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First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

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Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#171

Post by somebody78978 »

this_user wrote: post #129
ozr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was developed in lab, presumably there would be a substantial amount of information available on it. Lab notes, testing results, transmission rates, all sorts of things we had to discover in the wild. We could have used that data to make progress on a vaccine (and adjust our overall response) much, much faster.

How and why would they have that kind of data available if the virus only existed in the lab? At most they could have had computer simulations, but no real data. The only information they would have had is the DNA sequence, but that was rapidly sequenced anyway, and design of the original vaccines followed in short order. What took time was testing and manufacturing the vaccines, but none of this would have been acce…

I don't understand, the whole point of studying a virus in a lab is to gather data on it.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#172

Post by TechBro8615 »

hotpotamus wrote: post #151
TechBro8615 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had personally decided by April 2020 that there was sufficient information for me to believe that Covid was a lab-enhanced pathogen that was accidentally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My "source" was mainly common sense (the simplest solution is usually the right one, and guilty people doth protest too much), an understanding of probability (there is a lab studying the pathogen right n…

Ok, given your prescience about the origin of COVID, how did that influence the actions you took to mitigate its effects?

I lived alone, stayed isolated, kept healthy and exercised, took reasonable precautions while outside, and... because this is what you're really asking... chose not to get any vaccination, because data by July 2021 showed its effectiveness waned after three months and I had no plans within the next six months to interact with any crowds or expose myself to another individual for more than fifteen minutes. Then in December 2021, Omicron became the dominant strain, with much lower risk than previous strains, so I decided there was no sense introducing unknown variables associated with a vaccine for diminishing protection against a strain of a virus that presented risks I felt personally comfortable with accepting. (At some point I was also of the opinion that Omicron itself was an engineered strain, but I had stopped paying sufficient attention by that point to have much confidence in that opinion.)

I never felt any need to tell others what decisions they should make, and I understood my circumstances gave me relatively rare affordances of being able to remain isolated for long periods of time. Had those circumstances changed, maybe my decision regarding vaccination would have changed too. But by the time of Omicron, any risk analysis I made seemed to lead to the same conclusion that vaccination was not worthwhile, and if anything, that I should hope to contract the Omicron strain since it might confer the most effective immunity, with the lowest risk of complications, against future strains of the virus.

As of today, as far as I'm aware, I've never contracted any strain of COVID-19. Knock on wood.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#173

Post by PathOfEclipse »

muglug wrote: post #77

[flagged]

https://www.leefang.com/p/msnbcs-mehdi-hasan-gets-basic-fact...

Maybe you're actually the one falling prey to false information, and harming others by spreading it. From the article:

The Taibbi-Hasan debate speaks to the sorry state of affairs in the U.S. news media. Every journalist gets things wrong occasionally. Taibbi has conceded that he made an error in one of his tweets, though not in his congressional testimony, and swiftly corrected it. Many of Hasan’s claims have been debunked, including his false claim, first flagged by journalist Aaron Mate, that he “never said a word about the Hunter Biden story" and of course this CISA-EIP issue. Hasan’s version of journalism means never correcting his own falsehoods. But since Hasan works for a cable news network where exciting a polarized audience is the chief performance metric, he is sure to benefit from the gotcha-style assault on Taibbi.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#174

Post by hwillis »

graeme wrote: post #113
onethought wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun

The market is extremely close to the lab. Within walking distance

That's the CDC, a totally unrelated building which even then isn't very close to the wet market, which is not a very popular spot in the city. The WIV was many miles outside the city.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#175

Post by Vrondi »

onethought wrote: post #60
hwillis wrote: post #16

Note that this is NOT the Wuhan CDC, which is the building across the river from the wet market. They did not do any research there. This building is ~10 miles south, well outside the main city. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Wuhan_Ins... The fact that researchers were sick with flu-like symptoms has been openly stated by the US for a long time. This was put out in the state department Jan 2021, 2…

Which still doesn’t really draw the line of how an outbreak occurred at the wet market. Also common seasonal illness isn’t exactly a smoking gun

If a single staff person caught a virus, then anyone they interacted with and gave it to went to the market, then that's all it would take.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#177

Post by photochemsyn »

muglug wrote: post #77

[flagged]

It's only one claim in a large body of independent evidence pointing to bat coronavirus research at WIV being the source of the pandemic. Additionally, the collaboration between US-based coronavirus researchers and the Wuhan group dates back to 2013. The fact that the virus appeared pre-adapted to replicate rapidly in humans also is not aligned with previous zoonotic origins, where an adaptation process could be tracked over time as the genetic sequence evolved. Furthermore, the Ecohealth Alliance grant proposals to DARPA etc. for work to be done at WIV involved direct modification of the spike protein sequence, which in Sars-CoV2 has a codon usage pattern optimal for human cells. The question of whether WIV had the original bat coronavirus sequence that was modified into Sars-CoV2 is opaque due to WIV's deletion of their online database of sequences and further refusal to cooperate with investigations.

Overall, the most plausible scenario is that WIV researchers collected the original bat coronavirus sequence from cave(s) in southern China, then applied various research procedures such as serial passage through humanized mice lines and cell cultures, along with specific CRISPR-type modification of the spike protein, to generate a virus with optimal properties for replication in humans, which accidentally spread to human researchers and the people around them (including a superspreader event in the wet market). From there it spread globally by train and then airplane, causing millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage.

Why does it matter what the origin was? This kind of reckless and irresponsible research must be strictly curtailed to prevent it from happening again. There are dozens of mammalian viruses in nature that are harmless to people but which could be modified by these processes into novel pandemic threats to which human populations have little innate immunity.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#178

Post by MarkMarine »

mindslight wrote: post #125
MarkMarine wrote: post #72

It's pretty incredible to see the US Government shift around these conflicting narratives, moving toward (apparently 3 letter agency by agency) this lab leak origin. Especially considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein. I think they owe us a complete release of the data they have and an actual assessment, from the government, explained by the…

> considering the vilification of anyone (including the president at the time) for saying things that were in this vein It's very weird that you frame this as if the vilification including the President was an indicator of it being unreasonable, when the actual situation was that the President himself was one of the main drivers of why this topic couldn't be discussed rationally. Once the conversation is hijacked by…

Before I get painted as a Trump supporter and therefore blind to my team, I’m not. Don’t support him, and when listening to him yell about China virus and then listening to people calmly say that was racism, I went with the calm people. But the man did get the PDB every day. Maybe he heard some of this intelligence and made some leaps to suit his purpose.

But if we were all lied to about the origin, our family and friends died because of this, and xenophobia or racism was used as a shield to deflect criticism from the people and research techniques that got us into this mess… that isn’t something you just handwave away.

There are hollow suit blowhards hijacking every avenue of conversation around every important topic, right now. That research mechanism, gain of function or splicing together viruses… it’s being done again. To say that we have to reject what the blowhard says even if they are right about something, I can’t buy that.

If this is true, that research is too dangerous and needs to be stopped and treated like nuclear weapons, because it is.

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#179

Post by donohoe »

stainablesteel wrote: post #131
muglug wrote: post #77

[flagged]

in my experience, a pure reputation destruction post is generally non-credible, and you posted an establishment media interview on someone who supports twitter: of course they have a bone to pick. for the sake of honest conversation, can you list what conspiracy theories you're referring to? because the last few conspiracy theories i can remember somehow all turned out to be true. so i'm really concerned with what is…

Not really. You can easily find this information. Perhaps start here?

https://thebanter.substack.com/p/matt-taibbis-puff-piece-on-...

Re: First people sickened by Covid-19 were scientists at WIV: US government sources

#180

Post by kneel »

jb12 wrote: post #30

> "If you knew that this was likely a lab-enhanced pathogen, there are so many things you could have done differently" I'm curious - if we knew in March 2020 that covid came from a lab, what _would_ we have done differently?

Dangerous virus research has continued in the interim.

The real question is if there is little to no regulation or even acknowledgement of failures, it's only a matter of time before this happens again.

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