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

wsj.com

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

#231

Post by cookiengineer »

No idea if it's possible to still find the source, but the doctor of patient zero also got infected (and died/"disappeared" afterwards like her boss at the wuhan hospital).

Patient zero was a virologist that seems to have been censored off the Chinese internet afterwards, and I can't find the links anymore :-/

In the beginning of sars-cov-2 breakout there was an article shared on wechat that later got censored in varying degrees of translations/"hacks" to avoid censorships, they wrote it in emojis and stuff to trick the censorship algorithm. All of them were referencing Ai Fen's video and photo of the diagnostics report of patient zero that she recorded and spread on WeChat to warn others.

Maybe someone else has an archive link or screenshots or anything. Impossible to google the source due to the apparent emoji noise.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Fen

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

#232

Post by wahnfrieden »

Zetice wrote: post #140
bayesian_horse wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's credible to you because you want it to believe. The article doesn't say what the department of energy thinks went into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Which is a major piece of the puzzle I'd say.

Er, it's credible to me because it's the Department of Energy. I don't "want" to believe it, and generally believe folks who were touting it as fact up to this point were cranks. Even now it's still extremely murky, and as I said, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

why is it credible to you when you can as easily find contrary positions from other us govt agencies? what makes a "low confidence" doe take more credible than the other agencies to you

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

#233

Post by friend_and_foe »

cld8483 wrote: post #123
cc101 wrote: post #106

How can they tell the difference between a lab leak and a deliberate release to explore the world's reaction to a viral weapon?

You can tell the difference by looking to see if any of their research helped in developing the vaccine (it did not.)

That's not definitive because you're assuming motivation, it could be that someone didn't want a vaccine, and you're assuming all research was publicized to us. This was the fastest vaccine ever developed in human history, it's worth noting.

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

#234

Post by khazhoux »

Time once again to post Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8

I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, probably originated from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan. I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC Twitter and FB were flagging any post that said "lab leak."

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

#235

Post by Vecr »

nzealand wrote: post #102

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...

The market was an early superspreading event (or actually multiple superspreading events), I don't know why people conflate spread at the market with a spillover at the market. I guess it made more sense when the virus was thought not to be airborne.

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

#236

Post by chitowneats »

mikeyouse wrote: post #210
andai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Inst…

Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2

True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this.

Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.

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

#237

Post by anigbrowl »

It's a little perplexing to me that we're getting evaluations from spy agencies and the Department of Energy. I know the latter specializes in nuclear energy in particular, and this has experience with proliferation and adversarial information-gathering.

They also supervise biological weapons laboratories (presumably for the same reason), but what they're being asked to do here is to validate a premise (natural or engineered?) whereas their actual expertise is in tracking pathogens already known to be weaponized. This may be why they expressed their findings with “low confidence”, which is mentioned in the WSJ report but given less weight than it deserves.

A big problem in the pandemic response is that there are powerful strategic incentives for people to express a false degree of very high confidence about this , and indeed many other topics, so as to maximize insecurity and anxiety across a large population, which makes it easier to herd. This was an issue prior to the emergence of COVID-19, and strongly correlated with a drop in vaccine uptake and localized outbreaks of infectious diseases like measles that were previously considered easily managed under existing public health regimes.

See https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30138075/ for a quantitative treatment of this issue.

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

#238

Post by Zetice »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #232
Zetice wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, it's credible to me because it's the Department of Energy. I don't "want" to believe it, and generally believe folks who were touting it as fact up to this point were cranks. Even now it's still extremely murky, and as I said, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

why is it credible to you when you can as easily find contrary positions from other us govt agencies? what makes a "low confidence" doe take more credible than the other agencies to you

Hm, so the way I'm using "credible" here is as, "able to be believed". So I find the DoE and therefore the idea credible. It doesn't mean I do believe it, or that I find other, contradicting positions "uncredible" (incredible? lol).

The DoE is just an institution I trust, and if they're willing to publish this, I'm willing to listen to what they have to say.

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

#239

Post by cycrutchfield »

ThePhantom wrote: post #205

The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance…

There were no bats being sold in the Wuhan wet markets. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
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