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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

#511

Post by pessimizer »

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…

The headline is absolutely, literally true. I also don't understand the nuance that anyone could miss here. The astounding thing is that the Energy Dept. can say that a lab leak is the most likely cause of the pandemic, and people jump out in front of them to say that what they somehow still mean is that a lab leak wasn't the cause of the pandemic.

They have "low confidence" that it was a lab leak (there might not even be a physical way to prove that conclusively), but they have higher confidence in that theory than in any other theory or possibly even than in all other theories combined. When evidence pointing to your previous belief being untrue makes you more confident in your previous belief, you're in When Prophecy Fails territory.

-----

edit:

Just wanted to add this wikipedia quote because it makes me sad...

  * 12:05 am. December 21. No visitor. Someone in the group notices that another clock in the room shows 11:55. The group agrees that it is not yet midnight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails#Sequence_o...

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

#512

Post by dqpb »

CyanBird wrote: post #507
dqpb wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I can parse fine, can you?

From the article:

> The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak

People used to be called racist for saying this!

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

#513

Post by BurningFrog »

dalemyers wrote: post #245
BurningFrog wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd still say the Iraq War was most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. Hard to compare, admittedly.

Based on what exactly? According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War produced a total death count of 25,071 and a total wounded count of 117,961. Also according to Wikipedia COVID-19 has produced a death count of 6,868,964 and an infection count of 674,809,997. I'm all for complaining about US tactics, but it's 100% incorrect to try and claim that the Iraq War was "worse" than COVID-19.

You seem to assume no Iraqis were killed, which is pretty odd.

In "costly and fatal", I also include that the Iraq War arguably marks the end of the US as the world's only superpower. Both in terms of cost and moral status, it was a huge abdication of status.

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

#514

Post by dqpb »

somewhereoutth wrote: post #431
dqpb wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was situated in a region known for coronaviruses

Why was it so stigmatized before and now it's the preferred hypothesis for FBI and DOE?

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

#515

Post by alexashka »

boeingUH60 wrote: post #6

Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let’s say the pandemic was actually caused by a lab leak. That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again? If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly a…

> What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again?

Whatever assurances you want will be a fantasy.

There has never been accountability among the elite class and there won't be, because whatever mistakes they make only affect everybody else.

It's like a video game - imagine the game characters you 'mistreat' asking what consequences you will be facing. You'd cackle at game designers having thought of such an amusing feature and proceed to go right back to doing as you please.

It's about the same in real life.

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

#516

Post by frank_nitti »

mwbajor wrote: post #337
stevehawk wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak. seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of the news, which is that the confidence level is "low". so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is not confident in, it might be the least not c…

You know you're right. Remember when Saddam closed his labs to us? The ones that never had WMDs? What was the "confidence" threshold for invading iraq? I also bet its the same exact people now telling us about more "confidence" levels. Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.

As long as this logic also applied to the “confidence” in the original official narrative that the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory. In the LA area, many in the science/tech communities were on board with the official story and joined in the fun - laughing at the “morons” still considering the possibility of the lab leak.

I suspect many of those are the same ones who are eager to sweep it under the rug, or now turn to conspiracy theory that THIS story is part of a psyop but not the original response from the science/health authorities.

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

#517

Post by zdragnar »

Supermancho wrote: post #429
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #401

Earlier 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…

>> 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…

If, hypothetically, it did leak from a lab, there are two important things that should happen:

1- China has suffered more than enough to revaluate protocols around virus handling. The pandemic has done more to undermine confidence in their government than anything else in decades. They've got plenty of reason to be invested in change if change is warranted

2- The US government could put stronger regulations in place around funding companies that turn around and fund foreign labs (such as ecohealth) unless those projects can demonstrate compliance with new, safer protocols. What you call simple sanctions, I call the power of the purse.

All of this happens only if we determine whether the existing protocols, or lax enforcement of them, gave rise to the spread of the virus.

Just shrugging it off and saying "meh, it's hard so why bother" is a recipe for future man-made disasters.

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

#518

Post by lamontcg »

smsm42 wrote: post #373
lamontcg wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The effort required to culture virus like this is fairly large, and it requires them to keep it secret in 2019 before there was any need to keep it secret. Nobody talked about it to collaborators, no sequences were leaked out, etc. They somehow had tighter controls than Apple developing a new iPhone, before they had any reason to.

Again, you think keeping something secret needs a reason. That's not how totalitarian state works. In such state, not keeping something secret needs a reason. Everything else is secret by default. And the standard mode of action on any disaster is to deny it, lie and hide the evidence. It's not special for pandemic, it happens every time. Yes they absolutely have tighter controls than Apple, and the reason is they li…

We know they constructed Chimeras of the WIV1 SARS-1-like virus because they published it:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517719113

Pretty bad secrecy.

We knew WIV1 existed as well because they published it 3 years earlier:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5389864/

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

#519

Post by pessimizer »

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…

It's pretty sickening that a coronavirus lab in China that the US was completely involved with both financially and through scientific cooperation can be reframed as more nationalistic anti-China bullshit. The US isn't keeping things peaceful with China for the sake of trade relations, it's actually threatening China constantly. The US is keeping quiet about the lab leak theory because it was just as responsible for that lab as China was, and it wants to distract from that fact.

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

#520

Post by hackinthebochs »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #477
hackinthebochs wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people typically gather in the parking lot of the WIV in large numbers? What was the reproductive rate of the initial version? What was the probability of an infection turning into a severe enough case to register to epidemiologists months later? For a relatively low reproductive rate or severity, you will need a lot of human contact to have detectable cases. The fact that the initial detectable cases are clustere…

The market is not near the WIV. They're on opposite sides of a very large city.

"Near" is a relative term. In the context of all the places in China this novel virus could have popped up, it is definitely near. It's also a 45 minute drive from WIV (as stated in another comment). In the context of a location that will attract people from all over the city, it is also near.
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