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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

#401

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

mwbajor wrote: post #369
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance. After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.

Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason: Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it. Every American touched by covid knows this in…

If lab leak is confirmed the correct course of action is to design new systems and protocols to prevent such a thing from happening again in the future. Failure to do so will result in more issues down the line. It's basic engineering.

If this kind of research is so important then maybe the nations of the world should buy a cruise ship and implement extreme isolation protocols between interactions, if that's the only way to safely perform that kind of research. Just as an example.

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

#403

Post by padjo »

jrm4 wrote: post #324

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.

While I agree with the sentiment that the term wet market is quite pejorative, the sequence of events is very common and is what happened with the first SARS. New viruses make the leap to humans all the time. It’s evolution baby.

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

#404

Post by BearOso »

Glyptodon wrote: post #385
mwbajor wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter if they understand the nuance. The lab leak theory takes a back seat for the following reason: Lets say it is found out with definite proof that it was a lab leak. Then what? Grandma's dead, china killed her and there is nothing you can do. We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it. Every American touched by covid knows this in…

A lot of people seem to think the lab leak premise is the same as the "engineered biological weapon" premise so if that become popular it'll probably only drive a perception of "weak government that betrays the citizens" even more than we've already got...

Yeah, instead it was sheer incompetence and arrogance. They screwed up because they poorly handled the virus while doing something they should never have been doing: gain-of-function research. We need to stop that research, and we can't let them defend it with any nonsense excuses.

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

#407

Post by educaysean »

cld8483 wrote: post #115
credit_guy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second. But little by little people will start accepting that. What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent…

> What should the consequences be? The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulatin…

That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's computing technology by a century. There are numerous perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry. Don't burn the field just to punish a few.

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

#408

Post by dqpb »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #381
dqpb wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but the real news is it used to be taboo to say this - Sinophobic even. A lot of people are owed a serious apology.

Context, as always, is key: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/12/1027236499/anti-asian-hate-cr... Are these people who are owed a serious apology the ones who actually attacked Asian-Americans? Or simply the ones who stoked racial animus prompting others to attack them?

The people who are owed an apology are the people who did nothing more than to believe that the wuhan coronavirus outbreak originated from the wuhan coronavirus research lab.

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

#409

Post by nradov »

jcranmer wrote: post #399
nradov wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrorists motivated by religion or ideology sometimes use tactics and weapons that make no sense to rational people. The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons.

> The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons. Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological. It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.

The cult used a chemical weapon. They were also developing biological weapons based on botulism and anthrax at the same time but fortunately didn't get a chance to use those.
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