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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

#321

Post by ElectricalUnion »

TearsInTheRain wrote: post #133
r053bud wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.

If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

If USA is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

The money for WIV risky reasearch mostly came from the USA.

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

#322

Post by wrycoder »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #112
ttul wrote: post #11

The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it’s most likely a naturally created virus. However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science…

[flagged]

Here's a 2015 paper on successful gain of function work done at the University of North Carolina under the leadership of Ralph Baric. The work involved characterizing a synthetically constructed chimeric virus comprising a SARS-CoV backbone and a bat SARS virus spike.

It received special permission to continue despite a prohibition on gain-of-function research (Refer to the section: Biosafety and Security).[0]

Quoting:

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone.

And from the footnote describing author contributions:

[SHI Zhengli] provided SHC014 spike sequences and plasmids

As everyone knows by now, Shi is the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.[1]

It's pretty clear that Shi subsequently continued that gain-of-function work at Wuhan.

My question is, what is the correlation between the spike sequence Shi supplied for the 2015 paper and that of the early variants of SARS-CoV-2?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Zhengli

There is also a 2013 paper, written by Peter Dazak and Shi Zhengli, "Isolation and characterization of a bat SARS-like coronavirus that uses the ACE2 receptor".[2] Peter Daszak has been centrally involved in the US funding of the Wuhan Institute, in his capacity as president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York.[3]

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24172901/

[3] https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-th...

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

#323

Post by salawat »

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

Note: Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.

There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:

Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.

Beijing didn't grant it because

A) Poor information propagation Or B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result. Or C) some combo of the two.

I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.

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

#324

Post by jrm4 »

Don't get me started on how stupid and racist "wet market" ALWAYS was.

The question would be "why now?" There have been markets like this for, what, thousands of years? Why was this one special (unless, you know, it was near the lab where they made the viruses)

100% percent plays on "lololol look at the backwards bat eaters." So dumb.

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

#325

Post by mikeyouse »

chitowneats wrote: post #266
mikeyouse wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.

The question is not whether the research was worth it overall. They denied there was even a possibility that lab leak was the cause of the pandemic. I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.

There’s an immense benefit to being specific with both what you mean by lab leak (natural virus leaked or modified one did) and by “they” when you’re talking about coverups because it gets weirdly racist and conspiratorial in a hurry otherwise.

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

#326

Post by ss108 »

nradov wrote: post #310
ss108 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.

The model wasn't bad , just useless.

Why useless? People have to attempt to predict the outcomes of elections, and have to do their best.

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

#327

Post by aquarium87 »

Zetice wrote: post #161
aquarium87 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It would be weird, but that's not what happened at all!

Incorrect. Lab leak is de facto default from now on in the world we live in. Even if you disagree, it will be in 5 years. The tech, the databases, the labs, the money. It's all increasing. Every single year the risk of a lab leak goes up, to the point where we are expecting a covid per decade out of the labs. But hopefully the rest of the world is more ethical than the chinese and their new and novel virus creation strategy and we get relatively harmless versions of the flu etc. Rather than pathogens with zero prior human cohabitation.

Funny how all the datapoints, including new and novel to humans get ignored.......

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

#328

Post by csours »

I have extremely low confidence that we will ever be satisfied about the pathway that led to the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic.

I feel strongly that it was not tied to malicious intent, but other than that, I don't have strong feelings. Malicious intent would require significant actual evidence to convince me.

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

#329

Post by MilnerRoute »

belorn wrote: post #292
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…

If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a "low" confidence score. It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.

Four U.S. agencies say "market origins" - as does the U.S. National Intelligence Council. Two more agencies -- including the CIA -- are undecided. And then there's the "low confidence" Energy Department opinion, and one from the FBI.

So it ultimately depends on how you weight the 75% of groups that don't think there's evidence that it leaked from a lab.

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

#330

Post by dang »

philistine wrote: post #89

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. If a novel virus once again originates in China from a city with a BSL4 lab, I think we ought to skip the twice is coincidence.

Please don't do this here.
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