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WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

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Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#191

Post by reilly3000 »

stvswn wrote: post #134
reilly3000 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lab was located there because the wet markets and local bat population have been a historical epicenter of respiratory diseases.

there is no local bat population near Wuhan, China -- nor is Wuhan known to be some sort of wet market epicenter. It has wet markets like any Chinese city would. The reason the wet market theory came to prominence was because commerce seemed like a reasonable explanation for how a novel coronavirus showed up so far away from its known animal reservoir (bats). The reason the WIV is in Wuhan is the same as the reason w…

Understood, I should have been more clear that it is the largest urban center close to a large and interesting bat population i.e. hundreds of miles away. Certainly that's not the only wet market, and I just discovered a paper claiming that there were no bats actually being sold at that particular market:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2

Coincidentally, my sister lived in Wuhan for 3 years. Prior to 2020, I had to explain its location to people here in the US, but that is no longer the case!

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#192

Post by dehrmann »

> But months later, when WHO released its dense report on its mission to Wuhan, the U.N. health agency concluded that a leak of the virus from the lab was “extremely unlikely” to have caused COVID-19.

It took so long to get investigators in (wasn't it over a year after the outbreak started), I have no idea what the point even was, and I'm suspicious that WHO would make any claim beyond "its hard to say at this point."

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#193

Post by curation »

aesh2Xa1 wrote: post #160
rcurry wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we do block them on Facebook and Twitter.

What are you talking about (serious)? Dissent is legal and will not result in imprisonment in the US. I don't even subscribe to Facebook or Twitter by choice. I definitely wouldn't subscribe to imprisonment by choice, haha. If you're concerned about these platforms controlling their content privately, don't use them.

Assange?

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#194

Post by lamontcg »

m0llusk wrote: post #89
Phil_Latio wrote: post #50

Everyone with common sense must assume that a lab which does experiments on Corona viruses is the most likely source and not the food market nearby. It's really that simple...

That is really far off from the reality of determining viral origins. Both SARS and MERS were recent coronavirus outbreaks that have had their origins rigorously pinpointed. Did this happen because governments cooperated and journalists provided important information? Not even close. Governments interfered with research into SARS and MERS origins for political reasons and journalists never really contributed anything…

MERS was rigorously pinpointed because camels were filthy with it, it was a slam dunk.

SARS-CoV-1 has never been rigorously pinpointed. Civets clearly got infected with it, but its not clear if they were infected by bats first or were infected by humans (similarly to minks and SARS-CoV-2). It wasn't until 2013 when WIV1 was isolated and is the most likely related virus in bats in Yunnan. WIV1 may be able to infect humans directly, but it is only 95% homologous with SARS-CoV-1.

The WIV1 sample was also found in bats in the same province as the RaTG13 virus which is closest overall so far to SARS-CoV-2, but the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened about 700+ miles away in Guangdong. It still isn't clear how that happened, just a lot of handwaving about the movement of animals like civets around China.

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#195

Post by lamontcg »

ChemSpider wrote: post #80
timy2shoes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the jumping of viruses from animals to humans due to keeping them in close proximity is so unlikely that it's happened hundreds of times before (e.g. SARS, MERS, Spanish flu, bubonic plague).

The bat lady herself says that these type of bats are not in or near Wuhan: “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a kno…

The bat viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-1 were found 700+ miles away from Guangdong where the first SARS-CoV-1 outbreak was. There's never been any explanation of how that happened, but there's no distraction of a BSL4 lab in Guangdong so there's no lab leak theory.

But that is proof that a virus in bats can jump to humans 700+ miles away.

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#196

Post by JohnHaugeland »

peter422 wrote: post #155
JPKab wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To add to your point, it was a chain of improbable coincidences: Pandemic starting at the doorstep of a lab (that is not located in remotely close proximity to the Yunnan caves where the previous SARS viruses were originating from) Previous SARS virus outbreaks (SARS1 and MERS) had zoonotic reservoirs identified in months with dramatically fewer resources, but coincidentally, with vast resources and global efforts, n…

> Previous SARS virus outbreaks showed a gradual evolution of a virus to progressively becoming more infectious to humans, and equivalent genetic changes in the virus that can be traced. This one started out as highly infectious, and until several months in, mutations weren't very significant. Both of these statements are so inaccurate. It took many years before scientists were certain what the reservoir was for SARS…

Imagine trying to say that a statement you disagree with is equivalent to large scale attempts to prevent the discovery of the origin of a disease, causing more death

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#197

Post by lamontcg »

calibas wrote: post #126

So the best guess is that it came from wild bats, and there was a lab right next to the initial outbreak site that was studying wild bats. That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence and at the very least deserves further investigation. It could have been just an innocent mistake. A researcher got the disease while collecting bats out in the wild, but the lab never got a sample of the d…

> That could just be a coincidence, but it's a pretty remarkable coincidence

Not really.

It was always likely to be found in a major population center where people cluster tightly, where the r0 would be higher, where superspreading events would hit more people, and where there would be more educated hospital staff that would notice something going on.

Wuhan is the largest city in central China. It is also about as close to Yunnan where the bats are, as Guangdong is (where the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak happened).

If we understood what kind of intermediate animals might be involved in the zoonotic transfer and what their movement was around China, I strongly suspect that the chances that it was observed in Wuhan are something closer to 1-in-12 than 1-in-1000. And this is the second round, the first roll of the dice we had was with SARS-CoV-1 where we rolled a different number and it hit Guangdong.

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#198

Post by trasz »

iammisc wrote: post #154
trasz wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don’t stay silent, but the way the US works, it simply doesn’t matter.

If we had 100% incontrivertible evidence COVID came from a CHinese lab, I can 100% guarantee you nothing would happen to china.

If we had 100% evidence it came from an US lab, nothing would happen either. Your point being?

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#199

Post by handmodel »

s5300 wrote: post #161
handmodel wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted an article on HN at the time from a Chinese-born Harvard Public Health PHd who was writing in winter of 2020 he thought it could have come from the lab. It actually wasn't downvoted too much - plenty of people here found it plausible - but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me. I was told I had no idea how viruses work (this is true enough - I don't have a degree in b…

>but the amount of people saying I was stupid and gullible has really stuck with me. The amount of people saying something about you on a mostly anonymous internet message board has really stuck with you? This is, probably for your own good, a decent indicator that you should stop visiting said website.

I mean you are here now lol

I like this website. I feel like I learn a lot - mostly on discussions about fields I only have outside knowledge of.

Its not like I was personally offended but had the realization that it is possible for large groups of smart people to convince themselves of something even when it is not true (or at the very least, have no actual data to know if its true)

Re: WHO inquiry chief 'had concerns' about lab close to first Covid cases

#200

Post by diragon »

rcurry wrote: post #144
cm2187 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to think we don't put doctors in jail when they raise the alarm on a new virus.

Well, we do block them on Facebook and Twitter.

This is of course a joke, come on you guys. Nobody seriously compares jailing people to blocking them on social media.
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