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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

#271

Post by JPLeRouzic »

snowwrestler wrote: post #217
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> "There were tons of allegations that HIV was created in a lab too."

Scientists' best guess is that the precursor of the most common "M" virus jumped from the Cameroon chimps to humans sometime before 1931.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/virus/origins....

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#272

Post by plagiarist »

kcplate wrote: post #165
camillomiller wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They will not, because those accusations came from people who intended to use them to discredit Chinese people in general, or that closely associate the leak with the Chinese way of doing things and so on. These accusation led to racist attacks against Asian people all over the us.

Ok, so the original motivations for some making that claim were suspect. Should that automatically excuse or prevent discussion that better safety protocols should be used or a better “ways of doing things” should be undertaken when handling viruses and pathogens that are capable of killing 7M people? I think it’s a valid topic and important one that should be verboten lest the next time we accidentally kill 14M with…

If the people making that claim had been sane, instead of pushing it in the middle of; "it's not deadly, just a flu," "masks do nothing," "maybe a bit of bleach is fine in the lungs," "hydroxychloroquine cures everything," "no, wait, it is horse paste that cures everything," "the vaccine will kill you in X months, guaranteed," and "GREAT RESET," it'd be easier to transition into a serious discussion about studying deadly viruses in labs.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#273

Post by cubefox »

th0ma5 wrote: post #251
cubefox wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But why do you think it is important to prove a lab leak? Perhaps because it is slightly interesting what caused the worst pandemic since the Spanish flu? Because millions of people died? Because knowing the cause could perhaps prevent something similar happen again? Perhaps prevent millions of deaths? I'm astonished by this question.

Sure but what if it just isn't knowable?

Historians are still finding out things that happened hundreds of years ago. Do you really think the origins of Covid are lost in the mists of time?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#274

Post by randomperson01 »

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…

There is no reason to suspect Ill intent. Accidents happen. It is well known the WIV were doing gain of function research on SARS-related CoVs. It is also known that the WIV were partners in a proposal to insert human specific cleavage sites into SARS+related CoVs https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

The probability that a novel SARS-related CoV would emerge naturally in the city in China that was used as a seropositivity control -and the location of the worlds largest SARS-related related research lab, and which had very low wildlife consumption compared to Southern coastal cities is There is no evidence for any infected animals at the Huanan market https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.04.25.538336v2

There was a known ascertainment bias towards reporting associated with the market https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.00313-23

The modelling by Pekar et al inferring multiple spillovers at the market was flawed https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1

Prior to the pandemic, the State department literally warned the US govt. a SARS-related accident was a real risk at the WIV https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-dep...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#275

Post by denton-scratch »

th0ma5 wrote: post #259
denton-scratch wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distance from Wuhan of the discovery site of RaTG13 is irrelevant, if (as the article implies) a senior team at the Wuhan lab were working on RaTG13. The article is not suggesting that Covid19 evolved from RaTG13; it is suggesting that Covid19 is a chimaera made with RaTG13.

[flagged]

The NYT is a reputable organ, known for checking it's sources. Unlike Wikipedia, newspapers don't generally cite their sources; but if a reliable source states something like that as fact, they've probably checked. You're right: they haven't said they can prove it.

[Of course, it could be propaganda, government or otherwise; or it could be a damned lie concocted by the reporter or editor. They've said they have sources, they haven't named them, so it's not unreasonable to suppose they have sources that don't want to be named.]

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#276

Post by randomperson01 »

ajross wrote: post #175
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…

My position hasn't changed for years: if covid was really a lab creation we'd know, because someone would have told us. An email dump, a memo, a document, an interview. Something would have leaked out. The incentives are just too high and the access is too pervasive[1] to believe otherwise. Is it possible? Sure! Is it likewise possible that some of the circumstantial claims about WIV are true? Sure! But if someone ma…

Just like someone leaked out about the Sverdlovsk lab accident - how many years did that take?

http://web.archive.org/web/20210621032149/https://www.nytime...

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#277

Post by pbreit »

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…

"not in itself an indication of any ill-intent"

Was that even insinuated?

"no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab"

Wut?

"Between 1 July and 1 October 2012, we received 13 serum samples collected from 4 patients"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9744119/

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#278

Post by epups »

th0ma5 wrote: post #260
epups wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this line of argument. The facts are that 1) the virus outbreak was in Wuhan, 2) that there ws a local lab working on virus samples that come from all over the world and 3) as far as we know, the particular strain that affected Wuhan is not local. Altogether, this should add confidence to the lab leak theory, not detract from it.

[flagged]

Ok but in that scenario, a natural emergence would have come from a strain from Wuhan, while the lab leak theory explains why a virus from relatively far away had an outbreak in Wuhan.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#279

Post by kcplate »

plagiarist wrote: post #272
kcplate wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so the original motivations for some making that claim were suspect. Should that automatically excuse or prevent discussion that better safety protocols should be used or a better “ways of doing things” should be undertaken when handling viruses and pathogens that are capable of killing 7M people? I think it’s a valid topic and important one that should be verboten lest the next time we accidentally kill 14M with…

If the people making that claim had been sane, instead of pushing it in the middle of; "it's not deadly, just a flu," "masks do nothing," "maybe a bit of bleach is fine in the lungs," "hydroxychloroquine cures everything," "no, wait, it is horse paste that cures everything," "the vaccine will kill you in X months, guaranteed," and "GREAT RESET," it'd be easier to transition into a serious discussion about studying de…

I honestly don’t see much difference in the level of extremism between everything you listed vs people deciding a specific topic is off limits just because the theory may not be politically correct, or because the alt opinion may have some factual basis.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#280

Post by randomperson01 »

hayst4ck wrote: post #57

If anyone's in for a long read, despite the hokey sounding name, I found this to be one of the best contemporaneous explorations of Covid in china that I've seen to date: https://project-evidence.github.io/

Its a good compilation that I saw in mid 2020 that was one of the sources of data leading me to question the zoonotic spillover hypothesis that I had read in Zhou et al (RaTG13 paper) and Anderson et al. That the WIV was conducting exactly the type of research that could have led to a highly human infectious novel SARS-CoV was poo-pood and cast as a conspiracy theory. As Ian Lipkin stated following the Fauci teleconference "we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to deal with"
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