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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

#461

Post by B8MGHCBekDuRi »

mwbajor wrote: post #440
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wa…

no one is going to care if the deaths were "intentional" or negligent.

not Americans.

They always need someone to blame.

Remember when they went to war with Iraq on fabricated evidence?

Remember when they wen to war with Afghanistan after 9/11, but Afghanistan had no responsibility whatsoever (again!) and 10 years later they handed the country back to Talibans?

Can we consider 9/11 an accident?

Would it be the same to you?

You know when really nobody talks about it?

When it's the US killing people out of negligence and incompetence and sheer arrogance.

Are you aware of this?

Do they talk about it in USA?

They never apologized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655

***

can we also talk about this?

I'm quite sure how these poor people died makes a lot of difference for the families of the victims.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes...

***

It's not China fault if during covid in USA Trump was President and people really believed that covid wasn't real and a lot of Americans died with a rate double than my Country which was already hit very hard BTW.

China handled it much better anyway.

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

#462

Post by somewhereoutth »

mwbajor wrote: post #435
somewhereoutth wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree but also disagree. There are too many conflicting interests and I don't think you will ever get a straight answer. People also can't look at the lab leak with a critical eye because they think it makes them look like trump lovers. I standby my original assertion that a country in grief will collectively go through the stages of grief of which denial is the first. Similar to 9/11 when we convinced ourselves th…

In 2008 we had to bail out the banks, otherwise everything would have gone under. Indeed, I believe that a defining moment of the GW Bush presidency was when he told the head of the Federal Reserve (I think?) to do whatever was necessary, with GWB providing political cover, and thus 'saved the world'. Where we screwed up was in not bringing to account (i.e. prison) many of the people responsible for letting things get as far as they did. We also used monetary policy too much when fiscal policy (i.e. bailing out Main Street) would have been better.

My understanding is that it took a while before the (natural) emergence of SARS and MERS was understood, and so for COVID most probably.

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

#463

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

alevskaya wrote: post #355
skellington wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19. Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak? Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted…

This is a dumb argument. Sick animals were probably culled immediately by the farms to avoid getting blamed. As a 2-decade genetic engineer: there are no genetic "markers" pointing to a lab leak, there's really no sign of unnatural manipulation in the sequence.

Indeed, the government cracked down on wild animal farming at the beginning of the pandemic.

When you hear that "X thousand animals were tested," it's not the types of wild animals that are the likely culprit. It's cows, pigs, sheep and the like. It's a complete red herring.

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

#464

Post by seizethecheese »

djkivi wrote: post #447
ffssffss wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t know… I think when they all agree it’s also likely that they are wrong. (It indicates some possibility of motivated reasoning.)

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

#465

Post by another_story »

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…

Feels like we should assume it's a lab leak and push for caution anyways. If it wasn't a lab leak then all we've done is help better prevent that from happening in the future.

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

#467

Post by tripletao »

mikeyouse wrote: post #434
baja_blast wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense research…

It was available well into 2020 if you read past the shitty early headlines.

I guess you're referring here to Flo Débarre's misleading tweet, which you linked to four months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33247997

As I noted in my reply at that time, everyone has always agreed that the overall server remained intermittently accessible until Feb 2020. The particular database "was not accessed from outside of the WIV after 12 September 2019", though.

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

#468

Post by seizethecheese »

skellington wrote: post #294
boxed wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No there isn't. More than 50K animals tested an no animal reservoir for C19. Are there really reddit-ors who still think C19 was natural when ALL of the current evidence including genetic markers points to lab leak? Yes, we can't say with absolute certainty, but the case for lab leak is MUCH stronger than for natural. Plus, why has China still not released the nature and details of the experiments that were conducted…

You are arguing different things. There’s a reservoir of coronaviruses, but not exactly c19.

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

#469

Post by tharne »

trilbyglens wrote: post #390
chitowneats wrote: post #377

[flagged]

Right since covid only effected western countries. If it were "ethnic genocide" it was a pretty shitty one.

I'm pretty sure the person referencing "ethnic genocide" was referring to China's internment and genocide of their Muslim population in western China, not COVID.

I think their point is that if genocide wasn't enough to motivate us to change our relationship with China, then a revelation about COVID originating from a Chinese lab probably isn't going to do much to move the needle either.

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