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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

#941

Post by LorenPechtel »

bradleyjg wrote: post #736
hotpotamus wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It’s one thing for nutjobs to push a bad theory for some whacky reason and another thing entirely for establishment figures to shade the truth in order to push a (positive!) agenda. We have so many nutjobs, in part, because of generations of establishment figures being dishonest for the greater good. Lab leak was always a better theory. There were what hundreds? thousands? of wet markets across China and two bsl-4 la…

Except for the little detail that this virus has been observed to make natural zoonotic jumps at least twice--and has infected other humans (probably *many* other humans) without appreciable onward transmission. It's an entirely reasonable thing for it to have happened once again. We simply don't need to involve the lab, so why blame it other than to bash China?

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

#942

Post by bayesian_horse »

rleigh wrote: post #162
bayesian_horse wrote: post #132

Lab leak of what even? There is nothing magical about virological labs. They don't create new virus out of nothing. Most of the time there is a "lab leak" the virus already had all the potential it had before. In all the cases I can remember, the only reason the "lab leak" was even a significant event (as opposed to a bucket spilling into the ocean) is when the lab was geographically distinct from the endemic occurre…

What do you exactly mean that Gain of Function is "easier said than done"? We routinely engineer changes in viruses for all sorts of purposes. Even I can do it [baculovirus expression cassette vectors--takes less than a day from engineering the cassette to getting expression products]. The tools to do this can be ordered from a catalogue, and it's never been easier to manipulate genomes. You design and order the prim…

Then you don't understand viral evolution or genomic epidemiology. "Gain of function" genomes just aren't that viable. Modifying genomes always means the virus becomes less effective in most ways - except one. It's so much not like "programming" it isn't even funny.

Posing "Gain Of Function" experiments as the origin of Sars-Cov-2 also forgets to answer the question of what exactly the starting genome was. At the very least it was completely unknown outside that mystery lab. And there is zero signature anything has been done to it despite natural selection. And when we're talking evolutionary experiments, now you need to explain a couple thousands of hosts (and mice don't really cut it, ferrets and upwards more probably...) at the very minimum, if not hundreds of thousands, which are a lot harder to hide.

Biology is really hard. That's why it took millions of hosts to finetune Sars-Cov-2 to the menace it eventually became. That's not going to happen in a lab any time soon because we don't have the tools. We have tools to assemble and modify some genes, but the chance of actually creating a pandemic that way, accidentally or intentionally is next to zero. Yes, it is out of the question that Wuhan researchers created Sars-Cov-2 through "Gain Of Function research, especially related to those "papers" that are often cited to spread this misinformation.

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

#943

Post by tripletao »

andai wrote: post #869
tripletao wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah, the video with Jordon Trishton Walker--so not the virus origins, but alleged gain of function work after emergence. I understand that the video is real, and he really is (or was) a "Director of Research and Development" at Pfizer. Most of what he said was scientifically incoherent, though. I'd guess that he got the job for internal political reasons, and that he has almost zero influence on or even understanding of whatever Pfizer is actually doing. I don't love fact check sites in general, but this one has some quotes from researchers that are consistent with my judgment of his expertise:

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/02/scicheck-no-evidence-pfize...

I'm not aware of anyone developing vaccines targeting laboratory-enhanced viruses. GoF proponents sometimes cite earlier vaccine development as a possible benefit, but even they don't actually fund such work--the mutations that occur in the lab aren't predictive enough of the mutations that will occur in real human spread to justify the speculative investment. The research of concern is pretty much all in academia, basic research with more nebulous intended benefit.

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

#944

Post by autoexec »

plutonorm wrote: post #940
autoexec wrote: post #938

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because initially the "some evidence" amounted to little more than "A lab exists" and "leaks are a thing that has happened". Meanwhile the other theories were being supported by science like genome analysis. As time and investigations went on, more evidence came up, but when it started being spread around the evidence being presented was absolutely so weak that as a theory it was essentially speculation.

You are reading you info second hand. If you had gone to the evidence yourself you would not be saying what you are now saying. Read the academic papers, look up the facts from sources as close to the truth as you can. You can't trust people to give you information untainted by their pov. It was obvious to me at the time just by doing a modicum of research.

It's not just me saying there was no evidence. It's the people and articles that were spreading the conspiracy theory.

"Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says" - Tom Cotton

"at this point there's no reason to harbour suspicions' that the facility had anything to do with the outbreak, besides being responsible for the crucial genome sequencing that lets doctors diagnose it" (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...)

"In principle, outward virus infiltration might take place either as leakage or as an indoor unnoticed infection of a person that normally went out of the concerned facility. This could have been the case with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but so far there isn’t evidence or indication for such incident." (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus...)

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

#945

Post by yibg »

khazhoux wrote: post #674
yibg wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absent of other information, why is this the most probably explanation? It’s possible sure, but the best we could’ve said, especially back then is we don’t know. Viruses from animals jump to humans all the time, and have caused other outbreaks before many times, why is this one special?

> why is this one special? There was very clearly something exceptional about it, since we shut down much of the world for a year. > Absent of other information, why is this the most probably explanation? Again, the simple fact that the most severe viral outbreak in decades originated near a research facility for that same kind of virus, was reason enough to push lab-leak to the top of valid theories.

Correlation vs causation. The lab is where the virus is at. Lots of bats in the area.

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

#946

Post by zamnos »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #927
axxto wrote: post #530

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.

How many people in this world just put their blinders on and distort new information to fit their preconceptions and biases? What do you think "low confidence" means in the context of an intelligence report? I tried finding out myself, and I mostly just found people like yourself pretending it means whatever they want it to. I was surprised to find, at CNN, of all places, something that actually sounds credible: " ht…

Yikes, what's your definition for "shitty theory" then? Something that's "not reliable enough or is too fragmented to make a more definitive analytic judgment or that there is not enough information available to draw a more robust conclusion" sounds pretty shitty to me. Literal shit lets you draw more conclusions about the defecator than that!

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

#947

Post by actually_a_dog »

himinlomax wrote: post #888
yibg wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't see any evidence in either your or the GP's post.

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

#948

Post by vikingerik »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #926
vikingerik wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is how the fake news can lie with facts. "Most likely" might be technically true - in the sense that there might be a 2% chance it was that, but there's a hundred other possibilities each with lesser probability, so that one is on top. But it's not really likely at all. So writing the headline that way is absolutely designed to give you a false perception if you don't stop to think about that, which nobody…

Where did you get 2% from? I tried searching for what "low confidence" means when given by an intelligence agency, and in the process I'm finding a lot of people like yourself that apparently like to pretend it means whatever they want it to. > But it's not really likely at all. Is that what low confidence means in this context? After digging, I finally found a news site that said something that sounds credible: http…

I said don't focus on the number, I was simply using 2% as an illustration for how such a headline can be constructed to be misleading. Since you didn't read my post I won't read the rest of yours.

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

#949

Post by wry_discontent »

> U.S. officials declined to give details on the fresh intelligence and analysis that led the Energy Department to change its position.

Definitely truthful information coming from the US government and their very normal and friendly relationship to China.

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

#950

Post by lamontcg »

lmm wrote: post #614
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect, then it's unfalsifiable.

Maybe we should stop supporting the study of dangerous viruses in facilities that don't maintain adequate levels of transparency. Regardless of what actually happened in this case (FWIW I still believe a natural origin was most likely), the Chinese authorities covered up everything to do with the lab and destroyed potential evidence before a proper investigation could take place. In court cases we have a norm that ev…

> In court cases we have a norm that evidence you destroy is treated as evidence against you, for good reason.

Destruction of evidence is considered only evidence of consciousness of guilt and cannot be used to prove guilt alone. The court also has to consider that an innocent person may commit destruction of evidence to avoid wrongful prosecution from situations that look damning.

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