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How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

donaldgmcneiljr1954.medium.com

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Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#51

Post by AndrewBissell »

jMyles wrote: post #49
cletus wrote: post #39

So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories. That being said, I don't believe anyone can reasonably claim with any degree certainty that Covid was a lab-leak BUT the WHO investigation simply hasn't done their due diligence to a sufficient degree to eliminate this theory. Unfortunately the WHO's credibility is trained here. In the early days of the pandemic the WHO bent over backwards not to upset Chin…

> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories It needn't have been a conspiracy; it's plausible that it was accidental, or even if intentional, the work of a single disgruntled individual.

But that at the very least implies a conspiracy to conceal the virus's origin, and possibly even crucial details about its transmissibility or treatments.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#52

Post by aabhay »

slg wrote: post #46
monkeycantype wrote: post #26

The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news, as the alternative is that civilization has reached the threshold where we have a hyper connected population in contact with so many natural disease reservoirs that pandemics are emerging spontaneously. If it’s a lab leak we change pathogen containment practices, otherwise we curtain our freedom of movement and association

That might be great from a public health standpoint, but I'm not so sure from an overall global perspective. Proof of a lab leak and subsequent coverup would be a hugely destabilizing political event that could have severe consequences as there would be people pushing for some type of retribution for the millions of deaths. At the very least that would lead to further political division and racial animosity in places…

Unfortunately that outcome is happening already, from just the hearsay

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#53

Post by zackees »

p1necone wrote: post #5

Working out the initial cause of this Covid outbreak is far far far less important/actionable than working out what we should do differently when (not if) another virus starts spreading. This concept should be familiar to those in tech already: https://codeascraft.com/2012/05/22/blameless-postmortems/

  * The WHO released a report saying there was no evidence of human to human transmission and posted it on Twitter circa December 2019.
  * When the disease hit, Amazon removed masks from the market citing the threat of "price gauging".
  * Dr. Fauci said masks don't work.
  * Disease hits.
  * "Two weeks to flatten the curve" turned into a year.
  * NY and MI governors send recovering patients to NURSING HOMES, the MOST VULNARABLE DEMOGRAPHIC leading to a massacre.
  * Small businesses destroyed.
  * And then a network of leftist NGO leaders colluded to change the voting laws, then later bragged about it [in a Time Magazine Article](https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/)
Looks like they already knew what to do to make the impact of COVID19 be as bad as possible and for the maximum political advantage.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#54

Post by danenania »

eloff wrote: post #42

There's basically no evidence either way, although the outbreak being in a city with a class 4 bio lab actively studying sars viruses does on the surface seem to make the lab leak more probable. Bit of a coincidence. What really makes me think though is the way China is being uncooperative. You'd think if they were innocent they wouldn't need to limit access to data and prevent investigation of the Wuhan lab. Maybe t…

Has anyone analyzed this with a Bayesian statistical approach? Considering that a zoonotic transfer could happen in a very large number of places on earth, I would imagine that the odds of an outbreak in any particular city would be quite small? With that in mind, how many virology labs are there doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses? How many have had safety issues in the past? How many times have pathogens escaped? Also, how many zoonotic transfers have there been where no infected specimens of the host species could be found after a concerted investigation? It seems like one should be able to come up with reasonable estimates for most of these numbers with some digging.

I'm not qualified to make conclusions one way or the other, but it feels to me like this calculation would weight heavily toward a lab leak. To a layman's eyes, it feels a bit like we've got a lung cancer patient who just so happened to be a pack-a-day smoker, and everyone's searching furiously for any explanation that isn't the cigarettes.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#55

Post by Judgmentality »

scarmig wrote: post #50
lwf wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

s/trained/strained/

Strained is closer in Levenshtein distance, but I'd bet tainted was the original word.

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

TIL. Thank you.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#56

Post by peteretep »

monkeycantype wrote: post #26

The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news, as the alternative is that civilization has reached the threshold where we have a hyper connected population in contact with so many natural disease reservoirs that pandemics are emerging spontaneously. If it’s a lab leak we change pathogen containment practices, otherwise we curtain our freedom of movement and association

> The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news

For humanity, yes, for the CCP, not so much.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#57

Post by p1necone »

XorNot wrote: post #38
dsyrk wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu Except another very recent one was also a lab accident. So, no, not every single previous one was, and 2 of last 3 will have been from labs.

Except that virus was genomically identical to another virus in the 1950s. These thing's aren't being made in labs, they're being stored there but the actual reality is this: none of the countries being so interested in this have any ability to influence the country's these things happen in. So your effective response protocol may as well just blackbox the problem: "there is a new novel virus, how do we respond?" No…

Exactly. This is what I meant by "not actionable".

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#58

Post by benrbray »

slg wrote: post #46
monkeycantype wrote: post #26

The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news, as the alternative is that civilization has reached the threshold where we have a hyper connected population in contact with so many natural disease reservoirs that pandemics are emerging spontaneously. If it’s a lab leak we change pathogen containment practices, otherwise we curtain our freedom of movement and association

That might be great from a public health standpoint, but I'm not so sure from an overall global perspective. Proof of a lab leak and subsequent coverup would be a hugely destabilizing political event that could have severe consequences as there would be people pushing for some type of retribution for the millions of deaths. At the very least that would lead to further political division and racial animosity in places…

What would you say in response to someone who believes that widespread belief of a coverup would do more to sow distrust and division than a transparent admission of the truth?

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#59

Post by katbyte »

slg wrote: post #46
monkeycantype wrote: post #26

The accidental lab leak theory proven would actually be great news, as the alternative is that civilization has reached the threshold where we have a hyper connected population in contact with so many natural disease reservoirs that pandemics are emerging spontaneously. If it’s a lab leak we change pathogen containment practices, otherwise we curtain our freedom of movement and association

That might be great from a public health standpoint, but I'm not so sure from an overall global perspective. Proof of a lab leak and subsequent coverup would be a hugely destabilizing political event that could have severe consequences as there would be people pushing for some type of retribution for the millions of deaths. At the very least that would lead to further political division and racial animosity in places…

The truth is the truth and we shouldn’t cover it up because of the harsh realities it may bring.

Re: How I learned to stop worrying and love the lab-leak theory

#60

Post by bigyikes »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #51
jMyles wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories It needn't have been a conspiracy; it's plausible that it was accidental, or even if intentional, the work of a single disgruntled individual.

But that at the very least implies a conspiracy to conceal the virus's origin, and possibly even crucial details about its transmissibility or treatments.

While that is denotatively a conspiracy, most people think of conspiracies as something outlandish, not business as usual for the CCP. I think that’s what the parent comment was getting at, anyway.
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