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Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

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Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#521

Post by namose »

shusaku wrote: post #340
foreigner wrote: post #228

What I don't understand about this argument is why does it matter? Even if COVID was created in a lab in Wuhan they obviously didn't release it on purpose as a weapon (if they had they wouldn't have released it in Wuhan). There are any number of other labs around the world working on similarly dangerous research that could get released on accident.

It matters because if geopolitics. Any other reason given is laughably naive. For sure we should use this as a lesson to increase safe guards regardless. But discussing those measures would require actual domain specific knowledge, so you’ll never see it on HackerNews (to speak nothing of Twitter!)

You speak as if this is a bad thing. If the U.S. funded research that caused the covid outbreak, the international community should lose trust in us, especially since public officials dismissed (perhaps unfairly) theories that would have put the U.S. at fault. Obviously, this goes doubly for China.

Increasing safeguards relies on us knowing what the vectors of outbreak are. It matters if this was caused by an underpaid lab assistant selling animals that were meant to be contained, or a random person catching animals to sell, or a researcher that didn't quarantine after being bit. The safeguards should be different.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#522

Post by igouy »

tharne wrote: post #504
igouy wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to want to play a guessing game.

> COVID was never found in any animal from the Huanan market Seems pretty straightforward to me. The Chinese said it came from a market, but never found a single animal in that market with COVID.

And the question I asked someone else was —

What would you accept as evidence of "no lab involvement"?

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#524

Post by isitmadeofglass »

chmod600 wrote: post #102
scotchmi_st wrote: post #45

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…

There is also no evidence that it came from animals directly. Given that there are really only two plausible hypotheses, and nondirect evidence of either, we have to speculate based on circumstantial evidence. And if one hypothesis is floated around the media, we need to raise the other one as well. I'll also point out that some people don't like to believe that there can be global media conspiracies, even though the…

Where have I heard this kind of reasoning before? Oh yes, I remember:

There is no direct evidence for god not existing. Given that there are only two possible hypothesis, that he exists and that he doesn’t, we need to teach both sides to children, and the case for a 4000 year old planet with dinosaur bones buried to confuse scientists must be taught at equal level!

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#525

Post by isitmadeofglass »

jmyeet wrote: post #171
scotchmi_st wrote: post #45

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…

The problem is there are really only two contenders for Covid origins: lab origin (I much prefer this label than "lab leak") and zoonotic origin. Zoonotic origin is the obvious choice. As a general rule, nature is way better at evolving pathogens than humans are. The problem with this theory is we haven't yet found the wild population from which Covid originated. Now this can take time, sometimes years. But for SARS/…

> But for SARS/MERS this was established relatively quickly.

And for HIV or took close to a decade, so let’s see where we are in 2030. The argument “we haven’t found it after 2 years so it must not exist” borders conspiracy theory.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#526

Post by hackerlight »

yonaguska wrote: post #420
hackerlight wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They might not be conspiring with each other, but they are certainly are taking orders from the same places. I don't see enough evidence for this claim. The simpler explanation is that they're lazy (as most humans are) and scared to dissent (as most humans are), therefore they don't bother doing original work that challenges the accepted wisdom and they copy each other. I do have some evidence for this. Within hour…

> Lol, very few people are minimizing Azov or other far-right groups in Ukraine. Everyone knows they're a huge problem Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse. My problem is with the fact that the US did it at all, whether we agree or disagree on the success of that operation isn't part of my point. As for media being…

> Your response to the USA spearheading propaganda efforts to support far right neo-nazi's is- 1) they failed and 2) russian nazi's are worse.

No, my response is that (1) it's an insane unsupported conspiracy theory, (2) which misdirects from the actual fascist dictatorship that uses gaslighting and DARVO to trick conspiracy minded fools into thinking that actually the democratically elected centrists over in Ukraine are the real fascists.

Consider this. STOPFAKE, an alleged arm of US pro-fascist propaganda, whitewashes C14 by calling it a "community organization", yet the U.S. State Department classifies C14 as a "nationalist hate group". Why would the U.S. State Department do that if the goal of the US led conspiracy (which presumably involves the U.S. State Department) is to paint these groups as heroes? The claims are internally inconsistent and self-refuting.

> USA spearheading propaganda efforts

More DARVO. The US has been trying to respond to Russian propaganda efforts. What Putin is doing is out of Hilter's propaganda playbook for Sudetenland and Poland. If you knew anything about Putin's election interference in 2016, and about how Xi and Putin are weaponizing social media against the US population, and about the Kremlin's propaganda campaign to portray Ukraine as a fascist threat so as to have a justification for the invasion, you would perhaps not automatically assume such a cynical position. That doesn't mean that such efforts haven't sometimes failed, of course, in fact I'd be surprised if they had a perfect track record. But failures and mistakes don't mean that anti-propaganda efforts are themselves concerted propaganda.

> 1) they failed

This is a variation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. No evidence to the contrary is deemed sufficient because the conspiracy theory is this amorphous thing that has to be true regardless of how well it is falsified by counterexamples.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/ukraine-has-nazi-probl...

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-movem...

> Unrelated, they were an organization that existed long before Russia's invasion

More DARVO. They were nascent at best and had no institutional acknowledgement (and let's not forget that pre-Maidan was a pro-Russian government, so to the extent that Azov was a thing pre-2014, the blame for that goes on their shoulders). Then Russia invaded, and that forced a change in the status quo out of necessity and made eliminating far-right paramilitary groups pragmatically infeasible. Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing who can fight to defend their small population.

> I'm not going to take the time to prove that right now.

If someone alleges a conspiracy theory and doesn't present compelling evidence, it can be safely dismissed.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#527

Post by bialpio »

8note wrote: post #498
bialpio wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (...) it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease (...) I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnecte…

The Spanish flu also happened in a much less medically advanced society, that didn't understand how viruses work

Bacteriology was already developing at that time, first vaccines were already in use (for none other than a viral disease!), and the existence of a pathogen smaller than bacteria was already hypothesized. The response to Spanish flu was also eerily similar to what was recommended in the first year of COVID: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#/media/File%3AIl....

All that aside, your comment does not really prove that "nature cannot come up with something so transmissive", which was the claim here.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#528

Post by bialpio »

haswell wrote: post #494
bialpio wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (...) it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease (...) I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnecte…

I do think this is an appropriate counter-example, but I’m curious how much modern medicine would change the impact (and preserve the case for optimism).

Rapid vaccine development does indeed give some cause for optimism. Some counters that I'd have to that would be a potential resurgence of polio in the US [1] and the appearance of drug-resistant pathogens (typhoid fever in this case) [2], just to keep us on our toes and curb our enthusiasm...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7133e2.htm [2] https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/watch/xdr-typhoid-fever...

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#529

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

initplus wrote: post #477
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your information is out of date. The paper I linked to shows that both early strains of the virus were present at the Huanan market. That is already very strong evidence that the market was the origin point of the original outbreak in Wuhan, and not merely a superspreader event. We now know that early cases were centered on the market, that both strains were present in the market, and that the types of wild animals t…

The market is still involved lab leak hypothesis or not. The market may still be the place where the earliest animal-human crossover occurred, even if the lab leak hypothesis is correct. Say a group of animals intended to be euthanized were actually clandestinely sold at the market, it's completely reasonable that the virus could have mutated at the lab in the animal population before being transmitted to humans. In…

This is why conspiracy theories never completely die. They can be made more and more convoluted in order to avoid falsification.

You're now just asserting, without any evidence, that the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent animals to the Huanan market. We already know that wild animals from the countryside are shipped into the market to be sold, and that this is exactly how the original SARS outbreak in 2002 happened. So why would you suggest that the animals came from a lab?

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#530

Post by seer-zig »

igouy wrote: post #522
tharne wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> COVID was never found in any animal from the Huanan market Seems pretty straightforward to me. The Chinese said it came from a market, but never found a single animal in that market with COVID.

And the question I asked someone else was — What would you accept as evidence of "no lab involvement"?

Not the poster you're responding to, but a start is to allow external investigation into the labs by a third party.
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