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Lab Leak 2.0?

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Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#171

Post by Gigachad »

croes wrote: post #81

Without wanting to or being able to contradict the article, some of it sounds like the creationists. Because we cannot fully explain evolution, we do not know all the ancestors and the result is so complex, there must be a creator. I hear exactly the same argumentation from creationists when it comes to the development of the human eye, for example.

It would be more credible if you knew for a fact that there are people manufacturing and studying eyes. Even if you don't know exactly how the eye you are looking at got there.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#172

Post by jazzyjackson »

bArray wrote: post #158
option wrote: post #27

a coincidence which is almost always ignored is that China had huge Hong Kong protests with no resolution in sight until a global pandemic hit halting all and any street protests there.

I believe it's important to separate China and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). I don't doubt that the Hong Kong protests were a major problem for the CCP and that COVID allowed them to implement a series of restrictions and laws to stop protests. I also don't doubt the very real possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan (in fact, given how the CCP have responded, I find it very likely). What I do doubt is that this virus…

To participate in this intriguing line of inquiry,

It may be a case of aligned incentives. A new virus occurs (even CCP does not know whether it is lab-leaked), and it is allowed to exist for some time (doctors arrested for spreading rumors). Definitely prefer incompetence to malice here, but maybe a decision was made to "sit back and assess" while the problem grew more serious.

Faking terroristic plots and blaming protesters is old hat, and the outcome of cracking down on the free territories while you still have the #2 Navy in the world are predictable. Hong Kong is not alone in desiring independence, and Beijing is not willing to lose face. A re-run of Tienanmen Square was starting to look inevitable. What if instead of that well-trod path of war, they chose to boost the poll numbers by allowing a crisis to occur and saving the day?

The cost of an economic slow down, well it's a risky calculus, but if the pandemic becomes global, they will not be left that far behind the competition. In fact, a totalitarian regime may be better-able to enforce health mandates and become productive again sooner.

What's more, USA was also dealing with a kind of dueling rebellion between BLM and Trump-Forever types. Perhaps the two agreed that the world needed a cooling-off.

/tin-foil

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#173

Post by cassepipe »

alex_young wrote: post #132

If the author actually had some kind of evidence that there was a lab leak source of Omicron, don’t you think it would be mentioned in the opening paragraphs of the blog? Instead we have a long list of connect-the-dots tweets, out of context quotes, and unsubstantiated speculation going on for 2/3s of the post before we even get to the Omicron stuff. The meat of the speculation is a scary looking graph plotting genet…

Have you actually read it ? Can you give your opinion about the ratio between silent/non-silent mutations ? Because it is the main and most compelling argument.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#174

Post by netizen-936824 »

rob_c wrote: post #130
carlivar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do they use?

Serious people on serious topics, journals, peer reviewed publications, non anonymous blogs, large email threads... Almost anything other than a) social media and b) anonymous platforms

Twitter is not anonymous and the authors have their real names attached. Their credentials are easy to verify

It's not peer reviewed but that shouldn't discount the opinions of people who work in the field

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#175

Post by rhino369 »

omginternets wrote: post #12
torstenvl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Millions of people are dead. I think it's worth having an objective public debate about what steps would be appropriate to reduce the risk of this happening again. I don't see that "be mad at science" has anything to do with an insistence on an honest exploration and testing of hypotheses. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums up the scientific approach as follows: "Test ideas by experiment and observation. Build on those ideas t…

I suspect you have a bit of a straw man in mind. The opposition would likely say something like: "GoF is the best means at our disposal to fight diseases much worse than COVID".

We just need to hope that whoever discovers that much-worse-than-covid virus doesn't scratch their nose at the wrong time and carries it to the world.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#176

Post by chaostheory »

If we're revisiting this subject, it's time to revisit these articles

"LEAKED GRANT PROPOSAL DETAILS HIGH-RISK CORONAVIRUS RESEARCH The proposal, rejected by U.S. military research agency DARPA, describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses."

https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

"Lab-Made? SARS-CoV-2 Genealogy Through the Lens of Gain-of-Function Research"

https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

"RaTG13 – the undeniable evidence that the Wuhan coronavirus is man-made"

https://nerdhaspower.weebly.com/ratg13-is-fake.html

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#177

Post by tehjoker »

TeeMassive wrote: post #151
tehjoker wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world has been blanketed in Coronavirus and as far as I know Africa has seen a mix of action that has been different from how Western countries have experienced it. The rates of infection are different, the rates of vaccination are different. Two VOCs have come out of South Africa, but who's to say that an earlier version from 2020 wasn't bumping around the continent and returned to South Africa? Everyone…

> The entire world has been blanketed in Coronavirus and as far as I know Africa has seen a mix of action that has been different from how Western countries have experienced it. The rates of infection are different, the rates of vaccination are different. Two VOCs have come out of South Africa, but who's to say that an earlier version from 2020 wasn't bumping around the continent and returned to South Africa? You're…

All I'm saying is that my bias is towards this virus being a natural phenomenon and I think waiting for the full context will settle the case. Jumping to conclusions on the basis of flimsy evidence mainly serves political agendas. We simply will not know for a long time, months or years, where Omicron came from and that's uncomfortable, but we have to sit with that.

If you DO want to get conspiratorial, you can watch this 2001 Bush administration pandemic simulation where China blames the US for a smallpox lab leak. It's pretty amusing to me to watch the US administration astounded by their luck of COVID-19 first being identified in China try to flip the script on their simulated exercise. My feeling is this Omicron theory is trying to breathe life back into the original lab leak theory by proxy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we7Map5Pho0

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#178

Post by cassepipe »

tunesmith wrote: post #88
d23 wrote: post #79

I'm open minded, but my bullshit detectors started going off around the point where it was casually implied that we all know and it is widely accepted that delta was leaked from a lab. I tried googling it but could find nothing. Then I looked at the two sources the author links: > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 Neither of these have nearly enough evidence…

I had never heard that before either. I remember multiple sources saying the discovery originated in India. I think an essay that represents surprising information as obvious is usually a good indicator of bias.

You misread because of a poorly worded sentence. She does not claim Delta's origin was a lab leak at all but that there has been a lab leak. Instead she implicitly compares Omicron and Delta showing that Delta did evolved naturally whereas it is unlikely of Omicron.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#179

Post by cassepipe »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #105
d23 wrote: post #79

I'm open minded, but my bullshit detectors started going off around the point where it was casually implied that we all know and it is widely accepted that delta was leaked from a lab. I tried googling it but could find nothing. Then I looked at the two sources the author links: > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4371212 > https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4382708 Neither of these have nearly enough evidence…

I had the same reaction. Those articles don’t back up that claim one bit. And I cant make sense of the timings of the events described in those articles either and how that would line up with a supposed lab leak of delta. Some of the other points made in this article were mildly compelling to me (though I don’t know enough on this topic to be able to poke holes) but that delta claim and lack of convincing data to bac…

You misread because of a poorly worded sentence. She does not claim Delta's origin was a lab leak at all but that there has been a lab leak. Instead she implicitly compares Omicron and Delta showing that Delta did evolved naturally whereas it is unlikely of Omicron.

Re: Lab Leak 2.0?

#180

Post by cassepipe »

monocasa wrote: post #9

All of the GoF research procedures I've read stress natural evolution, but still rely on random mutations at the end of the day, which would still leave you with a natural looking count of silent mutations in the general case. As a GoF researcher you don't want to cull 'silent' mutations because those are a major source of building blocks for useful mutations.

Damn this is the first comment contrarian to the article that acually addresses the main argument : Silent vs non-silent mutations ratio. The article pretty much convinced me and I am not sure I am really unconvinced yet but I have to thank you.
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