801–810 of 1001 posts
[flagged]
Agreed, there is one issue of release. That we can never prove. China, not China. Intentional, not. GoF funded with US dollars or not. There is imo a bigger issue with response. And if ANYONE thinks the response was even remotely correct or good then they need to put their screen down for a good long while.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The PRRAR FCS not a known FCS prior to the pandemic so it is unlikely the lab would have genetically engineered it and they would have used something like RRXRR instead. Other coronaviruses have an FCS and they have evolved multiple different times, independently: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... The fact that we knew that adding an FCS to a virus would likely enhance its ability to pro…
Why would it have happened only in the market? Seems to me that it’s plausible they just managed to cover up other points of origin for the pandemic in Wuhan and that the market was the first super spreading event. If your only defense is that this is not the most commonly used way to add a FCS to coronaviruses, that seems pretty thin.
You realize that is going to rapidly descend into circular logic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately, unless whoever destroyed evidence screwed up (happens all the time, security services have enough idiots and slackers), or somebody kept some evidence and then will defect, yes, it is likely we'll never have the proof. That's why they do it.
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Inst…
> Do we have the genetic sequences from these experiments? Has anyone compared them to the sequences from the pandemic? I don't know about those specifically, but one of the earliest genetic matches we had is a natural virus called RaTG13 and was studied in the Wuhan lab. I think a closer match has since been found though. > I'm not entirely up to speed but I recall hearing something about the US government funding t…
I believe the most likely research-related origin involves an unpublished virus. I don't think that's implausible; the WIV was also sampling in Laos, and no research group in the world has published literally everything they're currently working on. Even with no attempt at secrecy, it takes time to write stuff up. It's also possible that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally-evolved virus collected and leaked by the WIV before they were able to sequence it.
As to the grandparent's final question, I'm not aware of any serious claim that Pfizer had anything to do with this. There was a claim that Moderna was somehow involved, based on a genetic sequence that appears both in SARS-CoV-2 and in a pre-pandemic Moderna patent; but that sequence appears in other previously-known organisms too.
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 e…
However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US, I want to believe them but they just shot 3 balloons in hysterical panic that were just their own weather balloons just because we sent 1... so sometimes they seem to be wrong and we should keep an open mind.
The best would be that a bat shat on a pangolin a lab worker ate before going to work, he sneezed around and contaminated all his colleagues who spread it around and poom: wild bat + pangolin traffic + lab leak all together lol Now that we can all agree, what has changed ?
Surely we re not agreeing that China was making weapons or leaked voluntarily, so beyond us being weasels unable to accept we screwed up, not sure why we drag on: we ll never say we screwed up, the US will never entirely accept we didnt screw up, what then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Aum Shinrikyo cult was developing biological weapons. Sarin would be classed as chemical, not biological. It's also worth illustrating that their primary terrorist act killed 15 people, after releasing sarin on 5 different trains during Tokyo's busy rush hour. You would have been more effective just lobbing a single grenade.
The cult used a chemical weapon. They were also developing biological weapons based on botulism and anthrax at the same time but fortunately didn't get a chance to use those.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A "sightly-less-shitty-than-other-theories" theory is still a shitty theory. Low-confidence means exactly what it sounds like.
Yes it's a completely ridiculous theory that the biolab that works on bat borne coronaviruses might have had something to do with the bad borne coronavirus that sprang up a mile away. It's just a theory. Totally crackpot. I mean come on they totally found the animal that came from to support the zoonotic origin theory. Oh wait, they have yet to identify a spillover animal. Anyone with common sense notice the lab leak…
Putting aside all the speculation here: What is the biggest possible gain we can get from gain-of-function research? Does it outweigh the possible downside of a gain-of-function experiment escaping a lab? I’m seriously interested in seeing a defense of this kind of research.
It has given a head-start on understanding the way certain viruses spread and change, and provided a basis for developing treatments and vaccines. If Sars-COV-2 really spread because of a lab leak, the irony of ironies is that treatments and vaccines could be developed so fast precisely because this type of virus had been studied.
We can assume a lab leak would not be admitted for some time (if ever).
So I reject the idea of a head start. If such a thing happened, the perpetrators would not give you a head start, as that would confirm their guilt!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is the nature of a "dog whistle" - it has a legitimate meaning, and some people use the legitimate meaning. That legitimacy gives malicious people plausible deniability. Social media sites cannot tell the difference, and quite often it's very hard for people to tell the difference as well. Social media sprays weed killer on all the discussions because they don't want their app covered in weeds; not having flower…
[flagged]