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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

#131

Post by lamontcg »

plank_time wrote: post #103
simonh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

3 people who work on coronavirus research at a lab that is known for lax standards catch coronavirus, and you think it’s more plausible that they each caught it from outside?

There's no evidence they caught coronavirus

There's no evidence they were even sick

Nobody knows which workers they are or who their names are

The article in the WSJ that really ignited the story about the "three researchers at WIV" is the same guy that in 2002 co-authored the piece in the NYT with Judith Curry about Saddam Hussein's nuclear WMD program.

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

#132

Post by lamontcg »

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?

Directly via bat guano farming and direct human/bat contact (plus some presence of live bats in wet markets and the workers that need to clean those).

Indirectly via animals like minks/civits being farmed. The bats can occasionally infect those animals, when those zoonotic jumps happen there's then a large bioractor of animals in close contact, resulting in a "serial gain of function" experiment to produce a virus which is adapted to those animals and can spread.

Every factory farm is a stochastic virus research laboratory that isn't even BSL-1 trained.

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

#133

Post by Maursault »

mandmandam wrote: post #122
albinofrenchy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses this very point. I have 0 trust in the CCP to do or say anything not in it's own interest, but on the whole the "They found a novel virus in the wild, sampled it, and then it escaped their lab" seems a lot less likely than "Some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, and got sick".

> "Some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, and got sick". More like, "some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, a thousand miles from the nearest bat population, while they were hibernating; and this all just happened to be within a few miles of a laboratory with sketchy safety history that literally studies coronaviruses , and didn't let independent examiners in for a year, even then…

>and this all just happened to be within a few miles of a laboratory with sketchy safety history that literally studies coronaviruses

If the argument is:

1) a lab was built in Wuhan that studied coronaviruses, then a global coronavirus pandemic originated in Wuhan

2) Therefore the lab caused the global pandemic

then it is a fallacious argument.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

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

#134

Post by lamontcg »

nickdothutton wrote: post #81

Skimmed the article but failed to see any evidence for a zoonotic origin. Did I miss it?

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427830v3

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00709-1.pdf

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

#135

Post by mikem170 »

forcry wrote: post #117
mikem170 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't the article cover the scenarios you mentioned? The article said that the lab's normal job was to look for new bat viruses, and that it's pretty hard to get infected from a qtip swabbed over a bats anus stored in a stabilizing solution. The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin, and it's not unusual for it to take many years to figure these things out…

>The bottom line is that the evidence we have at this time points to nature as the most probable origin.. Some scientists think otherwise, quite strongly in the opposite direction, it seems.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeW5sI-R1Qg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbbJaaMG7Bs

I found this link [0] that seems to debunk, in a lot of detail, the congressional testimony of these two physicists on the specifics of their claims for evidence of gain of function manipulation in the gentic sequence of covid-19.

That jives with another source [1] that explained, amongst other things, that there's genetic evidence covid-19 evolved in animals with intact immune systems, not in a lab.

[0] https://respectfulinsolence.com/2021/06/11/cggcgg-the-latest...

[1] https://leelabvirus.host/covid19/origins-part3

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

#136

Post by forcry »

scotty79 wrote: post #52
ChemSpider wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>It wasn't uniquely adapted to humans in the beginning.

Seems wrong.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92388-5#Abs1

>Conspicuously, we found that the binding of the SARS-CoV-2 S protein was higher for human ACE2 than any other species we tested, with the ACE2 binding energy order, from highest to lowest, being human > pangolin > dog > monkey > hamster > ferret > cat > tiger > bat > civet > horse > cow > snake > mouse.

>>These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission.

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

#137

Post by albinofrenchy »

canoebuilder wrote: post #123
albinofrenchy wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article addresses this very point. I have 0 trust in the CCP to do or say anything not in it's own interest, but on the whole the "They found a novel virus in the wild, sampled it, and then it escaped their lab" seems a lot less likely than "Some random person ran across a novel virus in the wild, and got sick".

There is a wide literature on this at this point. Please don’t make conclusive statements that also indicate you don’t have the faintest bit of background in what you are talking about. At this point, this is not a complete black box, “novel virus.” There is a scientific understanding of the virus. There are known related viruses in the wild, just not anywhere near Wuhan. There are multi-pathway paper trails linking…

> At this point, this is not a complete black box, “novel virus.”

Not sure why you insist on being pedantic on word choice here. It obviously isn't a novel virus at this point; but it was in 2019 -- or whenever WIV would have found it.

I'd also bet dollars to donuts you have no experience in virology apart from participating in online forums. Which I don't think is any kind of point against you; but it makes it weird when you come out swinging with "you don’t have the faintest bit of background in what you are talking about."

> I don’t mean to be too harsh on you, the media environment around all this has been so bizarre, how various waves of suppression have ebbed and flowed. But if you’ve known where to look, are an independent thinker, not one who just repeats what the large media bullhorns are trumpeting, and can connect dots for yourself, there’s been discussion, discourse, evidence gathering of the very likely source of this virus since the beginning.

I laughed out loud at this. If this is satire it was really well done.

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

#138

Post by forcry »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #86
morpheos137 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest thing that made the pandemic so bad outside of china was large fractions of the population not taking it seriously. That said this pandemic was objectively not that bad by historical standards.

The US was a major source of anti vaccination FUD. And while in the US vaccination is stalling because of "muh freedom" EU governments developed an app that stops unvaccinated people from entering restaurants and airplanes. The latest 3D chess move was letting children get the jab without their parents permission. I was seriously worried about our civilization for a moment but sanity prevailed. We will be at 90% soon…

> "muh freedom"

Freedom is costly. A lot of people died, and I mean, really, "A LOT", and I am talking people at the prime of their lives, for freedoms that we enjoy all over the world.

"muh freedom" indeed.

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

#139

Post by lamontcg »

rossdavidh wrote: post #100

The real motive behind most of these kind of articles: "...loose talk about a lab leak elevates tensions between China and the United States, undermining the collaborative research we need to understand this pandemic and prevent the next one." Translation: "please shut up about this, it doesn't matter now and we need to get China calmed down, and this talk is making them defensive and therefore uncooperative." The re…

The real motive behind most of the lab leak articles:

"Please shut up about zoonotic origins, we don't want to have to worry about factory farming of animals, and for fucks sake could you imagine a world where we had to admit the goddamn VEGANS were right? That certainly can't ever happen. They're already insufferable assholes, could you imagine?"

(p.s. be very, very angry at China so you don't think about the US policy response that wound up with half a million Americans dead -- once you pin fault on someone that allows everyone later to neatly escape any guilt)

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