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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#181
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me play the game. If covid was caused by a lab leak, I think the right question to ask is: who benefits (did benefit) by the leak? And remember that number of dead people is something that governments don’t care about (i.e., governments easily go into war every now and then: it’s clear they couldn’t care less about civilians).

Another question you should ask: Who insisted it almost certainly wasn’t a lab leak, and who possibly had motives to deny it?

I dunno actually, who has actually been arguing that it couldn’t be a lab leak? I’ve generally seen people arguing the position: there’s no evidence for it having been a leak. This second hand story about a low-confidence classified report doesn’t push me much in either direction. It is possible, though.

What do we do if it leaked? Dangerous thing are handled in labs. We should double check the handling protocols based on the unknown possibility that it was a leak, just to be safe. I bet there are more dangerous things than COVID in all sorts of labs.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#182
https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...

Isn't this a very important part of the context? And shouldn't we be sceptical when it comes sources directly from the state or industrial complexes?

We live in a realpolitical but PR narrated world.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Trump made accusations of a lab leak, there were few facts pointing to that conclusion. Furthermore, the statements he made were dangerous to Asian Americans in the US. Later, as more facts came to light, the lab-leak theory became more plausible. Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a person any kind of vindication in retrospect

I’ll never understand this take. “The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.

To be fair the lab leak theory implies those working at the lab knew what they were doing, had a decent idea of the risks, continued to do so anyway, then were incompetent enough to allow the leak to occur. Or worse, deliberately released it. Viruses spread from animals to humans with some regularity all over the world and such an occurrence doesn't imply incompetence among those who should know better etc.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#184
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're commenting on a report that the (US Government's) DoE is saying it was lab leaked , so... the US isn't actively supporting any cover up, or they're doing a profoundly terrible job.

Just to clarify, because the nuance is getting lost, they are not suggesting it was lab made. A naturally occurring virus can be studied and then accidentally leaked from a lab.

But yes, there's no indication that the US is trying to cover anything up. And China is secretive about all sorts of things, they're an authoritarian government.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also article mentions FBI has “moderate” confidence it was lab leak. I find that very interesting given it wouldn’t be so much based on scientific analysis but some intelligence collection the FBI has.

If you repeat a lie often enough, even the at first reluctant will start to believe it. That's how the propaganda machine typically works. The more these claims based on minimal new evidence are repeated, the more it seems the virus may have potentially been released by nefarious actors as an attack on the population. It's not implausable for an entity with knowledge and access to a virus being studied, to release a…

[deleted]

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Trump made accusations of a lab leak, there were few facts pointing to that conclusion. Furthermore, the statements he made were dangerous to Asian Americans in the US. Later, as more facts came to light, the lab-leak theory became more plausible. Guessing right in the absence of evidence shouldn't grant a person any kind of vindication in retrospect

I’ll never understand this take. “The virus accidentally leaked from a highly sophisticated lab in China” is somehow racist and dangerous, but “Chinese people can’t stop eating weird stuff at a wet market and the virus jumped to humans from there” isn’t.

Just clarifying my take (can't comment on what others think): I think the "Chinese people eat weird stuff" narrative is also racist and dangerous. It's not a dichotomy, and in the absence of evidence, I would rather avoid both.

My personal belief over the last few years has been "it could be zoonotic transmission through food, it could be a lab leak, it could be something else. I don't know, so let's wait and see."

Also, as a side note: non-Chinese people eat weird things too (and even worse - sometimes live with animals inside their homes). For example, the Black Death in Europe and the 1918 Flu pandemic which likely started in the US both had a significant zoonotic component.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I personally don't care whether the virus was man-made or natural That's really surprising to me, because in my opinion the answer truly does matter, and sticking my head in the sand feels defeatist. I suppose that's a difference of opinions, though.

How does it really matter though? What are in the Western world going to do in retaliation? Are we going to start a war with China over their bio-lab programs?

> How does it really matter though?

I’m seriously baffled how people say this.

It’s it obvious that if true then BSL4 virology and gain of function work needs international supervision and agreement for humanity.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#188
Publishing this with “low confidence”.

Glad our official experts are on the case! Next we will find out whether Assad gassed his own people, and who blew up the Nordstream pipelines.

(Just kidding. Maybe years later we finally find things out after they get declassified: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/how-jimmy-carter-...)

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#189

I wonder how the classified intelligence report responds to the fact that the early cases clustered around the Huanan Market not the Wahun Institute of Virology... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/03/03/1083751...

Do people typically gather in the parking lot of the WIV in large numbers? What was the reproductive rate of the initial version? What was the probability of an infection turning into a severe enough case to register to epidemiologists months later? For a relatively low reproductive rate or severity, you will need a lot of human contact to have detectable cases. The fact that the initial detectable cases are clustered within a nearby population center that manifests many close contacts should be expected.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#190
This is not a surprising conclusion given the way things have gone. The collapse of the natural origin theory (which was based on various schemes involving co-infection of bats, pangolins, civets with various wild-type viruses which didn't pan out) and the refusal of the Wuhan Institute of Virology to have an open investigation, along with the fairly shady behavior of the Ecohealth Alliance partnership that was partially funding the WIV (not disclosing conflicts of interests in those early Nature and Lancet letters claiming a natural origin), all result in a 'so what else could it be but a lab leak' circumstantial conclusion, even if positive evidence remains hidden.

What kind of lab leak is an interesting and important question, however. There may be four scenarios:

1) Collection of a wild-type virus that somehow evolved in a bat species, followed by accidental infection of a lab worker. This seems the least likely, as the viral lineages of the betacoronaviruses that would have had to fuse in the wild to form Sars-CoV-2 (sarbecovirus w/o furin site and marbecovirus w/ furin site) infect different bat species from different regions;

2) Collection of a multitude of wild-type viruses as well as a variety of bat species, then having accidental genetic fusions due to coinfection of the laboratory bats with a variety of different viruses (like what seems to happen on pig farms with avian / human / swine flu), which might be more plausible, though would indicate incredibly sloppy lab management;

3) 'Natural' mutational pressure via deliberately cultivating wild-type bat viruses in human cell cultures or in mice etc. expressing human genes, and looking for rare mutations that arose and gained the ability to infect human cells (things like this were done in the Soviet bioweapons program according to defector Kanatjan Alibekov, see "Biohazard") or to become more infectious than it already was;

4) Direct gene manipulation of wild-type (or possibly mutated) viruses using CRISPR technology, in which parts of the wild-type template virus are excised and replaced with specifically synthesized new sequences designed to bind to human receptor sites to facilitate entry to human cells by the virus. It'd be likely they synthesized a variety of such chimeric viruses and then ran them through human cell cultures to see which were the most infectious. They were doing this kind of work at Wuhan, based on prior CRISPR-based work done in the USA c.2015, and it seems most likely that a lab worker got infected then passed it to the local community, then onto the trains and airplanes.

Notably, 2-4 all could be called 'gain of function' research, which is a sloppy term that nobody in the field seems to use. It's all pretty reckless and poorly justified research, and people have been warning for about a decade since these precise gene swapping technologies became widely available that this kind of outcome was likely if not inevitable. It's also basically indistinguishable from offensive biowarfare research, even if that wasn't the goal (claims that this was deliberate are nonsensical, it looks like a "oopsie, we caused > $10 trillion in economic damage and killed millions of people by accident" event).

International collaborations to fight infectious disease should still be supported however, that's how smallpox was eradicated. Just not this kind of thing, please.

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