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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

#271

Post by csours »

khazhoux wrote: post #234

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 flaggi…

That is the nature of a "dog whistle" - it has a legitimate meaning, and some people use the legitimate meaning. That legitimacy gives malicious people plausible deniability. Social media sites cannot tell the difference, and quite often it's very hard for people to tell the difference as well. Social media sprays weed killer on all the discussions because they don't want their app covered in weeds; not having flowers is too bad, but weeds are worse (not my personal view).

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

#272

Post by NegativeK »

lvl102 wrote: post #261
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…

Deleted

> It spectacularly backfired on them.

Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)

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

#274

Post by adrianb »

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...

It's widely accepted that the Huanan market cases are an early super-spreader event and not the first human infections. Basically we don't know who and where the first infected humans were. We do know lots of people got infected at the market and that became the first time a new pneumonia was noticed in hospitals.

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

#275

Post by tzs »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #178
ffssffss wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.

Probably they still aren’t sharing all the information they have with each other. I had thought that was supposed to be much improved post 9-11.

I read that they did massively increase sharing after 9/11, but there was a reassessment after the Manning leaks. Manning had access to way more information than someone at their level needed for their job, and they concluded this came about from going a bit too far on the post 9/11 sharing and so they dialed it back a bit.

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

#276

Post by dekhn »

chewbacha wrote: post #44

The US agency making the assertion is the department of energy. Obviously the foremost thought leaders in virology and epidemiology.

The DOE runs national labs with research into biology. In fact, they funded the human genome project earlier than the NIH (who later swooped in after realizing they were missing out). They also have labs that work on biosafety. Lots of scientists.

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

#277

Post by colechristensen »

andai wrote: post #202
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today. Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus. So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cau…

> 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…

The evidence there is not that that particular group created covid, but that there is a clear history of engineering viruses in exactly the way a lab leak scenario would play out.

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

#278

Post by goolulusaurs »

boxed wrote: post #242
goolulusaurs wrote: post #192

IMO, it seems obvious from the behavior of China's government that they know it is a lab leak. If it wasn't a lab leak, then presumably there is an animal reservoir of the virus somewhere in China, but as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it. But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? A lockdown on travel would only r…

Of course there's a reservoir. That's why there was a lab in the first place. There are many more viruses in those caves. Many many. And tourists literally pay money to go into such caves, and look up to the ceiling to look at the bats. Bats that may at any time shit into their eye with one of these new viruses. And then on top of that people catch them and sell them live to slaughter them at home to eat. Again, this…

Well its been years, why haven't they found the reservoir yet then? They would obviously want to since it would prove that it wasn't a lab leak, yet as far as I know they haven't claimed to have found it yet.

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

#279

Post by seydor »

ajross wrote: post #167
seydor wrote: post #153

Even for the people that have always thought so, this must be uncomfortable. This is only the 1st engineered virus which brought the world upside down. We may be living in a biological war already, or at least some potential for weaponization.

No one is claiming this was an "engineered virus" (and the evidence for is really thin, FWIW). The finding in the linked article is only that a lab leak is the most probably origin of the pandemic. That's the problem with this discourse. Everyone has gone full absolutist and views even relatively sane, nuanced positions as evidence for nonsense like "we may be living in a biological war already". The fact that those…

The article does not say it's not an engineered virus either.

What's the hypothesis here, that the virus naturally arose only inside the lab where it infected one person? Or if it occured naturally in the wild, how come that it infected only one person inside the lab , since it's easy to infect

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

#280

Post by isaacremuant »

This has been written about many times, in 2020, very convincingly in 2021 by Nicholas Wade (https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...) and now.

It will always be dismissed by those who have a political interest in seeing things differently.

Authortiarianism and coordinated censorship between govs, big health and big tech made it so that anything countering the mandated narratives was heavily supressed and punished.

That's why the online world and the real one varied, no matter how many names and attacks the "mono narrative" mob used against those of us who dissented.

There will be no acknowledgement of the atrocities and human right abuses in the name of covid. No admission of guilt or bad faith. Just pretende that "we were wrong for the right reasons" and anyone who was right, if it's even admitted, "did so for the wrong reasons"

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