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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

#441

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #286
audunw wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Except that SARS-CoV-2's epidemiological dynamics are well-known to be overdispersed? Almost all lineages die out, and a few explode due to repeated super-spreader events. It's therefore unlikely that the first cluster will be discovered at the site of introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 was presumably first introduced to other continents at airports and seaports; but that's not where the first clusters were found.

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

#443

Post by peoplefromibiza »

BearOso wrote: post #404
Glyptodon wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#444

Post by mistermann »

theRealMe wrote: post #301
lvl102 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deleted

It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34927481

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

#445

Post by brookst »

smsm42 wrote: post #396
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.

It's not like any other options have high confidence. All theories are low confidence right now because there is no conclusive proof for either. But if you support some, you are the defender of science, and if you support another, you are a filthy conspirologist and get banned from social media. Try explaining that to 95% of the American populace.

I think it has more to do with the fact that one opinion is supported by more conspiracy nuts. Doesn’t mean it isn’t the right answer, but having lots of crazies insisting it is the only possible answer makes more grounded people less credible in the eyes of others.

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

#446

Post by actually_a_dog »

stubybubs wrote: post #384
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 know if it does make the most sense. Some context: https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks? If they wrote in their conclusion that it was "low confidence" I think they have g…

> 75% of all new infectious diseases come from animals. How many of those do we have start to finish routes from animals to humans? And if we don't have that route, how many of those are we suspecting of being lab leaks?

None, as far as I know. Nor should it be particularly surprising that no animal origin for COVID-19 has yet been found. The animal origin for SARS was only discovered in 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9 The first outbreak was in 2002. We're less than 4 years away from the first known outbreak of COVID-19, so dismissing a wild animal origin at this point is extremely premature at best.

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

#447

Post by djkivi »

ffssffss wrote: post #168
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.

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

Well, when all 17 intelligence agencies agree on something, you know they must be right then.

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

#448

Post by alchemist1e9 »

tomp wrote: post #360
orlp wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only bad viruses. Good viruses will be genetically coded to only harm a particular subgroup.

I was thinking that actually gives the United States a distinct advantage in such (hypothetical) biological warfare, it has the most diverse gene pool on the planet.

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

#449

Post by jimbob45 »

barbazoo wrote: post #349
jimbob45 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn’t Trump literally call it the “China virus” for over a year? Almost from the start? I know he got a lot of pushback from the DNC over that.

It didn't seem to be based on evidence at the time rather than a simple minded and racist bit to cover up that he had no idea what he was doing.

As a thought experiment, who would have access to the most information in the world outside of the sitting POTUS? The richest man in the world? Surely Trump of all people would be the most qualified to make such a claim.

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

#450

Post by lamontcg »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #175
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…

The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking. You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 "Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China" MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublishe…

HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there.

While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/

And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is.

They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.

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