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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

#661

Post by ethbr0 »

carlmr wrote: post #581
plagiarist wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's ridiculed because trust was immediately violated, and trust is not what science is built on. However just being an everything skeptic without any scientific education is not good either. The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption. Both camps were wrong plenty of times, none would admit to it, and public discourse suffered because neither side was willing to cede ground to actual science.

My litmus test for whether someone is worth talking to about this is whether they need to vilify any particular institution or individual.

It's intellectually nasty and petty to spend more effort on pointing fingers than working through systemic failures and fixes.

As you said, everyone on all sides was in the wrong plenty of times.

And about what you'd expect! Having to make big calls on a novel situation with uncertain science. Nobody lucks into 100% correctness.

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

#662

Post by Pyramus »

Reason077 wrote: post #657
Pyramus wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, that is something that struck me as well. In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta. Don't get me wrong, Covid is a deadly disease with a lethality of 1-2 %, but the typical symptoms for a 30 year old are mild.

> "In particular Vanilla strains were milder than beta/delta." Not my experience! OG Covid (March 2020) was just as severe as alpha/beta (December 2020). My most recent infection (August 2022) was much milder, but that could also be explained by being vaccinated.

See my sibling comment with a link to the estimated properties of SARS-Cov-2 variants: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36337757

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

#663

Post by plagiarist »

carlmr wrote: post #581
plagiarist wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's ridiculed because trust was immediately violated, and trust is not what science is built on. However just being an everything skeptic without any scientific education is not good either. The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption. Both camps were wrong plenty of times, none would admit to it, and public discourse suffered because neither side was willing to cede ground to actual science.

> The problem was the politicization, the dishonesty, the corruption.

This one part is correct. For example, when they admitted to being wrong about masks after they had better information, lunatics claimed they were lying and corrupt. And they have been spreading wild-eyed propaganda to this day.

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

#664

Post by [deleted] »

evandale wrote: post #293
predictabl3 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what that's supposed to mean. No, sorry not sorry, I don't really put much stock in the analysis of people that immediately link this into their unsubstantiated handwavey global conspiracies. I've seen articles, research, professionals talking about the evidence. Which aren't headnods and whistles. And I read it. And that's why I don't have any strong opinion, contrary to whatever I think is being implie…

> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles. > None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles. It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of course every single discussion about these lab leak immediately dove-tails into various other conspira…

[deleted]

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

#665

Post by kuhewa »

bunga-bunga wrote: post #507
quad_eye_oh wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lik…

The wiki above explains it. Technically they are supposed to purchase a shift algorithm.

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

#666

Post by kuhewa »

INTPenis wrote: post #625
bunga-bunga wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SARS-like symptoms Aren’t SARS-like symptoms just flu-like? I heard the same exact thing from an European friend and again I think it’s Barnum effect-like. Given the transmissibility of the virus, I doubt that it was in the wild unnoticed for 12+ months before suddenly affecting millions in weeks.

Sort of but what made me think I had SARS specifically was the fact that I had this weird cough that persisted for a month after I recovered from the worst of the flu symptoms. That was very unusual to me. During the actual week or two I was sick I had all the symptoms of Covid, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and the rest of normal flu symptoms. And when I recovered I remember eating a protein shake just because I co…

You didn't have SARS mate

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

#667

Post by ethbr0 »

claytongulick wrote: post #533
retrac wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alabama had a ban on interracial marriage in its state constitution. Struck down in the 60s by SCOTUS but still on the books after that. When they put it to a referendum to repeal it from the text of the law - the vote was surprisingly close: > The amendment was approved with 59.5% voting yes, a 19 percentage point margin, though 25 of Alabama's 67 counties voted against it. That was in 2000.

And Oregon didn't repeal its black exclusion laws until 2002. And just over 20 years before that there were riots in Boston over desegregation of schools. It's so funny, this romantic notion that many from the north have of how supposedly enlightened they are, while the south is a bunch of backwater hicks. I know, I used to have it too, as did my wife then, who was Canadian. People thought we were crazy when we moved…

As someone who's lived all over, the primary difference in the south is that there are large African American populations.

Try being black in South Dakota or Maine.

Racism and othering exists everywhere, but physical proximity and interaction with the class in question moderates it heavily. It's harder to hate someone you know personally: that's why segregationists were such staunch opponents of any social integration.

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

#668

Post by Reason077 »

jacquesm wrote: post #650
Reason077 wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lab-leak scenario presumes zoonotic jump, too. Just rather than from something in the wild, it's from humanized (ACE2-transgenic) mice, which WIV was known to be using to study SARS-like Coronaviruses.

SARS-like CoronaViruses != COVID19. All cows are animals. Not all animals are cows.

The coronaviruses being studied at WIV included RaTG13, one of the closest relatives (96.1% genomic match) to SARS-CoV-2 ever found in the wild.

But a key difference between SARS-CoV-2 and it's wild relatives is the spike protein with affinity for the ACE2 receptor, so it would have had to have evolved through an intermediate host with a human-like ACE2 receptor. For example, ACE2-transgenic lab mice.

This does not itself rule out the wild-origin theory, but no wild host that could explain the missing link from RaTG13 to SARS-CoV-2 has yet been found.

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

#669

Post by evandale »

predictabl3 wrote: post #424
evandale wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles. > None ever will from your perspective if you're citing "head nods" and dog whistles. It means that if you consider mentioning the lab leak theory an automatic dogwhistle for bioweapon then of course every single discussion about these lab leak immediately dove-tails into various other conspira…

Well now you're definitely making up stuff I didn't say and don't think. Thanks but no thanks. Like, I'm pretty annoyed that what I did say managed to get that twisted in your head, especially when I took multiple attempts at indicating that I am doing my own research and keeping an open mind, but thanks for kinda just demonstrating my point. Waste of time. Speculative nonsense and infighting so someone gets to be ri…

You never said this?

> And this thread is littered with all of the usual conspiracy head-nods.

> I think we should know more about the origins of COVID but I haven't seen a single discussion of this that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles.

You literally said "I haven't seen a single discussion of this [the lab leak theory] that doesn't immediately dove-tail into various other conspiracies or whistles"

So where are the head nods and dogwhistles in this thread? At what point did this discussion, just like every single lab leak discussion you've seen, dove-tail into conspiracies and whistles? Because I don't see the whistles and head nods in the current thread about this (this being the lab leak theory). They're all either deleted or flagged at this point for me.

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

#670

Post by kuhewa »

scythe wrote: post #467
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…

>As we’ll see later, there may actually have been two jumps from animals to people at the market. Mixing fact with speculation is never a great sign for an argument. Many people pushing the lab leak theory are doing this, but the people pushing against it don't need to start. If there were two spillovers, that needs a very good explanation, particularly because events like this tend to fall into the categories "one"…

Have you read the brace of Science papers that analysed the market data
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