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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#161

Post by bobwaycott »

awb wrote: post #154
bobwaycott wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as? Assuming the best, the parent asked a bunch of questions (in an admittedly dismissive and argumentative way) to try and invite some kind of response that explains what China gets out of it, and what the world does next if we could somehow prove China created the original virus. So … let’s assume China created it. Now what? What’s the next step and response if it was an accident ? What’s the next step and res…

There are all kinds of forms of cooperation between countries: economic, political, financial, scientific, legal, regulatory, transportation, trade, military, etc. One option instead of full scale invasion is to cut back or attach strings to some of those forms of cooperation. This happens all the time. In this specific scenario, it might look like: Spend $100M upgrading Wuhan lab security and we won’t indefinitely b…

> There are all kinds of forms of cooperation between countries: economic, political, financial, scientific, legal, regulatory, transportation, trade, military, etc.

Oh, for sure. Those are certainly the broad categories of foreign policy and cooperative (and coercive) action.

I appreciate the specific ideas. I really am just curious what others’ ideas are on specific actions that could be taken if there was suddenly definitive proof tomorrow of origins.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#162

Post by sudosysgen »

garbagetime wrote: post #131
sudosysgen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't change that I was correcting an incorrect statement. Someone said the source was Reddit, it isn't, it has multiple sources, none of which are Reddit. As far as I'm concerned this is a complete non-sequitur.

The source is undeniably Reddit, in a sense (in the sense that it is opposed to a peer-reviewed journal). Regardless, I directly addressed a portion of your comment. I believe the portion was meant to borrow some of the creditability of serious journals and give it to Reddit - which is, perhaps, a bad idea, for the reasons I laid out. To label my comment a non-sequitur is ridiculous.

In no sense is the source Reddit, anymore than the source of a New York Times article is paper, or the source of my word is your screen.

Citing sources is meant to borrow the credibility of the source for elements of your argument. Not to attribute that credibility to the sheet of paper your pen is inking.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#163

Post by dnautics »

DarknessFalls wrote: post #33

Can someone explain why the furin cleavage site is unusual from a natural evolutionary view?

it kind of doesn't matter why it is, it just is (the why might also be unknowable, or too facilely reducible to just-so stories). And it's actually not TOTALLY unusual in coronaviruses, it's unusual in the coronavirus subfamily that COVID-19 comes from.

There is this very hilarious paper where they talk about this, but also rejigger the phylogenetic trees without describing how they pick what to put in and hide from the trees, e.g. they overload "trivially similar" sequences that happen to have furin cleavage sites, and then there are diagrams where they omit entire huge families of coronaviruses that don't contain the furin cleavage site to "lie to you with pictures" that the furin cleavage site is more common than it actually is.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7836551/

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#164

Post by dopa42365 »

xqcgrek2 wrote: post #10
karpierz wrote: post #4

Is there a way to disprove the lab leak hypothesis?

Yes - an animal host or reservoir is found. It's unusual after 2 years none has been found.

Turned out that it's basically impossible to test just us 7.something billion humans.

No one is out there testing a billion bats (or many more billions of mice and what not). Animal patient 0 is probably dead already anyway?

Good luck with that search.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#165

Post by sudosysgen »

neom wrote: post #119
sudosysgen wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't, and that's the issue, we can't know unless we find an ancestor virus. It's also very possible if could have wiped out the original virus in all original reservoirs. It's very difficult to do this now and for endemic viruses in general, and it took a very very long time to do for SARS where this wasn't a problem.

I thought they thought it might be pangolins? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32380510/

Yeah, that's a theory, but I don't think it's settled yet

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#166

Post by endominus »

dboreham wrote: post #122
suifbwish wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts are facts. The fact is in 2019 there were 39,397 wet markets in China. How many virology labs were there in China handling Corona-viruses? TWO. One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to. One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to a…

That's not how probability works. You'd need to wait for thousands of years and several pandemics to know if they are more or less likely to emerge next to a virology lab. And then you'd need to control for the fact that virology labs are better at detecting dangerous viruses than average humans. Like how the first confirmed cases in the US were in Davis --- because there's a specialist unit at UC Davis that was alre…

Oh, I never get to share this. Relevant SMBC comic; https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-09-08

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#167

Post by whatshisface »

awb wrote: post #134
whatshisface wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Does tobacco smoking cause cancer," isn't a biased question... What's biased is answering it with a "no."

Right but when asked by biased people, with biased intent, it solicits biased answers. It looks innocent on the surface but it’s anything but.

If it's the people and their intent then I think we're agreeing that it's not the questions themselves, but the ways they can be biased-ly answered.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#168

Post by carlivar »

mads wrote: post #132
suifbwish wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facts are facts. The fact is in 2019 there were 39,397 wet markets in China. How many virology labs were there in China handling Corona-viruses? TWO. One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to. One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to a…

Additionally the closest cave containing any viruses resembling SARS-Cov-2 are 1500 km away from Wuhan.

And when journalists tried to access those caves, the road was suddenly closed.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#169

Post by pault »

grover35 wrote: post #45
Jimmc414 wrote: post #3

[But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.] The entire foundation of science is based upon empirical observation and asking hypothetical questions. It is discouraging that scientists can make sta…

Quoted post unavailable.

I can’t tell if this is satire or not…

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#170

Post by sudosysgen »

riyadparvez wrote: post #133
sudosysgen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source isn't Reddit, it's a published virologist, and he himself cites over a hundred academic sources. Reddit is the medium.

Several top virologists have publicly tarred lab leak as racist conspiracy theory, while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's highly probable. Here's a very recent email that has been released yesterday [1]. So forgive me for not taking another virologist's take on why lab leak is improbable on redit seriously. [1] https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/148093069191961805…

So now a single passage out of context that accounts for 4 out of 1000 differing nucleotides is proof positive that the author's mind was absolutely settled that it was a lab leak? Give me a break.
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