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The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

vanityfair.com

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Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#101

Post by lawnchair_larry »

peter422 wrote: post #56
yumraj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did any of them originate a few miles from a pathogen research lab that handled such pathogen that caused those outbreaks?

I don’t dispute it is one point of suspicion, but Wuhan is also one of the 10 biggest cities in China. It isn’t a surprise the first US outbreak was in the biggest city. The first cases could have been anywhere. If there were more evidence that it was lab made then the location would be another point, not to me without further evidence it doesn’t mean all that much. And there have been 2 emerging coronavirus outbreak…

There are mountains of evidence. Proximity to the lab is barely the tip of the iceberg.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#103

Post by kaesar14 »

analog31 wrote: post #64
kaesar14 wrote: post #54

It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of crackpot theory. The serious questions raised in this article have been around since last April but it’s only now it’s even allowed to talk about them on digital forums. Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.

Here's what I remember from that time period. My recollection is that the wet market hypothesis fell out of favor rather quickly, but nothing else really emerged in its place. The lab leak theory was circulating, but amongst people such as rank-and-file scientists, the attitude was: We aren't going to get a straight answer about this, but we've got to defeat this virus. I don't remember dismissing the lab leak theory…

They would’ve had a better chance of being taken seriously if it wasn’t actively a bannable offense to talk about them on major social media websites.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#104

Post by tootie »

harryf wrote: post #77
arrosenberg wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are getting downvoted because it's muckraking. There is nothing shady about NIAID giving a (verrrry small for this type of research) grant to a foreign research lab, which is doing research about a topic of interest. That's how you ensure the U.S. government gets a copy of the results.

I'm not saying it's shady to provide that funding. What I'm saying is it demonstrates conflict of interest. Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav... Whether or not anything shady was happening, the conflict of interest is clear.

Fauci is clearly dismissing the notion that it was engineered. He says pretty clearly that if a natural virus escaped the lab it would still be a natural virus and hence not a useful topic when it comes to treating it. I don't think he ever said it wasn't possible just that there's no reason to believe it. And it's understandably not his primary concern to figure out.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#105

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

harryf wrote: post #85
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the lead guy we’ve been listening to (and still are) for scientific advice on this pandemic is entangled in a massive conflict of interest. How does any role he might (or might not have) played in GOF research create a conflict of interest in terms of his advice about the pandemic?

Last year in May 5 2020 Fauci dismissed the idea that the virus came from a lab that his own organisation was providing funds to - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthony-fauci-wuhan-lab-coronav... The conflict of interest is: was this statement actually what he believed to be true at the time, or was it to draw attention away from the Wuhan lab, so there wouldn't be ugly questions about why his organisation provided fu…

You write this as if NIH is a privately run foundation with Fauci at the head. He's not even head of the NIH, and while I have no doubt that he was directly involved in decisions to fund research at the Wuhan lab, this is a government agency, which as we're told over and over (when it's convenient to say so) means layers upon layers of bureaucracy and red tape , particularly when handing out money.

Is it your position that he was able to run it as some personal fiefdom?

Suppose that Fauci had known for a fact in May 2020 that SARS-COV-2 originated in that lab. How would that have changed the advice he (attempted to) offer regarding public health and safety?

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#106

Post by _wldu »

peter422 wrote: post #59
JPKab wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several were HOSPITALIZED with a respiratory illness, in a lab studying bat viruses on humanized mice. The cognitive dissonance you are suffering is painful, I'm sure, but it's obviously clouding your judgment.

Those same people were tested for antibodies and they were negative. Or I guess that is also part of the cover up.

Covid antibodies may or may not be produced and if they are seem to fade quickly. This has been widely researched and documented [1]. T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 are a better indicator of exposure [2].

[1] - https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179

[2] - https://abcnews.go.com/Health/fda-authorizes-cell-test-game-...

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#107

Post by ALittleLight »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #86
nostromo wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason it's coming out now is because Trump is gone. During the election, most of the media decided to ignore anything they were afraid would help Trump or hurt Biden. Whether an activist media is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.

We have an actively status-quo favoring media, not an activist one. The former president was a pathological liar (thousands of documented clear lies during his office), and there were (and are) extremely good reasons to ignore more or less anything he said.

There are reasons to ignore what Trump says - not reasons to believe the opposite of what he says. In other words, if Trump says "Covid was made in a Chinese lab" that shouldn't convince anyone either way. I'm afraid it may have convinced our media though that "Covid was definitely not made in a Chinese lab" and that is basically the same mistake as believing everything Trump says.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#108

Post by bradleyjg »

542458 wrote: post #57
bradleyjg wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it we haven’t identified a similar enough animal virus to be the source. China has and continues to have every incentive to find it.

It also differs from every betacoronavirus backbone that had been used for genetic modification (and there’s no clear reason somebody would want to come up with a new one), which is basically the same problem but in reverse. We’ve never, despite years and years of trying, been able to identify an origin for Ebola. The basic reality is we don’t know anywhere near all the diseases that animals have.

I’d guess several small teams have received single digit million dollar grants to look for the origin of Ebola. Maybe one or two got double digit millions.

China put sanctions on Australia that will and have cost their economy billions for implying that the lab leak hypothesis is plausible. Reasonable or not the Chinese government believes suppressing this theory to be a major policy goal. So I expect they’ve either spent orders of magnitude more effort than we ever spent on looking for Ebola’s origins, or they have some reason to believe they wouldn’t find anything.

This isn’t a smoking gun, but it is a dog that didn’t bark.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#109

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

mc32 wrote: post #81
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #70

You know the story of the boy who cried wolf? Trump was the boy. Everybody knows how that story ended, but as a reminder: "This tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. When a wolf actually does appear, the villagers do not believe the boy's cries for help, and the flock is destroyed. The moral of the story is that liars will not be rewarded; eve…

Ok, but somehow he turned journalists' brains into mush such that they could no longer do investigative journalism and moreover turned them into bots which flagged Tweets which questioned the received theory and turned the CDC virologist into a Saint?

Investigative journalism? Do you know how long it takes to do that sort of thing under normal conditions?

How long was it between the writing of the Pentagon papers and their release? How long did the Catholic sex abuse situation take to be fully reported?

It's been a bit more than a year since the virus turned into a global pandemic. I'm willing to grant journalists a bit more leeway in the timeline for serious investigative journalism, particularly when the central locate is a somewhat secretive Chinese lab in an area that was completely locked down for months as the pandemic started.

Re: The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins

#110

Post by 542458 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #83
kaesar14 wrote: post #54

It’s crazy to me how many people on even this forum, a place purportedly of science, continue to dismiss a lab leak origin out of hand citing it as some sort of crackpot theory. The serious questions raised in this article have been around since last April but it’s only now it’s even allowed to talk about them on digital forums. Excellent write up by Vanity Fair.

Kevin Drum had a good summary of this a couple of weeks ago, much shorter. His take? There's no more evidence for the lab leak theory now than there was a year ago, BUT what has changed is that the cross-over theory implied that we would find certain evidence for the vectors, and that evidence has not shown up. KD's take was that it's not so much that the lab leak theory has become more likely, it's the that biologic…

We’ve been trying to find the zoonotic origin of Ebola for decades without any success. We don’t have anywhere near a complete catalog of animal diseases, and of those only a fraction have been sequenced.
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