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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

#421

Post by lamontcg »

danenania wrote: post #394
sokoloff wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus techno…

Also, zoonotic transfer happening naturally in any particular time and place is extremely unlikely, even in places where the conditions are optimal. I always thought this was a good test for whether someone can apply Bayesian reasoning. It turns out not many can, including a lot of highly educated people. Without hard evidence to contradict it, lab leak should have always been the default hypothesis. That it hasn’t i…

Your prior should be that it was just like the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak which happened in a different city without this research lab and also involved in a spillover in wet market of a virus whose closest known relative was found hundreds of miles away in bats (in close to the same area that RatG13 was found).

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#422

Post by oilchange »

godelski wrote: post #322
HardlyCurious wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right? The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. Gain of function research is real, scient…

> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up ki…

> To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control.

Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.

> The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself.

Never prevented intentional disease warfare throughout history. What makes you think leaders aren't willing to hurt their own countries to hurt their enemies? More importantly, what makes you think these countries will develope bio-weapons, but not vaccines for them?

> The threat of a infectious weapon is not from other nations, but from a terrorist organization (which of course dramatically reduces risk).

Every major terrorist organization is or was created, funded and controlled by major nations.

> Contagion weapons are the weapons of those with nothing left to lose (which aren't big/rich countries, even in dire circumstances).

And yet, all weapons labs in history were created by big/rich countries. You so desperately want a world without bio-weapons that you are blinded to the contradictions in your argument.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#423

Post by upsidesinclude »

sokoloff wrote: post #296
lamontcg wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is not direct evidence, but under a weaker burden of proof (e.g. balance of probabilities) it is fairly convincing. - We have a bunch of evidence of WIV engineering SARS-1-like viruses because they talked about it before the pandemic. - We have zero evidence of them ever doing experiments on live SARS-2-like virus - We have zero evidence of the existence of a SARS-2-like progenitor virus - Before the pandemic th…

> If it was transported to the seafood market by someone who worked at the lab that is highly coincidental that the place they infected first just happened to be the most likely place for zoonotic spillover If we're going with highly coincidental pairings, it seems like we can't ignore "the disease originated in the only city in China to have an institute that specializes in virology, viral pathology and virus techno…

At this point can we not just state plainly, the whole denial argument is predicated on politics?

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#424

Post by thsksbd »

joering2 wrote: post #400
whyenot wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the mid 1960s, my mom worked in an infectious disease lab. One day, her and her colleagues were tasked with cleaning out a freezer full of samples. Shortly thereafter her and everyone else in the lab got a flu-like illness that did not clear up for many days. It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have…

Back in 2009 I used to date a girl in Connecticut. She was attending Yale. She was a very nice person but very sloppy. She would always break something or spill something, it was her nature. One day she told me she's running late with school stuff so "meet me at the lab". I came in, got thru security and went to her lab. There she was feeding some 200 mosquitoes sick with malaria, buzzing in a rather small jar, all p…

Anyone who's worked with grad students knows that the lab leak is very plausible.

Every one i know who did a science graduate degree has hairy stories.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#425

Post by George83728 »

godelski wrote: post #322
HardlyCurious wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the closest natural viruses to covid were sent to Wuhan for study. I mean, that is what the Wuhan institute of coronaviruses was built to do right? The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. And it doesn't require any malice. No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. Gain of function research is real, scient…

> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up ki…

> [...] infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control.

You mean contagious, not infectious. Biological weapons which are infectious but not particularly contagious, such as anthrax, are much easier to control and have been the focus of most biological weapons research. Biological weapons are banned and aren't, used not because they don't work, but because other things work better and with less political fallout.

And FWIW, very contagious pathogens could be used as weapons for strategic effect if you had reason to believe they would hurt your economy less than your enemy's. For instance, if you believe your authoritarian government will allow you to flatten the curve but liberal governments will have a disordered response that precludes this. I'm not saying they did it, but the possibility isn't patently absurd.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#426

Post by junofan »

antonvs wrote: post #393
startupsfail wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can the lab be sued out of existence for damages? It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been s…

> And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus A claim was made about that, but it’s far from settled. One could argue it has been debunked. See “SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site was not engineered”: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2211107119 > And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. That’s speculation. Irresponsible speculation, in fact, which has been pushed by people wh…

It’s speculation because nobody’s been allowed to investigate the lab thoroughly.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#427

Post by junofan »

SantalBlush wrote: post #402
joering2 wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2009 I used to date a girl in Connecticut. She was attending Yale. She was a very nice person but very sloppy. She would always break something or spill something, it was her nature. One day she told me she's running late with school stuff so "meet me at the lab". I came in, got thru security and went to her lab. There she was feeding some 200 mosquitoes sick with malaria, buzzing in a rather small jar, all p…

Well I don't have any mildly interesting anecdotes about dating a bat who got sick in a cave, so I guess all the evidence points to a lab leak.

It’s worth investigating the lab to gather evidence. I think that is the point of the anecdote; things happen.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#428

Post by irjustin »

HardlyCurious wrote: post #392
irjustin wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that? The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.

Are you of the belief that the lab leak theory implies intention?

i'm of the belief that we only have speculation.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#429

Post by jcranmer »

oilchange wrote: post #422
godelski wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up ki…

> To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. Most countries ( small to mid-tier ) lack the expertise, will or reason for it. But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best o…

> But most major countries are working on biological weapons. If you think the US, Russia, China, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, etc aren't running bio-weapons labs, then you are being too trusting at best or too naive at worst. Or maybe I'm just being too cynical.

https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch... covers this in some detail (it's geared towards chemical weapons, but biological weapons are the same boat). In short, chemical and biological weapons just aren't useful. For any platform you put it on, conventional explosives will do more damage. For major militaries, there's no point in using them, which is why the "big" military powers have all signed up to the anti-chemical weapons and anti-biological weapons treaties, but not the anti-nuclear or anti-cluster munitions or anti-landmines, etc.

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