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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

#481

Post by actually_a_dog »

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.

This is exactly why I can't give this article, or any of those multiple intelligence agency assessments any real credence. I don't have access to any of the data that went into those assessments. What I do have access to doesn't point very strongly at a lab leak origin, despite its plausibility.

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

#482

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #475
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…

> But if there is an animal reservoir of the virus in China, then how could the Chinese government ever expect a lockdown to work? Because if people avoid contact with the animals and it's a rare type of human-animal interaction to begin with, then it doesn't spread. And if you catch it again, you lock down instantly locally again. I'm not taking any side on the source of the virus, but I don't think the Chinese gove…

[deleted]

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

#483

Post by SMAAART »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #269
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…

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.

> Good luck getting 95% of the American populace to understand any of that nuance.

And that's why media use these headlines (dark patterns?) and politicians keep making fake promises and get reelected.

#SAD

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

#484

Post by naasking »

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.

Passage through humanized mice wouldn't leave signs of unnatural manipulation. It's still pretty suspicious that COVID was so transmissible between people from the outset, and no evidence of it circulating in local populations was found.

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

#485

Post by ikrenji »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #428
mwbajor wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's a hell of coincidence that out of all chinese cities the outbreak started in the one city housing the premiere institute dedicated to researching coronaviruses... so there is no smoking gun evidence, but it's a reasonable hypothesis... anyway, no one apart from the chinese ministry of state security will ever know for sure one way or another

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

#486

Post by B8MGHCBekDuRi »

tharne wrote: post #469
trilbyglens wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty sure this qualifies as genocide, because the word "genocide" is in the title.

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

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

#487

Post by mikeyouse »

tripletao wrote: post #467
mikeyouse wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, a database put online in June 2019 - widely claimed to be “suspiciously removed” in Sept 2019, actually wasn’t. It was available into 2020 at which point after a bunch of hacking attempts, they took it down. And certainly “everyone hasn’t agreed” because in every thread about the topic people imply like this 6 Month old database is a smoking gun when it’s self evidently not.

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

#488

Post by Tuna-Fish »

ecf wrote: post #438
mwbajor wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

> it’s unreasonable to assume it’s all because a freak mutation with some bats.

I don't think this holds. Such freak mutations happen all the time.

Note that this doesn't discredit lab leak either. It's entirely possible they were testing a new, entirely natural strain they found in some weird cave somewhere. And because that lab had terrible safety protocols (which has been documented extensively), possibly some got out.

It's not really possible to rule out or confirm the lab leak hypothesis without inside information that we are unlikely to ever get. Other than as vague "intelligence report says this", which you can hardly trust.

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

#489

Post by seizethecheese »

jokoon wrote: post #478

I've read that some american scientists were working or were distantly involved in research projects at this lab. I still entertain the conspiracy theory that Trump, since he hated China, could have had the capacity to ask the CIA to "cause problems in China", and this lab would have been one way to do harm. Of course the US would not be really held responsible as long as chinese lab workers were pushed to be neglige…

If this were likely, the US would have shut borders way faster. It was a statistical likelihood it would arrive quickly given the number of China to USA travelers.

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

#490

Post by bsder »

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.

Until they mutate.

It is beneficial to the survival of a virus to infect the largest group that it can. A virus targeted to a small group of people has a large "survival benefit" the moment it can mutate to infect everybody.

In addition, it's really hard to target a biological entity at a specific subgroup of humans. From a biological standpoint, all humans are damn near identical.

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