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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#211

Post by andsoitis »

jakear wrote: post #176
BryantD wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a terrible article. “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.” The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.

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> The point is the young and healthy don’t get very sick. You get it, have the sniffles for a day or two, and move on with your life. Same for covid. We could have just embraced that blessing and let children continue to go to school and not experience massive declines in intelligence. But here we are. “Think of the really old people” was truly hilarious. Indeed, all we could do was “think” when my grandpa died alone because visiting the nursing home was banned.

One thing to consider is not so much an individual's health and risk of getting serious ill, but rather that as the numbers grow geometrically, health care systems like hospitals can (and in fact, did) become severely overwhelmed.

Even with measures in place, here in Los Angeles we were at a point where for example if you had a heart attack at home, an ambulance / hospital couldn't deal with you.m https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/05/us/los-angeles-county-califor...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#212

Post by revelio »

aaplok wrote: post #72

> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power. This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand mig…

Viruses mutate because they are constantly exposed to the immune systems of people who were already previously infected, so they have to mutate in order to dodge prior natural immunity. That isn't a concern if most people who get infected die.

Moreover, the first SARS-CoV-2 variant took a long time to start mutating and even then it was only minor mutations. If you release an extremely infectious very deadly virus and you have a vaccine for it, then at that moment it's a Deus Ex scenario and whoever can manufacture the vaccine can take over the world because your enemies are now collapsing and will do anything to obtain the vaccine including giving up their own autonomy. Guess that's the theory, at least.

As to why SARS-CoV-2: because it's airborne and can spread long distances via gas-like clouds (which is why lockdowns, masks, wiping surfaces etc didn't work). You can't really get better if you want to very rapidly infect a whole country.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#213

Post by [deleted] »

reuben_scratton wrote: post #151
pcrh wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The Origins of Covid-19 — Why It Matters (and Why It Doesn’t) >More than half of the earliest Covid-19 cases were connected to the Huanan market, and epidemiologic mapping revealed that the concentration of cases was centered there. In January 2020, Chinese officials cleared the market without testing live animals, but positive environmental samples, including those from an animal cage and a hair-and-feather–removal…

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#215

Post by 2devnull »

aaplok wrote: post #72

> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power. This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand mig…

Governments investigate imperfect weapons. Consider LSD.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#216

Post by peteradio »

th0ma5 wrote: post #121
Xen9 wrote: post #116

I personally believe in Rootlclaim's Bayesian analysis ( https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COV... ) which states that "the virus was developed during gain-of-function research and was released by accident (89% probability)" This is consistent with David Martin's speech in Europe: https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1661698114917646336 I haven't checked the "publicly available references" but m…

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You can't in one comment complain about investigations using "made up priors" and then in another complain that we are investigating something which could actually provide a measured prior.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#217

Post by snowwrestler »

AbrahamParangi wrote: post #174
pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

I’m sure most of this is true or at least true-ish but to be appropriately skeptical, all evidence which has a Chinese source here should be considered as potentially made up. Regardless of whether or not there was a coverup, the Chinese government has certainly acted like it was covering something up. The circumstantial evidence is sort of ridiculous here though. An institute with weak safety controls experimenting…

The “circumstantial evidence” is only novel if the event in question is novel, which the emergence of a new strain of a virus is not.

It is certain that a new strain of some virus is emerging right now next to a lab that works with viruses, because that is a thing that happens continuously in nature, and labs exist within nature. It’s also likely that such a new strain will not cause human illness, as most viruses do not.

SARS-COV-2 only looks novel to humans because it made a lot of humans sick. There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too. This says more about our self-regard than about the virus itself.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#218

Post by lifelong »

BryantD wrote: post #168
pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

What a terrible article. “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.” The rate of hospitalization among 18-49 year olds with flu in the US was 54.1 per 100K in 2019-20. It’s rare, sure, but that kind of absolute statement from an anonymous researcher doesn’t instill confidence.

> What a terrible article.

> “Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”

> It’s rare, sure

Then what makes an article terrible when you agree with the statement?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#219

Post by [deleted] »

jansan wrote: post #112
arisAlexis wrote: post #39

I remember still when it was considered a conspiracy theory and we got downvoted here and banned on reddit for even implying the possibility. Unfortunately something similar is happening with AI x-risk right now.

Same with pointing out at the first studies that indicated that the virus was airborne. I got downvoted to oblivion here for posting a link to the study.

[deleted]
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