax to no safety standards. https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4102619 > A video released two years before the start of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic shows Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) scientists being cavalier toward protective equipment and being bitten by bats that carry deadly viruses such as SA…

You'd need to find that bat that you imagine bit someone in October 2019, swab its nose or anus and sequence for SARS-CoV-2, because the closest known bat virus relative to SARS-CoV-2 has a decades-long evolutionary gap to it.

Oh, also viruses don't get virulent in the new host the moment the zoonotic transfer occurs. It takes a bit of time to evolve and adapt.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#178

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

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.

All of science is driven by hypothesis, but those hypotheses don't just appear out of nowhere. Suspicion, bias, and bad data can all drive focus on a particular field. In that way, such conjecture is a powerful scientific tool that in my opinion is too often dismissed.

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#179

Post by Dah00n »

ChemSpider wrote: post #93
Dah00n wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be but we have hardly started looking yet. We haven't even found a source of SARS from 2002 yet.. > "... no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching..." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11... Edit: Added source.

Wrong. A likely Sars1 origin was found within months. For Sars2 Chinese researches sampled 40000 animals (according to WHO report) and found nothing. Sars1: Prof. Zheng-Li Shi from Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Prof. Shu-Yi Zhang from the Institute of Zoology, and some researchers from Australia also tracked the source of SARS virus to bats, and their findings were published in Science in…

Finding a virus in an animal isn't that same as finding the source. A source has not been found. Only later and intermediate hosts (as in 2005):

>"As no direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations despite 15 years of searching and as RNA recombination is frequent within coronaviruses, it is highly likely that SARS-CoV newly emerged through recombination of bat SARSr-CoVs in this or other yet-to-be-identified bat caves"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7097006/#!po=11...

>"No direct progenitor of SARS-CoV was found in bat populations, but WIV16 was found in a cave in Yunnan province, China between 2013 and 2016, and has a 96% genetically similar virus strain."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

Re: More Scientists Urge Broad Inquiry into Coronavirus Origins

#180

Post by pishpash »

Suppose for a moment this was not a lab leak. What kind of evidence would be sufficient to be convincing? Or are we looking for investigation after investigation until the end of time?

What this letter fails to establish is a success criterion. Nobody is going to invest in a "proper investigation", much less one tinged with politics, without even knowing something will come out of it.

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