501–510 of 631 posts
This github page is the most interesting (fairly apolitical) read on the lab leak hypothesis that I've seen to date: https://project-evidence.github.io/ After reading it, it seems most likely to me that patient 0 was a person who collected bats for the lab with insufficient safety equipment, but the article itself doesn't really present a strong conclusion.
Well I hope that at least the next lab-made pandemic will insert some beneficial mutations to humanity. In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another vir…
Isn’t the lab leak hypothesis saying nature did this make this, but scientists who were studying (and allowing) the natural processes accidentally leaked it? Which is the main argument against this kind of function research - there’s little gain compared to the risk.
“We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,”
They were denied over Gain of Function concerns, and bam a year later the only Sars virus to be ever observed with those exact human-specific cleavage sites at the S1 S2 junction ravages the planet starting 500m from WIV.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
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> The best argument gain of function proponents have for their research (besides weaponization of course) is to create the next big thing in a lab first so that we can figure out how to neutralize it Did that actually help in this case? Or are gain-of-function advocates the science equivalent of employees who want to rewrite your webapp in the language du jour ? They say it's for the benefit of the company (humanity)…
I don't understand how this argument has any traction at all. My understanding is we had the COVID vaccines formulated within weeks of the initial outbreak. The problem is, it then took many months of large scale testing, and then scaling production to make the vaccine readily available. In the meantime, the virus spread across the globe and mutated into forms that the vaccine isn't very effective against. Treatments…
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> What would you accept as evidence of "no lab involvement"? Read the last sentence.
You seem to want to play a guessing game.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. The Chinese said it came from a market, but never found a single animal in that market with COVID.
It appears reasonable to assign COVID lab leak hypothesis a higher prior, in Bayesian terms, just based on the many institutions/individuals whose image/status would it directly or indirectly damage if found true (NIH, DARPA, the US, WIV, CCP), and which therefore would be compelled to paint it as unlikely.
If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence. The main issue I have with the 'lab leak' theory is that I haven't seen much evidence one way or another. Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence. I personally don't see any issue with the idea…
>Hitchens' razor applies- what can be stated without evidence can be as easily dismissed without evidence Say mr X was seen at the crime scene at 10 am, he also knew the victim and lots of people have seen them fight a week ago, the victim had just came out of the bank with 20k$ in cash in a bag, mr X who's broke have been seen driving a car a month after the crime worth 18k$. There is no evidence mr X killed the vic…
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The liability-free fast tracked vaccine that doesn't actually mitigate transmission greatly restored my belief that we might survive the next large event. It was rolled out quickly, and it actually greatly reduced mortality. Reducing transmission would've been epic, but we can't win them all. The CDC's ever changing guidelines were good, but their not admitting that at some point the had been wrong or worse were flat…
Imposing mandatory curfews was never reasonable. That was never justified on an evidence-based medicine basis, and it violated the fundamental human right of free assembly. Those involved in policing such policies should be ashamed of themselves.
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It does. Knowing what caused this should be important, so it doesn't happen again. If it happens naturally and randomly, there's nothing we can do. If it was a lab leak, maybe some special precautions should be taken, or such things should not be done in labs with iffy security practices... or maybe even not done at all. Many workplace (and general) safety rules were written because someone has died doing something (…
> Knowing what caused this should be important, so it doesn't happen again I really don't see that. If it is really true that both options are indistinguishably plausible, then what do you in response to this one event is absolutely meaningless. The next event could as likely come from "the other source", or from a new entirely one you don't even know about. Your only reasonable option _in any case_ is to just streng…
How is it “absolutely meaningless” if you can narrow the chance of happening of the one you have control over? Is a global pandemic is a rare occurrence already don’t you make it more rare if you mitigate the risk of one of the possible sources?
The problem with this is it is full of utterly debunked nonsense that Ebright knows full well has been addressed. It's Brandolini's law [0] in action, and no matter how many times virologists rebut these positions the same old tripe gets wheeled out again, and again, and again. If you ignore rebuttals and just repeat yourself + get 20k likes on twitter how many people are going to see a rebuttal like the excellent on…
>It's about a separate personal desire to regulate supposedly risky research. Referring to: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787 So a paper on a lab-made coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells from Wuhan on topic about the origins of a coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells that caused the pandemic from Wuhan, is a separate personal desire? >It's about a completely diffe…
The other lab leak hypothesis is that a specimen collected and cultured by scientists, infected a lab employee and this patient zero then transmitted the virus to others. This is a plausible option, and it is being researched. However it is less plausible than wild transmission based on a simple numbers game. What is more likely, a breakout infection cause by a dozen scientists specifically trained and equipped against this possibility, or a transmission to one of the millions of other people who routinely interact with these bat populations? Both are possible, but one is much more likely. Before covid19, WIV had published research indicating that novel coronaviruses routinely jump from bats to humans in that part of the world. Most of these viruses aren't don't last in human hosts, but it's clear that it was only a matter time before something nasty got through. After all, it's already happened once before.
The real nail in the coffin is that research[0] has shown that there were at least two, independent transmissions of sars-cov2 to humans. For this to happen as part of a lab leak it would require WIV to have found and cultivated 2 different strains of sars-cov2, and then each of those strains would have to escape the lab.