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

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

#861
I always wondered why there is is much resistance to the idea of lab leak and why the origin of a virus is this political. My conclusion is that this topic happens to go to the root some very important disagreements we are having as a culture.

At the core I see this as being about individual freedom vs big government. If your attitudes are pro-government you really want the most destructive virus of all time to have "spilled over" from nature. Finally, a job only a state can do. "We" need to protect habitats! Fight Climate change! Lock people in their homes and force injections to "protect" everyone. "Well you know, it's not like we WANT to do this but this virus is forcing our hand".

If this is lab leak than it means that your government (not only the Chinese government, US government is implicated here as well) is murderously incompetent to start with and then covered it up with constant lies and gas-lighting and then took all your civil liberties, got everyone who disagreed banned from social media (and I hope that was the worst they did). All the while getting people deeply scared with targeted propaganda and making anyone who just wanted to lead their lives normally out to be a stochastic granny killer.

But of course, if lab leak turned out the be the truth, we would still not see even 1/1000000th of the vitriol directed at anti-maskers be directed at the people ACTUALLY literally responsible for all these deaths as well as the health-, social- and economic mass destruction.

It's always been this way: when government does it, millions of corpses is just so much spilled milk on the way to Utopia.

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

#862
post #805

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…

Im in China myself and I dont mind if it's a lab leak, better than saying we re degenerate Pangolin eaters :D 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 la…

> However, it's hard to be too trusting of the US

The question is not whether to trust the US [government] in absolute terms, the question is whether the democratically elected US government that is bound by the rule of law, strong institutions providing checks and balances and the Freedom of Information Act can be trusted more than the autocratic Chinese communist party that is accountable to absolutely no one.

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

#863
post #202

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…

Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2

Even if we had them and they were found to be different, that doesn't exclude the possibility that they repeated the same experiment with different source material.

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

#864
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

Is that even true? Because I recall the opposite.

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

#865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what China wants yes. But while this helps the CCP party save face, it doesn't help to move on with the investigation. It's not even about the blame. We investigate air crashes in such detail so we can prevent them from happening again. Of course with an even bigger event like this we should do the same. The pandemic has happened and no kind of blame or money can revert it. But we can try to learn everything a…

Pilots are licensed and airframes are certified. Licenses can be revoked. Where are the personal civil and criminal penalties for the GoF staff?

You're missing the point. The main purpose of airplane crash investigations is to find the cause and fix it so it doesn't happen again in the future. This is done mostly without placing blame on anyone, precisely because that leads to finding a scapegoat instead of finding and fixing a problem.

Finding and fixing a problem is exactly what needs to happen here too.

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

#866

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…

FWIW the Japanese translation of the title is

新型コロナの起源、研究所から流出の可能性高い=米エネルギー省

To retranslate back to English as a relatively direct translation

The cause of COVID, there is a high possibility it spread from a lab.

Notably missing are something like 一番, to mean most. This title is in absolute terms. The reason I found this in the first place was because a Japanese colleague was surprised that it did come from a lab! after an initial moment of doubt before accepting it because WSJ is reputable.

I sent the news deck an email pointing it out but do expect it's intentional. Reading as absolute rather than relative is likely "correct" and a great example of misinformation from the WSJ. Presumably reputable news sources just don't exist anymore, or perhaps they never did :(

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

#868

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember articles and quotes firmly rejecting the lab leak hypothesis and darkly implying that those championing the theory had a hidden agenda. The considerations were: — there were random attacks on Asians - public health officials and scientists were worried about an anti science backlash - virologists were really worried about a backlash against virology — relations with China had not yet deteriorated to their…

There were and are problematic elements of the lab leak people as well - I still see people (on this site) who claim that some or all aspects of the virus were synthetically created at the behest of Anthony Fauci. You may say I'm nutpicking, but I truly have a hard time determining what the lab leak theory is sometimes. But my sense was that the agenda behind the lab leak family of theories was to lay blame at some h…

You know how you're driving and a person behind you gets in a turning lane but then continues to go straight anyway and then honks at YOU for getting in their way. And because you are the nice guy but knows they fucked up you don't raise a stink and honk back but you're still fucking mad as hell?

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

#869
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The BANAL viruses collected in Laos are closer than RaTG13. No published virus is close enough that SARS-CoV-2 could readily be derived from it in the lab, though some people have speculated about pathways via accelerated evolution during serial passaging. 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 resear…

Thanks. To clarify my question, the part about Pfizer seems to be that they were engineering virus variants after the pandemic started, and doing so intentionally in a laboratory, not (merely) as a byproduct of overly-specific vaccines exerting evolutionary pressure.

What I heard about that was based on supposed leaked information (Project Veritas). Such information going public would obviously be very bad PR, so it would make sense for it to be secret, if it's real. But also, anyone can record a fake interview (and nowadays, somewhat convincingly replace the faces and voices too), so...

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

#870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where’s your comment from two years ago belittling the wet market theory as shitty? This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences.

>>> This whole saga is a damning indictment of: science journalism, government agencies’ public engagement, scientists’ public engagement, and the critical reasoning skills of middlebrow audiences Aint this the dang truth.

How big the sway ones political affiliation is drove all of that
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