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

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

#501

Post by GavinMcG »

corty wrote: post #495
tootie wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think lab workers getting sick is really a useful data point. People get sick all the time. Could have very easily been seasonal flu or whatever. It also seems The Lancet letter doesn't actual address the question of lab leak. Only that it wasn't engineered. That was a pretty hot conspiracy theory at the time and one that remains far fetched. They didn't positively say it couldn't be a naturally occurring vir…

Lab workers getting sick should be a starting point to begin analyzing archived blood samples for instance. Also, you don't usually visit a hospital for seasonal flu. And three people from the same lab at the same time suggests a wider outbreak in the lab. Even if it were the seasonal flu, it would have warranted a wider investigation, given what that lab was working on.

Plenty of people visit hospitals for seasonal flu, fyi. They shouldn't, but they do.

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

#502

Post by arrrg »

_wldu wrote: post #106
peter422 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

If several people were hospitalized that means several dozen to hundred people in the lab actually had COVID (hospitalization rates are low, especially among people who haven’t reached retirement age yet).

Testing was done on those people and nothing was found.

This means we would be looking at a huge coverup, not false negative testing results.

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

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Post by foobiekr »

40four wrote: post #492
ridaj wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wuhan wet market episode, in retrospect, was almost certainly a superspreading event rather than a patient zero situation. The virus's effects are so variable from person to person (lots of asymptomatic carriers, people who just get a little cold, symptoms undistinguishable from the flu) that it was almost certainly already circulating in Wuhan unnoticed, until it became big enough to be hard not to notice. Consi…

Guys, a bit of a tangent if I may? This is not normally my lane, but I really wish we could get over this term ‘wet market’. From a western point of view if you really think about it, it’s derogatory, and likely based in racial paranoia. We’ve all heard this term time and time again in the media. But after looking into it more, it’s not really accurate. Just call it a market. Or a farmers market as we call them in Am…

What kind of farmer’s markets have you been to with live animals in poor health being slaughtered in place?

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

#504

Post by nickysielicki »

tmp404 wrote: post #155

While this article is quite illuminating on the political side of the lab leak theory, on the evidence side it's mostly a rehash of some long-standing speculations. The only recent evidence it contains is the fact that 3 researchers from WIV sought hospital care back in autumn of 2019 with symptoms similar to COVID. However, this piece of evidence is hardly consequential without further details: - First, most common…

My recurring shower thought at the moment is that there will eventually be strong evidence of a natural origin and this whole debacle will be rubbed in the faces of people who dared challenge the medical/media industrial complex and its infinite wisdom. Let's be clear: there's no strong evidence either way.

The take away is that it doesn't matter whether it was from a lab or whether it was naturally originating. What matters is that it was (and still is) completely reasonable to question the official narative. The CDC chose to favor the CCP wet market story because they wanted to maintain a positive relationship in order to ensure they got accurate numbers -- they broadly lied to the American public about the certainty of the science in order to achieve political goals. The media, who should have kept the CDC accountable in such a situation, instead could not resist to tell a story about a disagreement between the Trump administration and the CDC/Fauci (both sides did this).

It does not matter where it originated. What matters is the media didn't do their job and the American public was intentionally misinformed by the federal government in a time of crisis, and the people who called out the government and called out the media were ostracized for it. American institutions broadly failed to meet their responsibilities to the public.

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

#505

Post by badmadrad »

psychlops wrote: post #286

This article is painfully political. The author takes far too much time demonizing Trump and anointing Biden to keep me interested in learning what she has to say.

Now that media has to tell the truth they have to get the negative Trump spin in to justify the vitriol of the last 5 years otherwise the narrative wouldn't make sense.

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

#506

Post by cma »

Jarwain wrote: post #312
lamontcg wrote: post #185

> Wade devoted a full section to the “furin cleavage site,” a distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. > Within the scientific community, one thing leapt off the page. Wade quoted one of the world’s most famous microbiologists, Dr. David Baltimore, saying that he believed the furin cleavage site “was the smoking gun for the…

There are so many "shocking" articles, but here's something I don't get: The closest genetic match is only 3.8% similar. When it only has 29,903 base pairs, that's 1,136 mutations. I'm no bioscientist but my friends who are tell me that's a lot of changes, and that experiments might change a few base pairs or proteins at a time. A lab leak theory doesn't explain how gain of function study resulted in so many mutation…

There's around one mutation each time it transmits between hosts (for flu it is one each time it goes cell to cell). 1,136 doesn't seem that high, say it hops 100 bats a year, that's just a divergence of 11 years of bat hopping (the more mutations that add up maybe the rate doesn't hold due to conserved regions though?). 5X less hops a year, 55 years: still a blink.

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

#507

Post by noduerme »

um_ya wrote: post #314
tootie wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this whole thing is a great example of why you don't ban alternative viewpoints, even if considered "conspiracy theories". Zerohedge was reporting this early on, and Twitter banned them for "misinformation".

But Zerohedge in turn is a great example of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

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

#509

Post by gary_0 »

Gatsky wrote: post #164

Assuming the chance of a lab leak is non-zero, it is worth considering how this will ever end. - If there was any hard evidence actually proving they had SARS-CoV-2 in the lab before the pandemic, it will be long gone. Only an independent full access forensic level investigation would ever find any sign that evidence was destroyed, and that is never going to happen. - It seems extremely unlikely to me that anyone fro…

> What actually can and should happen

Not to mention fixing all of the other failures that allowed COVID to kill millions worldwide. Everyone's pointing fingers but hardly anybody's talking about improving epidemiology and public health policy (which the US is long overdue for a reckoning on).

One of those failures, by the way, was the seeming assumption that whatever state a global health emergency started in would act in something resembling good faith. Regardless of how COVID came to be, China wasted precious time deflecting when it should have been diligently helping to sound the alarm and properly investigate.

And how many other countries might have prevaricated in the same fashion, if the pandemic had started within their borders? This is not a failure concerning China specifically. Indeed, there will come a point where blaming China for COVID, however cathartic that might be, will be counterproductive to preventing future catastrophes.

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

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Post by ramraj07 »

GavinMcG wrote: post #498
ramraj07 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This New York mag article [1] published eons ago already made it clear to any sane biologist that all you mentioned are important things to consider. However the issue is sane biologists or scientists in general are actually in extreme short supply, the vast majority are often under the delusion that they “understand the system” better than they actually do. They also are often knowingly and unknowingly more interest…

Trump didn't exactly follow Fauci's advice, so it's odd that you'd blame Fauci's "method of approaching pandemics" for "this mess." Was there some other, better, established method?

I meant Fauci at al.’s approach of proactively looking for the next pandemic via sample collection and lab engineering of new variants which predates the trump administration. By all appearances Faucis performance during the pandemic is nothing to be questioned. These are different topics.
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