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CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

nytimes.com

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Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#51

Post by wongarsu »

suzumer wrote: post #18
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #9

Wasn't this one of those "forbidden" conspiracy theories, censored from most social media, while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?

Saying COVID-19 leaked from a lab with zero evidence is different than waiting for evidence and then saying it leaked from a lab.

There was also no evidence against it. If there is neither solid evidence for nor against something I find it perfectly reasonable to apply the balance of probabilities. At least as long as you qualify your statement with a "probably".

And with the main competing theory (covid spreading from a wet market in a city that contains a biolab) also being consistent with the hypothesis that it was an accidental lab leak, to me the balance of probabilities always seemed to favor the lab leak hypothesis.

Yet saying that Covid probably originated from a lab leak was once branded as dangerous misinformation, with seemingly no evidence to support that claim

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#53

Post by andy_ppp »

We can conclude nothing, except that humans do stupid stuff and usually conspiracy theories are incorrect. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Do we actually know if NIH was doing gain of function research (on Corona viruses) in the Wuhan lab? It sounds like another right wing conspiracy theory but if people have high quality sources for this being true I’ll happily change my mind.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#54

Post by jjtheblunt »

_cenw wrote: post #27
cm2187 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censoring views that it came from a lab leak with zero evidence isn't any better. In fact I remember being lied to by major news outlets at the time saying that the evidence points to a non lab origin.

It did though. Animal origin only stopped being the most favored explanation because we haven't found the link in 5 years.

There was a nucleotide sequence in the covid strain that did not show up in any of the proposed hosts or progenitor viral sequences, which is where leaked documents showed NIH (Fauci included I believe) discussing the non-natural origin of the nucleotide sequence. It's possible to search for articles about the Fauci NIH emails, and whether they mean anything scandalous.

Here's a technical article at NIH discussing the theory of no known natural origin for a nucleotide subsequence

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8209872/

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#55

Post by bdangubic »

mhb wrote: post #41
mmustapic wrote: post #16

So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?

Or, in a parallel universe, there's an old president who preemptively pardoned the person who might have been involved in GOF research leading to a lab leak.

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Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#57

Post by buyucu »

mrkramer wrote: post #46
chimprich wrote: post #33

The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here. A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2

US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened. The burden of proof is on China. But let's be honest if it was a lab leak of this scale and consequences in US, US wouldn't admit it as would probably no country.

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Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#58

Post by kleton »

mhb wrote: post #41
mmustapic wrote: post #16

So there’s a new president and the main intelligence agency changes its position radically in alignment with the new government. Why should we be confident in any other claim they made in the past?

Or, in a parallel universe, there's an old president who preemptively pardoned the person who might have been involved in GOF research leading to a lab leak.

It is an interesting angle, because now he could potentially be subpoenaed by Congress or anyone else, and it seems unlikely that he would perjure himself over anything after 2014.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#59

Post by rufus_foreman »

eightysixfour wrote: post #29

I had a pretty long post about this here before, due to the politicization of the issue it is highly unlikely any of us will ever know “the truth” without a surprise smoking gun. There are good reasons to believe the natural or the lab leak hypotheses. I think you have to accept it is now unlikely we normies will ever know the truth. The post, and its comments, are worth reading still IMO: https://news.ycombinator.co…

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