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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

#591

Post by yibg »

ikrenji wrote: post #485
actually_a_dog wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Isn’t that mixing causation with correlation. The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

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

#592

Post by B8MGHCBekDuRi »

nl wrote: post #532
B8MGHCBekDuRi wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

> If you were part of the 96% of the World population which is not American, you would know the feeling. I'm not American, nor do I live in America. And while I have some sympathy for pointing out "the world is not the US", the majority of the comment was bald whataboutism: > "At least a leak is not intentional like killing hundreds of thousand of innocent people by bombing their homes. Leak doesn't mean engineering…

What about "People in the USA are grieving because of China virus created to kill us, but we won't do anything against China because the first step of grief is denial"?

How does this sound?

It's completely normal to me to answer: well my friend, first of all a leak is a mistake, it's not intentional since, you know, the first who paid where the Chinese themselves, it would be pretty stupid to do it intentionally. But if you really think things go that way because people do not understand who's their enemy (the Chinese who want to kill you by engineering a virus), what about all the countries that the USA has relationships to, to their advantage only, after killing their citizen, without even apologizing?

Should they cut the links too?

What about what the USA and UK did to Chinese people?

There's a reason why they made a cultural revolution and chose communism, and no, being a "democracy" doesn't make your country automatically better.

Spoiler alert: American people have lost many relatives because of their government.

So maybe it's toward them that they should be angry and ask for a change.

Even if it was a lab leak, the right solution would be cooperation, so that it doesn't happen again (because next time could happen to the US...)

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

#593

Post by AnimalMuppet »

smsm42 wrote: post #152
r053bud wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.

That lying about pandemic origins is the best course of dealing with the pandemic is an exceptionally bold statement.

That some bureaucrats might think that is a much less bold statement.

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

#594

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

mwbajor wrote: post #287
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…

So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions, does that count as a leak?

It absolutely would.

I think the people so eager to say it wasn’t a leak are often strawmaning that the argument is intentional leak.

I don’t care if it was a 1 in a billion accident. If it happened, it did so at a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses, and that was being funded by money originating in the USA. So…

I think I know how to prevent the next global event that someone is surely working on.

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

#595

Post by chasd00 »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #554
dqpb wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I think it's different in that I think when the lab leak strategy was first introduced, it was introduced in an explicitly political manner, i.e. by a politician vs an (arguably) apolitical institution. There wasn't evidence presented to support this theory beyond the political pundits footballing the theory around, who were most certainly not medical research experts about this. At least this is how I saw it as a la…

Regular people here without a known political affiliation were ridiculed relentlessly for even mentioning the lableak hypothesis. Same goes for merely questioning lockdowns. I hope many of you are doing some serious reflection.

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

#596

Post by anothernewdude »

lucideer wrote: post #589
pessimizer wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> The headline is absolutely, literally true It absolutely, literally isn't. The headline says the lab leak is the most likely origin. The lab theory being the least shitty theory absolutely doesn't make it a likely origin: it is purely a statement about the information we have (rather lack thereof) on origins, not on the likelihood of any of those. Likelihood of origin doesn't even come into it given the current sta…

Yes, a thing can be most likely, and not likely.

It is talking about the relative likelihood of the possible origins.

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

#599

Post by lmm »

mwbajor wrote: post #287
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…

So if a tech from the Wuhan lab on one of these expeditions, does that count as a leak?

If "patient zero" was someone who was there in a work capacity and got infected while doing that, yes. If they were a tourist who happened to work at the lab then no.

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

#600

Post by hotpotamus »

baja_blast wrote: post #433
hotpotamus wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US isn't capable of preventing its own citizens from acquiring weapons and performing terrorist attacks with them. The idea that we'll be able to enforce controls on labs in foreign countries seems pretty far fetched given that. And as the tech advances, I suspect it will democratize like any other technology so that a lone enthusiast can design their own viruses in a home lab. I'm not particularly an optimist ab…

But it is in the best interest of all countries. Unlike nuclear weapons where the damage can be isolated to one area, highly contagious weapons are impossible to control and will end up hurting themselves as well.

I suspect the world would be better off if all knowledge of nuclear weapons were eradicated. I doubt on a few levels that the damage can really be isolated given proliferation. Baby Boomers were found to have significantly elevated levels of strontium-90 in their baby teeth attributed just to atmospheric testing. That did result in a treaty to ban the practice, but nuclear weapon research continued and continues today. I doubt any country will willingly stop viral research; especially because there are legitimate medical reasons for such research, though I suspect weapon applications are inextricably intertwined as well.
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