Some folks think that the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada dipping to Beijing for a quick minute in 2020 was sus.
Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
501–510 of 1001 posts
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#502IMO, 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…
Sure, but don't they have a vast network of contact tracing? Presumably if a bunch of cases showed up that weren't connected to any other cases because of the lockdowns then that would be a really good indication of where the animal reservoir was located. But they haven't found the animal reservoir yet either, even with all of the lockdowns.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#503[flagged]
what should your ideal candidate think after reading these?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/wjdt_665385/2649_665393/202...
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#504The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it’s most likely a naturally created virus. However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science…
> 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…
they collected dozens if not hundreds of samples of various viruses. not all the work gets published. in fact majority of scientific effort doesn't get published. experiments either don't work or you don't get interesting results etc... doubly so if a global pandemic started before you were done with your current project
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#505Earlier 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.
Part of the problem might be that commentators are going to want to willfully conflate intelligence "confidence" with a more pseudo science-y sounding "confidence score" that sounds like a bastard hybrid of research critique and statistics. One wouldn't predict that to be the case with all of the scientists here. But given that it is, perhaps we can't fault the American people if they don't understand the nuance. The…
> Further, certainly "low confidence" doesn't imply that the inverse conclusion is likely true.
Not by the strictest definition of "likely", no, but it certainly does imply there's a high enough likelihood of spreading from the wild that a lab leak isn't conclusive. It's not meaningless nor even "relatively meaningless": it's just very difficult to tell where a given virus came from unless there's a smoking gun, and any conclusion in any direction is going to be shaky.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#506The This Week In Virology podcast has been talking about the lab leak concept since the early days of the pandemic, with various experts opining on the likelihood. In [1], the expert discusses how the virus itself does not seem engineered; it’s most likely a naturally created virus. However, this is exactly the sort of virus that they study at the BSL4 lab in Wuhan, quite legitimately - and they produce good science…
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Perhaps because Fauci may have been held partially responsible through gain of function research his department funded?
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you had actually read the article that you are supposed to be commenting on,you would realize that this statement of the title is done in "low confidence"
No one is gonna apologize to you if you are unable to parse information
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#508Time once again to post Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8 I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, probably originated from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan . I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC Twitter and FB were flaggi…
> I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved The leading theory should be the thing that has never happened before (lab leak causes epidemic or pandemic) instead of the thing that has happened dozens of times before (animal virus jumps to humans and causes epidemic or pandemic)?
lab leaks do happen. not often but a lot more than never. we were just lucky enough that they didn't result in a global pandemic...
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#509Earlier 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…
This is probably the most egregious example of "whataboutism" I've seen on HN.
I think you're missing the point.
To me the post was answering to someone claiming that
- Americans suffered the consequences of COVID because of China, which is arguably not true, they have handled the pandemic badly because of their own faults, incompetence and hubris (and a President in denial).
- The Americans are at the first stage of grieving over this, because they are obviously victims, while truth is they are often perpetrators that just don't care of the consequences of what they do, because if some non American dies, it's probably because they deserve it. During COVID they proved that they also don't care very much if someone of their own dies, because FREE MARKET OH YEAH! FLY EAGLE OF FREEDOM! Which has honestly been embarrassing, watching from outside.
If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling.
Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What? Why would anyone be punished for an unintentional lab leak? Scientists are also humans that can make mistakes.