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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

#711

Post by throwaway4good »

kelnos wrote: post #555
jcrawfordor wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Fauci have even known? Budget numbers say NIAID clears around $5 billion in grant funding per year and this grant was more at the $100k per year level. Another source shows that NIAID receives around 3,000 grant applications per year and that's just in two of their multiple grant types. It seems most likely to me that the grant was approved and funded by a subject-area committee without Fauci being involved at…

Pretty sure if I ran an organization that funds a bunch of labs that do virus research, and a global pandemic started in the neighborhood of a lab doing virus research, and people started floating the theory that the virus leaked from that lab, one of the first things I'd do is call my grant-funding team and ask them if we funded that lab. If Fauci didn't do that, he's a strange dude.

Or maybe he just knew enough about his field to know that this theory is lala land and catnip for conspiracy nutheads.

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

#712

Post by chasd00 »

dTal wrote: post #625
scrubs wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.

Why wouldn't you? All the research is ( supposed to be ) shared with the world anyway. If you're interested in a topic, and some other country is also interested, and they have a lab ready to go - why not throw some money at them to study your thing? Cheaper than building your own lab - especially when the phenomenon is regional.

How could you ever expect the CCP to be even remotely honest in any “share this with the world” R/D scenario?

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

#713

Post by bildung »

avereveard wrote: post #696
bildung wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in the world except the US right called it that, and it is indeed uncommon to name viruses after its place of origin.

Except for the Spanish flu, the Brazilian flu, almost every single mammarenavirus strain...

The Spanish Flu most probably originated in the US, not Spain. Spain just had a pretty free press and published much about it. Never heard about the Brazilian Flu and couldn't find out when and where this was supposed to be, so can't comment here.

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

#714

Post by bildung »

zpeti wrote: post #684
bildung wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody in the world except the US right called it that, and it is indeed uncommon to name viruses after its place of origin.

Literally any new variant has been called by its origin in the last year: -kent/brit variant -indian variant -california variant What are you on about?

> What are you on about?

Not those variants, obviously.

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

#715

Post by myfavoritedog »

arrosenberg wrote: post #95
harryf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a conflict of interest because Dr. Fauci wasn't gaining anything. The agency he is head of is specifically interested in infectious disease and has a large budget for grants. $120K per year pays for a couple plate of genetic samples and tech time to run them. Maybe in China you can run a few more for that cost, I don't know. As head of that agency, it's also his job to share his professional opinion with the…

Seriously, what's he getting here for his supposed "deception"?

Fauci has been covering this up since early on. Have you not followed the story of the released emails from the FOIA request? He knew this research was being conducted. He gave cover to those who attacked people like Sen Tom Cotton, who was trying to get this looked into from the beginning.

For this, his reward is a public servant's salary

Fauci is the highest paid employee in the Federal government.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/01/25/dr-...

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

#716

Post by shlant »

greenwich26 wrote: post #654
sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

Don't be absurd. Every single major social media platform banned even the most gentle suggestion that the lab was involved. And everyone who mentioned it was called "racist". Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true, they are all in major damage control. And you are trying to change the narrative by introducing some silly victim-blaming charade about "oppression complex",…

> Now that the scientific consensus is settling and lab leak does indeed seem to be true

That is absolutely not the scientific consensus

> It had an enormous amount of evidence

I've been following this since the beginning. No it didn't

> This paper was publicly available in March 2020

did you read the paper? it does not conclude what you insinuate it does.

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

#717

Post by op00to »

estaseuropano wrote: post #483
bglazer wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite astounded and confused at the sudden shift in discourse towards assuming that the lab leak theory must be true. It's not so much the theory itself that's surprising. Lab leak remains plausible but less probable then natural origins. The sudden shift is just baffling to me though. This huge new furor is due to anonymous CIA sources saying three people got sick? That's extremely tenuous evidence, as you state…

Natural origin and lab leak are in no way exclusive. The lab was collecting viruses and creating new ones - either one could have leaked. I don't have strong views as it's incredibly difficult to prove a negative (that it was not a leak), essentially you would have to identify and prove exactly the actual vector and even then it might be difficult to be conclusive. Lab leak seems however like a very likely scenario a…

Why is a lab leak a likely scenario? You say that with no evidence to back up the claim. I say a lab leak is highly unlikely.

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

#718

Post by isolli »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #701
isolli wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was censorship in the form of calling the hypothesis of a lab leak (distinct from the hypothesis of an engineered virus) a debunked conspiracy theory. The fact that the theory is considered acceptable again is what people are claiming vindication for, and rightly so.

Someone telling you that your theory is wrong isn't censorship dude.

Saying that a theory is wrong is different from saying it's a conspiracy theory.

In the second case, you’re smearing proponents of the theory. That’s a form of censorship.

Doing it for a theory that was not in any way proven wrong (then or now) is professional misconduct.

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

#719

Post by op00to »

TheBigSalad wrote: post #371
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…

It would be interesting to know how many scientists there are and how often they are admitted to the hospital. Then you could say how likely or unlikely the event was. Obviously there would be other factors like season, etc. But maybe this is a big outlier. We can't say without more numbers.

I used to work in and around BSL 2 and 3 labs. A leak was highly unlikely. I was way more concerned about catching something where the animals were kept.

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

#720

Post by op00to »

sbagel wrote: post #587

The amount of wildly delusional oppression complex in this thread is staggering, HN has really gone downhill. On the media 'not taking it seriously' - because there was no evidence whatsoever outside of conjecture and it was being pushed heavily by misinfo merchants. No grand conspiracy. Skepticism is a good default approach to take for info heavily pushed by such sources with no solid evidence. There were tons of ar…

You can’t rail against the government due to your own oppression if you’re making $350k+options without some serious mental gymnastics.
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