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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

#881

Post by MrMan »

xwolfi wrote: post #805
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…

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…

they shot the balloons as theater to show they are tough on balloons after the political opposition started hassling them about the balloon, I wouldnt call it a panic

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

#882

Post by tootie »

pagekicker wrote: post #840
yellowapple wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also weird to me that the Department of Energy (and not, say, the CDC/DHHS or USAMRIID or what have you) is advancing such hypotheses in the first place. What does the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have to do with American energy policy?

DOE supervises the national labs, which have 1) bio experience 2) high classification 3) supercomputers 4) lots more scientists than CIA or God help us FBI. DOE has organic science resources. The other agencies tend to rely on academic consultants, who are compromised because no one wants to bring virology labs under intense and blaming scrutiny.

That would also imply they were specifically looking at lab protocols to determine if there was a possibility of leak and perhaps not fully evaluating the likelihood of other origins which would be outside their expertise. The CDC/NIH/WHO operate loads more labs and also employ loads of epidemiologists.

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

#883

Post by logicalmonster »

p0pcult wrote: post #781
logicalmonster wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On each visit, vendors were asked what species they had sold over the preceding month and in what numbers, along with the prices (US$1:RMB¥6.759) and origin of these goods (wild caught or captive bred/ farmed). It might be true that no bats were sold in Wuhan wet markets, but this methodology doesn't seem the slightest bit credible. Imagine if you were selling bats (is that legal in China?) from a likely illegal so…

The amount of pure speculation in this post is surprising, coming from a logicalmonster. Are those activites illegal in China, or just in your mind? If it is not the former, then your point collapses like a two legged stool.

I am not a lawyer from China and I doubt many posters here are either.

When you have imperfect information, trying to understand a complicated world can never be perfect, but we all still do that anyway because we have to. There's no other way to reason about the world because we're always going to have imperfect information about so many topics.

But I can use my limited knowledge of China, and a reasonable understanding of human nature, to understand that the polling methodology seems unlikely to yield trustworthy results.

Until proven otherwise, I think it is a perfectly reasonable to think that people in China who might deal in some quasi-legal trades wouldn't be perfectly honest in a poll due to concerns about what might happen to them if they admit to something that might be seen as illegal.

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

#884

Post by swores »

plutonorm wrote: post #669
mliker wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the point is the headline is clickbaity, and for the uninformed masses, it sounds like it's highly likely it's from the lab, when that judgment was made with "low confidence"

That you think it's a coincidence that a novel coronavirus pops up in the only place in china working on coronaviruses blows my mind. Any sane, rational human thought it likely a lab leak from the moment this thing started.

Or the scientists sensibly chose to build their lab near where novel viruses are expected to be found, to make studying them easier?

You'd probably, for example, find that charities studying/helping poverty are often found near where lots of poor people live - yet you wouldn't blame charities for creating poverty.

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

#885

Post by bradleyjg »

yellowapple wrote: post #827
bradleyjg wrote: post #576

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.

Were any of these "theories" (they're hypotheses, at best) ever mutually exclusive? It seems entirely possible - and maybe even probable - that SARS-CoV-2: - Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent - Was being studied in a lab and escaped - Found its way into a wet market near said lab

Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent

Almost everyone thinks this is true. Even the most fringy people don’t seem to be claiming that a virus was synthesized from scratch.

Found its way into a wet market near said lab

Ditto for this one. It’s pretty clear that there was a cluster of people early on that were infected in or near the market.

—-

The distinction between the lab leak and non-lab leak theory is whether the lab had anything at all to do with the chain of transmission.

If patient zero caught the virus in the lab or from a vector that was once in the lab, that’s lab leak. It’s apologists for the lab that want to conflate lab leak and bioweapon in order to dismiss the former as a nutty conspiracy theory.

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

#886

Post by himinlomax »

ttul wrote: post #11

The 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…

> it’s most likely a naturally created virus.

The lab leak hypothesis doesn't even rule out that it was a natural virus. It just says that the virus leaked from the lab. It could have been:

- deliberately created in the lab (gain on function)

- accidentally created in the lab through repeated cross-species contamination of lab animals

- just stored in the lab from a natural sample

- or even not deliberately stored in the lab but acquired through infection of a researcher on a collection mission.

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

#887

Post by himinlomax »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #356
smsm42 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious solution for this conundrum is that they did study it, but didn't publish it because the screw-up happened and all evidence was promptly destroyed. In a totalitarian state, the secrecy is the default mode. You can get exceptions and publish stuff, sure, but only once you asked and received permission. If you didn't - or in the period between you asking and permission being issued something happened - no e…

Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.

It's not, because all it would take to falsify it would be to do an exhaustive search of the lab's documentation and a comprehensive interview of lab employees.

We can't do it because of the CCP, not because of epistemological reasons.

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

#888

Post by himinlomax »

yibg wrote: post #591
ikrenji wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The lab is there because there are lots of virus sources there.

That's patently false.

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

#889

Post by unsupp0rted »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #711
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…

Perhaps. But you buried the lede. It wasn't that long ago that just asking the question - or questioning the then narrative - was positioned as a threat to the democracy, racist (i.e., anti China), conspiracy theory, etc. Low confidence based on available data is 100x better than high confidence based on nothing but some backroom creative thinking, and a mindless media entourage willing to parrot anything tossed in f…

I got banned from a major Coronavirus subreddit for saying in 2021 "we don't know yet how many boosters will be needed or on what schedule". This was seen as a claim that the vaccines don't work, which was patently false (at the time).

Questioning whether the virus emerged organically or came from a lab leak? That was equivalent to claiming the government is run by lizard people and the earth is flat. That's a public shaming and banning with prejudice.

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

#890

Post by woooooo »

areyousure wrote: post #877
yellowapple wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were any of these "theories" (they're hypotheses, at best) ever mutually exclusive? It seems entirely possible - and maybe even probable - that SARS-CoV-2: - Originally evolved in the wild to at least some extent - Was being studied in a lab and escaped - Found its way into a wet market near said lab

Your example chain of events would be called "lab leak".

But the lab is completely superfluous to the chain of events. It's jammed in the middle so we can still say "lab leak".
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