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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

#101

Post by throwawaymaths »

ndr42 wrote: post #91

I found this recent interview with Christian Drosten [1] very interesting, he explains very good scientifically why it is much more probable that the origin is not from a laboratory. A quick summary of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av2Hax3Bg1U (1) The area where the Nyctereutes spec. (german: Marderhund, I have no idea how it is called in english) where kept, there where a lot of DNA of Nyctereutes and a lot of nuc…

there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade).

now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that became a pandemic came from the sequence that is engineered to be efficient.

any scientist that has any molecular biology wet experience will tell you this is exactly what they would have done (though us researchers would probably not have pulled from the patented BLAST sequences, since that selector is turned off by default by the NCBI)

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

#102

Post by zeagle »

dandanua wrote: post #48
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?

Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus leak...

Well, if there is one thing about Trump that everyone would agree on, it is that he is very self confident in everything he says.

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

#103

Post by rayiner »

manbart wrote: post #45
drewbug01 wrote: post #17

> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…

What is clear is that Ratcliff wants the lab leak theory to be true

That’s certainly motivation for releasing it, but he’s been in office for five days so the analysis being released was done under the prior administration.

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

#104

Post by dboreham »

dandanua wrote: post #48
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?

Even if the lab leak theory is true, why Trump was so confident about it? Does he have sources that CIA does not? I would be so confident in it only in the case if I myself caused that virus leak...

He has the voices in his head.

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

#106

Post by pessimizer »

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.

> US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened.

The US funded the lab and the specific fields of research. I have no idea how people can still be banging on about lab-leak origin being a racist plot against the Chinese. Covid probably leaked from US lab experiments in China. The rest of the world should be raging against the US and China both.

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

#108

Post by rbcjvuvy6 »

manbart wrote: post #45
drewbug01 wrote: post #17

> The agency made its new assessment with “low confidence,” which means the intelligence behind it is fragmentary and incomplete. I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. --- One thing that is, however, quite certain: there are very real political reasons to favor one theory or another. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton is quoted as…

What is clear is that Ratcliff wants the lab leak theory to be true

[dead]

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

#109

Post by rayiner »

silverquiet wrote: post #98
pessimizer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do believe that's all one really needs to know about this shift in their thinking. In other words: it's really far from certain. There's never going to be any conclusive evidence of the source of covid, and anyone claiming they have certainty (who wasn't a witness to a lab leak) is simply lying to you. What they're doing is going along with everyone else worth listening to, who find the coincidence that we were f…

I assumed it was a non-lab origin at first because that's how all previous pandemics have started as far as I am aware. A lab origin (and what precisely that means has never been particularly clear to me), but I have to say that I'd say your last observation cuts both ways - if one thinks this is such a great crime, then perhaps one would have encouraged masking, shutdowns/distancing, and vaccines, but those seem ant…

> Perhaps we'll do better next time around?

We won’t, because the judgment of many of our cognitive elites has been impaired.

This is a bit of a digression, but I’m reading a tweet thread by a $2,300/hour attorney who is an MSNBC contributor that is making just basic logical errors in discussing the birthright citizenship EO. Not even on the merits, literally in just summarizing the implications of the argument being made on a page of a filing he screenshotted in his tweet. I’m persuaded that if you had these folks take the LSAT with questions that had a political coding, they’d score a 160.

We need to get back to prioritizing the institutional and values of the different professions above all else. The public should view our scientific and professional organizations as neutral actors staffed by people who put the institutions above their personal beliefs. They shouldn’t be wondering whether medical organizations would be saying the same things about the “Lab Leak” theory if it had involved Russia instead of China.

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