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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

#501

Post by throwawaymaths »

abracadaniel wrote: post #453
geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

We have samples that pre-date the wuhan outbreak, so they are not among the earliest. Wuhan was only the first identified super spreader location. Here's one such study from Italy that found infections from as early as Sept 2019. https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220830/Italian-study-fin... original journal https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512...

FTA:

Our findings should be complemented by high-throughput sequencing to obtain additional sequence information.

I don't see this having been done (and HTS isn't exactly a heavy lift these days, even in Italy). Seems likely they did it, didn't confirm these preliminary results, and didn't publish because it's not interesting.

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

#502

Post by cscurmudgeon »

rnk wrote: post #344
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine how many scarce resources would have been mispent if SARS-CoV-2 had begun with worldwide knowledge that China was responsible? OTOH if we knew that China was responsible, won't the future be better served by putting safeguards to prevent a worse thing happening again?

I don't think that we would have done anything differently if we knew that China was responsible. It wouldn't have changed our treatments or vaccination strategies or anything. Could it have made some people who are crazy against China feel differently? Maybe. I don't think it would have made the doofuses who took ivermectin act differently though.

By us, I mean the govt.

The ivermectin stuff is irrelevant.

We also had doofuses claim masks won’t help and they flip flopped. They aren’t relevant either in a response for future containment and policy.

The doofuses directly and indirectly funded WIV and if shown that was harmful can act to stop that.

https://www.bbc.com/news/57932699.amp

Truth is always better even if no action is taken.

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

#503

Post by InitialLastName »

pezezin wrote: post #497
kayodelycaon wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got H1N1. The only reason I didn’t end up in a hospital was because I forced myself to stay hydrated and somewhat lucid when I wasn’t able to sleep. It was really bad.

I got a type-A flu this year in early January, and holy shit was it painful, I hadn't been that sick in 25 years. Some co-workers and relatives also got it (in opposite sides of the Earth!) and reported the same, this year the flu was really strong. In comparison, I had corona last week and it was a walk in the park (I am also quad-vaccinated, that might have helped).

> In comparison, I had corona last week and it was a walk in the park (I am also quad-vaccinated, that might have helped).

I can attest that somewhere between vaccines, potential acquired immunity and variants having reduced strength, my pair of confirmed Covid experiences (March 2020, July 2022) went from "the sickest I've ever felt, with symptoms recurring for months and persistent-to-present reduced smell capability" to "a mild cold".

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

#504

Post by plagiarist »

sterlind wrote: post #377
ethbr0 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm of two minds on that. On one hand: yes, more data will inform future technical approaches and procedures. On the other hand: no, people are technically ignorant, xenophobic, and more willing to scapegoat and project anger than reflect on their own behavior.

I don't like being lied or condescended to, just because most people can't handle the information. Also, it often backfires. Like, in early 2020, when the CDC said masks were unnecessary, then that N95s were unnecessary, it was glaringly obvious that this was propaganda to keep the public from panic-buying PPE and causing shortages. Some people believed them, took inadequate protections, got sick or died. It led to i…

How can that be the reason "trust the science" is ridiculed when the people scoffing also refused to wear any sort of mask?

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

#505

Post by plagiarist »

kneebonian wrote: post #289
ethbr0 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to start thinking of politically-impactful truths in terms of probability distributions and outcome possibility spaces, rather than absolutely. If it were a lab leak, there are probably a handful of eyewitnesses. Any information (not leak; was leak) would have serious ramifications to the political systems of the two largest economies in the world (the US and China). What are the chances that we'll ever h…

For me it isn't about the effectiveness or the blame it was that we spent 2 years where many fundamental and basic rights were suspended because of fear. For me it is not about blame it is about reminding people how fragile our rights are and that there are people all to willing and eager to take them. Combined with the massive redistribution of wealth that happened as a direct result of government action that furthe…

I think instead of panicking over temporarily needing to wear a mask on public transit, you would be better served directing your energy against the trillions in handouts to the already wealthy or actual incursions against our rights like the good ol' Patriot Act.

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

#506

Post by MrOwnPut »

gcanyon wrote: post #496
Reason077 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the location, the timing, the symptoms, the severity of the illness (it's unusual for 'flu to put healthy young adults in hospital) I think we can be pretty confident in our guess.

The non-lab-leak coincidence required: 1. They made a mistake in the lab, exposing themselves to a virus (not covid-19) 2. That virus was non-human-transmissible 3. The exposure happened 1-several weeks before the actual start of covid-19 at the market That's not impossible, especially if the lab was sloppy and (1) happened fairly regularly. Given the early concentration of cases around the market, and the detection…

Could you remind us what the "non-lab-leak scenario" is again?

To be clear, is your "likeliness" determined on whether we can find a creature that is more similar to covid than RaTG13 (we haven't) or something else?

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

#507

Post by bunga-bunga »

quad_eye_oh wrote: post #116
notjulianjaynes wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic, but thanks to your first link I was just doing some satellite image sightseeing of Wuhan and noticed that on Google maps the streets are offset about 3 blocks east of where they should be. It's fairly obvious here [1] where the curved road extends out into a lake. Not saying this means anything, just found it amusing. 1. https://maps.app.goo.gl/reVDkMAhfMRbv1uJ8

That's Chinese map data obfuscation. The idea is to make it marginally harder for an adversary to target missiles using public map data.

Which is useless in this day. I was in China last week and Google Map’s street layer was aligned correctly to where I was, but the satellite imagery was not.

This demonstrates that Google already knows the correct coordinates of street in China, including those of an airport finished in 2021. For some reason they have spent no time manually aligning the imagery.

Coordinates on the globe are constant whether China likes it or not, my only guess is that Google doesn’t want to spend time fixing data in a country that blocks them entirely.

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

#508

Post by jasmer »

geuis wrote: post #225

I don't trust this article at all . > Sources within the US government say that three of the earliest people to become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. > It is unclear who in the U.S. government had access to the intelligence about the sick WIV workers, how long they had it, and why it was not shared with the pub…

[dead]

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

#509

Post by [deleted] »

kneel wrote: post #185
boomboomsubban wrote: post #86

Why name the researchers that got sick? Even if one of them is the source for COVID, which really isn't clear from this, I don't think they deserve the harassment articles like this are bound to cause.

You don't think causing a global pandemic and millions of death from dangerously careless research deserves criticism?

[deleted]

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

#510

Post by undersuit »

harry8 wrote: post #500
undersuit wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"FFS", then I'm going to make the argument that mainstream media is funded by subscribers too! Substack isn't much different from a newspaper.

Mainstream media has "owners" who "fire" editors when they don't like the stories being written. Journalist pitch stories at those editors. See Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London, The News of the World, The Sun, The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and Fox News. For example, note how many times Tony Blair and separately Gordon Brown sought audiences with Rupert Murdoch. You subscribe to the NYT or WSJ you u…

https://mashable.com/article/substack-writers-leaving-misinf...

Just admit it's not a perfect thing, just another flawed alternative.

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