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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

#281

Post by orlp »

kranke155 wrote: post #164
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #154

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.

Doesn’t the FBI also have a large biological analysis team? For bio terror ?

I think if anything COVID has shown us that biological warfare makes as much sense as nuclear: none. In our globally connected world it's mutually assured destruction, and that's without even the need for your enemy to maintain stockpiles of weapons. The virus will find itself within your own borders soon enough.

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

#282

Post by mwbajor »

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…

I don't understand the mental gymnastics to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. The fact that the lab and epicenter of the virus are in the same geographic area make it the likely scenario and warrants the most investigation. The efforts to look past this seem artificial.

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

#283

Post by Bjartr »

kashunstva wrote: post #207
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or there aren't objective standards for what "low, medium, and high confidence" actually mean, thereby allowing one agency to look at the evidence and say it's of low confidence and another to look at the same data and say it's moderate confidence.

Interestingly, the CIA has published a paper on exactly this subject:

Words of Estimative Probability (PDF) https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/ar...

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

#284

Post by porcoda »

denotational wrote: post #24

Without meaning to take a position either way, as a non-American, why does the Energy Department have a position on this? I’m aware that the Energy Department has sone degree of responsibility for the US nuclear arsenal, but even taking that into account, it seems out of scope.

The placement of the national labs in DOE is mostly a historical artifact of the time they were born. They cover most sciences these days and it isn’t uncommon to hear people with DOE jokingly refer to it as the “department of everything”.

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

#285

Post by swatcoder »

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

Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit.

Interesting strategy!

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

#286

Post by lamontcg »

audunw wrote: post #176
lamontcg wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan No it isn't. The were studying SARS-CoV-1 and WIV-1. They sequenced RaTG13 but that is too far away from SARS-CoV-2 with a thousand random mutations across its genome. And there's no evidence that they ever recovered culturable virus from RaTG13 or were able to culture it--there's a vast gap between sequencing a virus and culturing…

Earlier in the pandemic I read a report talking about the possibility of the virus being something they sampled, and that it leaked when they accessed the sample presumably to start sequencing/analyzing it. The theory was that it was a virus they'd have sampled from immunocompromised miners working in the same caves that the bats with the most closely related viruses inhabit. They had some references to a report with…

There's many thousands more contact between bats and humans involved in mining (literally how RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine, bat guano collection for farming and just tourism:

https://www.sciencetimes.com/articles/33905/20211012/china-r...

There's a lot of economic activity in China that is close to bat habitats and there's evidence that cross reactivity to sarbecoviruses exists in a significant amount in rural china.

The researchers collecting samples were a very tiny slice of the human-to-bat-virus exposure that is going on in China all the time.

And we know that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't last very long on surfaces, it isn't transmitted by fomites. It needs to be aerosolized and breathed in. It isn't likely that the researchers were collecting live viable virus in the samples that they brought back to the lab. What they were sequencing was overwhelmingly going to be "dead" mRNA.

The idea that the lab researchers were the initial Typhoid Mary of the pandemic is also simply not believable because it requires one to believe that they lived within a bubble EXCEPT for one trip to the wet market where the outbreak happened. They didn't start spreading it around their apartment building, they didn't infect people in restaurants, didn't infect elderly relatives who wound up in the hospital, etc.

It makes "more" sense that they deliberately genetically engineered the virus and released it in the wet market entirely on purpose.

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

#287

Post by mwbajor »

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…

So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions, does that count as a leak?

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

#290

Post by colechristensen »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #203
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…

[flagged]

This supposes way too much intention that can much more easily be explained by incompetence.

A lab doing questionable work with inadequate safety measures hiding a major leak to save face makes way more sense than a supervillain story.

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