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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

#181

Post by actually_a_dog »

handmodel wrote: post #137
danenania wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is my thought. I think it is hard to do a Bayesian analysis here and come up with priors everyone can agree on but it always seemed to me it would be like if a new Mad Cow disease started near Cambridge, Mass. If a new cow disease arose naturally it would probably be in a cattle farm with tons of animals being slaughtered - not next to a lab that studies prions.

The problem with that is there are way more pathogenic viruses originating in animals than prion diseases, and (probably?) way more virology labs than labs studying prion diseases. That makes both factors in the equation much larger in the case of viruses than prion diseases. Just off the cuff, I'd guess that would make the overall probability of a zoonotic virus emerging near a city with a virology lab at least an order of magnitude greater than your prion disease scenario.

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

#182

Post by AstralStorm »

3327 wrote: post #172
InTheArena wrote: post #2

Just so people know who is posting this - Donald McNeil Jr was the chief voice at NYT focusing on covid. He was ousted earlier because of some remarks that he allegedly made to a school group a few years ago, but before that, the NYT was pushing for him to get a Pulitzer for his reporting on COVID. Him starting legitimize the lab-leak theory as possible is reflective of the people more generally taking the lab-leak h…

Its astonishing “scientist” in labs are so detached from the real world and dismissive as always. The virus wasn’t tampered with. Th lab in Wuhan is “GAIN OF FUNCTION” testing. read it again. Gain of function means nudging viral samples so they gain functions on their own without human gene editing or modification that can easily be traced. Why now? Why not 5 years ago? The animal markets have always been there. Occa…

Why MERS was in 2009? Why not 2007 or 2001? Etc. The animals were there since millions of years.

This argument is bootless. Viral mutations and spread happen according to anomalous diffusion statistics that are inherently chaotic at outset.

For those who do not know what chaotic means, it is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Most of which are actually unknowns. Risk is always there, but details are never initially predictable.

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

#183

Post by AstralStorm »

ddingus wrote: post #162
lamontcg wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same problem with SARS-CoV-1. The Bat SL-CoV-WIV1 virus that is closest related to that is also from Horseshoe bats in Yunnan. The SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in humans was >700 miles away in Guangdong. The virus may or may not have used an intermediate animal like civets to jump to humans. We've seen this happen before and we know there was no lab leak involved.

The lack of cooperation complicates all of this, which was my primary point.

The problem is, there is nothing to cooperate in. Any source or fact given by Chinese government or scientists will not be trusted.

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

#184

Post by AstralStorm »

barry-cotter wrote: post #141
jb775 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So I generally give like zero weight to conspiracy theories You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. And it was once considered blasphemy to say putting leeches on your body didn't help an illness. There's a reason why the term "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by the media so much...it's because they know a certain subset of people have been socially conditioned to bypass critical…

> You know it was once a conspiracy theory to say the Earth wasn't flat. Archimedes knew the Earth was a sphere. You can tell the surface of the Earth is curved by the fact that the body of a ship disappears from view before its mast.

And he was wrong, as the Earth is flattened at the poles. Sphere is a first order approximation at best.

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

#185

Post by AstralStorm »

baryphonic wrote: post #115
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. 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. It's okay, you're among open-minded people here! FWIW, I think we should stop couching any critical examination of the received th…

Does it matter which kind of regime it is? Should similar thing happen in the USA, let's say American flu of 2030, you'd see identical levels of lies and lack of cooperation and propaganda.

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

#187

Post by lamontcg »

3327 wrote: post #172
InTheArena wrote: post #2

Just so people know who is posting this - Donald McNeil Jr was the chief voice at NYT focusing on covid. He was ousted earlier because of some remarks that he allegedly made to a school group a few years ago, but before that, the NYT was pushing for him to get a Pulitzer for his reporting on COVID. Him starting legitimize the lab-leak theory as possible is reflective of the people more generally taking the lab-leak h…

Its astonishing “scientist” in labs are so detached from the real world and dismissive as always. The virus wasn’t tampered with. Th lab in Wuhan is “GAIN OF FUNCTION” testing. read it again. Gain of function means nudging viral samples so they gain functions on their own without human gene editing or modification that can easily be traced. Why now? Why not 5 years ago? The animal markets have always been there. Occa…

Why did SARS-CoV-1 jump from Bats in Yunnan to humans in Guangdong in 2003?

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

#188

Post by AstralStorm »

Lazare wrote: post #40
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/

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took. Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonoti…

Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.

Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.

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

#189

Post by lamontcg »

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…

> What really makes me think though is the way China is being uncooperative

This reminds me exactly of the same kind of arguments made about Saddam Hussein when it came to WMDs before 2003.

It turned out that Hussein was playing to the domestic audience, not the USA. It made sense to him to stand up to the weapons inspections for domestic political consumption. Everyone in the USA, including the CIA thought he MUST have been actually hiding something, but he wasn't, it was all just bluster.

Similarly here, its likely all for domestic consumption. They just don't want to admit it came from China, period. They've been pushing the idea that it was spreading like wildfire in Italy in Sept/Oct 2019 (via some scientific article that never should have been published). They're happy to make the argument entirely about the lab leak theory because then they can rely on the scientific community to debunk that -- and then all that remains for domestic consumption is their ideas that it came to China in imported food.

And here's the kicker which is that if this doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't have to. They don't give one sloppy fuck about what you think. They care about what 1.4 billion Chinese people think. If you're convinced it is a lab leak they just don't care and that works fine for them. They can debunk that internally and push the idea that China is the victim.

And the zoontic theory doesn't help them as much, then they have to explain why it happened again after SARS-1 in 2003, and they might have to actually do something about a lot of the animal farming practices in China, and could lose face for domestic political consumption. Bunker mentality is better for authoritarian regimes than self-reflection about mistakes.

(See also Jose Mourinho's player management style)

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

#190

Post by Lazare »

AstralStorm wrote: post #188
Lazare wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My engineering org practices blameless postmortems too, and I am an extremely strong advocate of them, but a blameless postmortem is not the same thing as a postmortem that refuses to identify or address root causes. And here, there is some possibility that the current pandemic was the result of specific risks that we, collectively, took. Earlier in the pandemic I saw a focus on the risks of "wet markets" for zoonoti…

Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties. Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols,…

Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it.

> Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.

I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form:

"Because might do , there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing ."

Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes?

I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".

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