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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

#421

Post by MarcoZavala »

cdolan wrote: post #265
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…

Did I just read this correctly? “janitor steals a highly modified and virulent bat and sells it for $10 in a wet market” Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.

[dead]

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

#422

Post by cameldrv »

Bjartr wrote: post #283
kashunstva wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Moderate and Low are Words of Analytic Confidence [1]. This has more to do with the quality of the sourcing than a numeric probability number.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_confidence

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

#423

Post by somewhereoutth »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #401
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…

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…

And this is (one reason) why so many are keen to believe Lab Leak - because then it was done by 'bad humans' and so can be fixed, instead of being (another) consequence of our encroachment on the natural world and indeed something that often just happens. Much easier to believe the 'baddies' have been found and 'brought to justice' than having to face up to the world we live in and our effect on it.

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

#424

Post by peoplefromibiza »

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…

> Every American touched by covid knows this in the back of their head.

only Americans were touched by covid I guess...

> The first stage of grief is denial.

At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes.

Leak doesn't mean engineering a disease to kill some specific target, anyway, if China did it to kill Americans, it wouldn't be as bad as the Opium wars and the American invasion of China in 1900

The first U.S. multimillionaire, John Jacob Astor, made part of his fortune smuggling opium into China.

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

#425

Post by Consultant32452 »

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…

Evolutionary theory SUGGESTS it is a lab leak. When a virus "makes the jump" from animals to humans, it tends not to be very good at first. Then, over time, the virus would evolve to get better and better at spreading among humans. You'd have likely years of the virus spreading fairly slowly. You know how each progressive strain has become more capable of spreading but less deadly compared to the generation before it? One would expect to have seen strains prior to alpha which would have been significantly less infectious.

Covid, conversely, was EXTREMELY good at spreading among humans right from the start. This experience coincides with the exact category of experiments we know were funded in Wuhan, which include using directed evolution to get bat corona viruses to be able to infect human cells. They literally trained these corona viruses to be able to infect human cells.

Is this definitive? Of course not, nothing is definitive.

If you're interested in how these types of coverups play out in the real world, I recommend investigating the 1977 influenza pandemic. 700,00 people died due to a Russian lab leak and the entire scientific community kept it a secret from the public because they didn't want to embarrass Russia during the cold war. It took 30 years for the scientific community to come clean.

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

#427

Post by credit_guy »

bmikaili wrote: post #331
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…

AND america? nah man China should pay reparations or face heavy sanctions and geopolitical isolation.

America founded research at the Wuhan lab [1], and more precisely exactly the research that lead to the virus outbreak.

  EcoHealth Alliance and Daszak have been working with Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology], for more than 15 years. Since 2014, an NIH grant has funded EcoHealth’s research in China, which involves collecting faeces and other samples from bats, and blood samples from people at risk of infection from bat-origin viruses. Scientific studies suggest that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus most likely originated in bats, and research on the topic could be crucial to identifying other viruses that might cause future pandemics. The WIV is a subrecipient on the grant.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02473-4

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

#428

Post by actually_a_dog »

mwbajor wrote: post #282
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.

You don't need to "discredit" the hypothesis very much, because it shouldn't have any real "credit" to begin with. The only evidence for it at all seems to be the proximity of the Wuhan lab to the first known outbreak, plus the fact that 3 researchers got sick in November (i.e. flu season) with some unknown virus. If you ask me, that plus $5 might buy you a cup of coffee.

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

#429

Post by Supermancho »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #401
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…

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…

>> We are not going to let this ruin trade relations even more ($$$ LOL) so you're just going to have to forget about it.

> 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

I'm not sure why people choose to assume their simple solutions are somehow insightful. You aren't going to be able to reach into most countries to intervene in any other way than simple sanctions at best. The protocol of "asking country X please knock it off" is not productive, as it's not going to result in any specific change, it hurts trade, and every country is doing it to some degree despite previous agreements on the world stage (basic Game Theory).

This is what the GP described, yet someone still thinks that nobody involved, understands "basic engineering". Very smart people do this kind of work with money and lives at stake. Let's give a little rope to people with big responsibilities, to try to understand the motivations rather than assume they are ignorant.

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

#430

Post by mwbajor »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #401
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…

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…

I know, basic engineering, so simple and straightforward right? And when a country says "no", I assume we issue a series of stronger and stronger worded warning letters to them right?
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