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

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

#61

Post by katbyte »

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/

I disagree. If it was indeed gain of function research in China that caused covid we should immediately stop doing that sort of research and ban it. There’s a reason it’s been controversial and many virologists have jobs on the line when it comes to its origins

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

#62

Post by rllearneratwork »

danenania wrote: post #54
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 pathoge…

>>"Has anyone analyzed this with a Bayesian statistical approach?"

- YES. And they give lab leak theory over 80% likelihood

https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV...

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

#63

Post by baggy_trough »

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…

Why do you call it a conspiracy theory? There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Any politically sensitive organization will inherently do whatever it can do avoid blame. That's as natural as the force of gravity.

I also don't understand why you say so vehemently that you don't believe it was engineered. Gain of function experiments are something they do in these labs!

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

#64

Post by ekianjo »

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…

Having an open mind about alternative explanations than the official one from the WHO is not believing in conspiracy theories. Its just not believing in propaganda.

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

#67

Post by katbyte »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #20
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I mean never letting Covid out (if that is the source) would have prevented 7-13 million extra deaths this year so it is worth thinking about how we don’t let another one out if it is possible. I disagree that it is less actionable. I am a former scientist. Proper handling of lab waste etc. is infinitely easier than having the whole world lock down, wear masks, and rapidly develop mRNA vaccines to try and put th…

That's a false equivalency though; whether or not this was a lab accident, there will be future pandemics which aren't (like every single previous one in history).

There hadn’t been one at this scale for 100 years, who’s to say how long it would have been till the next natural one, I for one would rather not have experienced a global pandemic even if a natural one was due in 50 years

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

#68

Post by dsyrk »

p1necone wrote: post #57
XorNot wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

How is lab safety “not actionable”? Is it some special field of science where all improvements and progress has stopped? I don’t understand your point.

Haven’t more people died from SARS-Cov-2 than nuclear weapons, why we can’t have international conventions and inspections on dangerous virological research?

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

#69

Post by whatshisface »

baggy_trough wrote: post #63
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…

Why do you call it a conspiracy theory? There's nothing conspiratorial about it. Any politically sensitive organization will inherently do whatever it can do avoid blame. That's as natural as the force of gravity. I also don't understand why you say so vehemently that you don't believe it was engineered. Gain of function experiments are something they do in these labs!

I don't know what the OP was saying, but a lot of people use "engineered" as a byword for "released on purpose."

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

#70

Post by katbyte »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #17
ahupp wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In software you would never do a postmortem without understanding the root cause of the incident. If this was caused by a lab leak, or even gain-of-function research, that seems like a pretty important detail.

But that's not what you would start with. If you have an incident and discover that your response plan was hilariously inadequate, you would prioritize making more robust response plans because even if you can prevent that exact incident from happening again, there will be other disasters.

Regardless you would do both? And knowing it was gain of function research in a lab is an easy “let’s stop doing that” moment
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