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The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

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Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#51

Post by aliasEli »

makomk wrote: post #28
emilgouliev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have a point if China was the only country that was able to keep their case numbers low, but dozens of countries did even better than China. Perhaps South Korea or New Zealand is to blame instead.

South Korea seems like a bad example, because they had twice as many Covid cases as China with less than a twentieth the population. Actually, it looks like even New Zealand has reported substantially more Covid cases per capita than China, and they're literally an island a thousand miles away from anywhere else. China's low case numbers really are remarkable.

South Korea did well at the early phases of the epidemic[0]. The problem now is that they don't have enough vaccines[1].

China used some draconian measures to achieve their results.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_South_...

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#52

Post by scotty79 »

ChemSpider wrote: post #50
Synaesthesia wrote: post #30

As far as I'm concerned it's largely irrelevant, because the real question is how the governments all handled the Covid crisis, once it was out in the open.

Not really. Once thing the lab leak theory would explain is that why the virus was so unexpectedly infective right from the start (adapted to human tissue e. g. via passage in humanized mice). In that sense, I hope that it was a lab leak. It will be better for us humans.

There's nothing unique about covid spreading to humans. It infects various species very easily. Cats, dogs, ferrets.

It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning. Humans are just more connected species than for example panthers.

As it grew to pandemic levels it spawned mutations slightly more adapted to humans.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#53

Post by scotty79 »

ChemSpider wrote: post #47

"Bats being bats..." What about the undeniable fact that China (the government) is blocking all international research into the origin of Covid. Is that only China being China?

Yes? They even mention it in the article about SARS and MERS approach before natural origin was estabilished.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#54

Post by scotty79 »

corty wrote: post #5
aritmo wrote: post #2

It's kinda obvious that the 'lab leak theory' was created just to attack China.

Of course the theory is used that way, it fits nicely into various political arguments. But that doesn't influence the veracity of the lab leak theory either way. Looking at the article, it also uses weak arguments to support its thesis: "She first takes aim at the popular version of the lab leak theory that posits that Covid was taken from nature and escaped in its wild form. The problem with that scenario, she told…

Marburg is a different virus. Coronaviruses infection very much depends on the size of viral load.

It's not like ebola where single micro droplet is enough.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#55

Post by aliasEli »

stavros wrote: post #35
pmoriarty wrote: post #12

"Ever since the SARS outbreak of 2002-03, after all, paper after paper and countless popular pieces have warned that, sooner or later, nature would produce the next big SARS." In 1995 Laurie Garrett warned about how the world could be brought to its knees by another airborne flu-like illness in "The Coming Plague" .[1] The first SARS and avian flu and swine flu, and CJD and mad cow disease were just more warnings tha…

> The first SARS and avian flu and swine flu, and CJD and mad cow disease were just more warnings that humans were continuing to play russian roulette with the way they were living with an using animals. How do we live with and use bats that makes viruses crossing over more likely, though?

I does not have to be an immediate infection from bats to humans. With both SARS and MERS an intermediate host transmitted it to humans.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#56

Post by willis936 »

_huayra_ wrote: post #7

As someone who is out of the loop on this and only a basic understanding, it seems very peculiar that scientists were so quickly to just jump on the "it must be bats and a wet market" thing so early on despite the Wuhan lab being right there. It's like when some out-of-control company creates a superfund site through gross negligence of industrial byproduct handling and then goes "idk cancer gonna cancer. you can't l…

Watch Contagion (2011). COVID-19 has been predicted for nearly 20 years, including the origin story. When the most likely explanation was predicted based on understanding, why should the politically charged finger pointers be given credence? An investigation should happen, but the lab-leak proponents appear to have ulterior motives rather than to innocently seek the truth.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#57

Post by aliasEli »

simonh wrote: post #22
lmm wrote: post #16

The article opens by pooh-poohing the idea that three WIV researchers with flu-like symptoms in November might have had Covid-19, then a couple of paragraphs later asserts that it's well-known that Covid-19 was already circulating in Wuhan in November. Isn't there a contradiction there? How widely accepted is the notion that Ebola is a bat virus? The last I heard (which was a while ago) the leading theory was a simia…

On the first point, they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment), and that even if they did have Covid instead of flu they might have got it outside the lab. There were people in Wuhan with Covid back then, but there were a lot more people with flu. The odds that any given three people with f…

> The reasons for this seems to be that bats are just too small and the virus load too thin to pose a threat to humans. So bat to human is very unlikely, but bat to cat is more plausible, and then cat (etc) to human also more plausible.

Some bat species, e.g. flying foxes are not really small and can weigh about 1 kg. Also bats are very strange that they can tolerate high virus loads without getting ill. There is a report that one of the Chinese researcher got infected while collecting samples.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#58

Post by willis936 »

jfktkrkfk wrote: post #27
adventured wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's going to be more criticism of China in the next 10 years than in the past 30 years combined, as their power continues to expand. It's going to be an ocean of criticism. China will have to go after a couple hundred million people. It's silly, to put it mildly.

You underestimate the power of AI and social credit like tools. Now add human-free justice systems and block lists to the mix.

Ridiculous. Software isn't magic. Hell, it's barely even impressive. Persecuting 100 million people outside your borders requires one thing: power. If China invades every nation and dissolves every other government then they can commit genocide on every other people. Until then, it's just one poster's deranged fantasy.

Good luck with any of that post-Manhattan Project.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#59

Post by aliasEli »

ChemSpider wrote: post #45
detaro wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't the next step not be "I wonder what the scientists consider that my basic understanding doesn't cover", not "scientists are lying"?

Being a scientist myself, I did that. But it could simply not understand how - in early 2020! - "the scientist" could be so sure and demonized the lab leak theory so fervently. And now in mid-2021, one of the few things that we know for sure is that some of the key scientists in the "It must be natural" camp have ties with the WIV and thus a strong conflict of interest that they did not disclose. And then of course,…

What do you mean "did not disclose", most scientists that had connections with WIV were pretty open about it.

Re: The Case Against the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory

#60

Post by zohch »

simonh wrote: post #22
lmm wrote: post #16

The article opens by pooh-poohing the idea that three WIV researchers with flu-like symptoms in November might have had Covid-19, then a couple of paragraphs later asserts that it's well-known that Covid-19 was already circulating in Wuhan in November. Isn't there a contradiction there? How widely accepted is the notion that Ebola is a bat virus? The last I heard (which was a while ago) the leading theory was a simia…

On the first point, they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment), and that even if they did have Covid instead of flu they might have got it outside the lab. There were people in Wuhan with Covid back then, but there were a lot more people with flu. The odds that any given three people with f…

> they're just saying that 3 people seeing a doctor about flu symptoms at that time of year is not unusual (most Chinese routinely go to hospitals for any medical treatment)

But what evidence is there that this was the case, that they just had normal flu like symptoms, and it was not more serious? What information at all do we have about their cases, and how trustworthy is this information, and why does this have to come out through leaked intelligence reports if China is so sure they have nothing to hide?

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