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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#131

Post by garbagetime »

sudosysgen wrote: post #126
garbagetime wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That a person cited sources should not be seen as a sign of the quality of the work. Nor should be the amount of citations the person makes. In some cases the lack of citations can be used to suggest a piece of writing should not be taken seriously. But never the other way around. It's extremely common for people to reach a conclusion, and only then to go looking for research. And, then, to be looking only for resear…

That doesn't change that I was correcting an incorrect statement. Someone said the source was Reddit, it isn't, it has multiple sources, none of which are Reddit. As far as I'm concerned this is a complete non-sequitur.

The source is undeniably Reddit, in a sense (in the sense that it is opposed to a peer-reviewed journal).

Regardless, I directly addressed a portion of your comment. I believe the portion was meant to borrow some of the creditability of serious journals and give it to Reddit - which is, perhaps, a bad idea, for the reasons I laid out. To label my comment a non-sequitur is ridiculous.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#132

Post by mads »

suifbwish wrote: post #107
systemvoltage wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article shouldn’t have quote this person in the first place - there are plenty of serious investigations into the lab leak theory from reputable virologists. I recommend Alina Chan’s new book: Viral. This clarification also masquerades as a clarification of something important. This person quoted by the tabloid is irrelevant here. In fact this article does more damage to the credibility of lab theory than otherwi…

Facts are facts. The fact is in 2019 there were 39,397 wet markets in China. How many virology labs were there in China handling Corona-viruses? TWO. One of which was TWO BLOCKS from where the wet market from where the original Covid-19 virus which started the pandemic has been traced to. One might be forgiven for being curious as to the likelihood of the virus emerging from this particular wet market as opposed to a…

Additionally the closest cave containing any viruses resembling SARS-Cov-2 are 1500 km away from Wuhan.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#133

Post by riyadparvez »

sudosysgen wrote: post #82
xqcgrek2 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snopes and Reddit are not credible.

The source isn't Reddit, it's a published virologist, and he himself cites over a hundred academic sources. Reddit is the medium.

Several top virologists have publicly tarred lab leak as racist conspiracy theory, while privately discussed that not only it is a possibility, some of them believed it's highly probable. Here's a very recent email that has been released yesterday [1]. So forgive me for not taking another virologist's take on why lab leak is improbable on redit seriously.

[1] https://twitter.com/TheSeeker268/status/1480930691919618051

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#134

Post by awb »

whatshisface wrote: post #95
awb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re the end result of asking biased questions then manipulating answers to fit those biased questions. My point is that if you ask biased questions it won’t be long until someone provides biased answers. You need to ask unbiased questions to get unbiased answers.

"Does tobacco smoking cause cancer," isn't a biased question... What's biased is answering it with a "no."

Right but when asked by biased people, with biased intent, it solicits biased answers. It looks innocent on the surface but it’s anything but.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#135

Post by jraph »

bsder wrote: post #94
torstenvl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you find that [a government] has lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve any evidence whose contents or quality are material to the issues in this case, then you may draw an inference unfavorable to the [government]." West Virg. Jury Inst. 5.03

Okay. China created it. Now what? I have yet to see anyone explain what they would do with the result that is somehow beneficial. Does knowing this help fight it? Does it help stop it? Does it help treat it? Does it help stop the spread? Let's say China even INTENTIONALLY did it. Then what? You gonna invade China? Exactly how are you gonna make someone like Apple pull out of China when they should already be doing th…

I do think it would be actionable as sibling comments point out, but I would find this knowledge interesting by itself (intellectual curiosity, I think we are at the right place for this).

> focus hate

That wouldn't be me.

I would feel bad for the people who caused the leak (edit to be clear: if this is what happened, not assuming anything here). To be at the origin of such a pandemic spanning multiple years with all the repercussions must be uncomfortable.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#136

Post by zeptonix »

rhino369 wrote: post #123
bsder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. China created it. Now what? I have yet to see anyone explain what they would do with the result that is somehow beneficial. Does knowing this help fight it? Does it help stop it? Does it help treat it? Does it help stop the spread? Let's say China even INTENTIONALLY did it. Then what? You gonna invade China? Exactly how are you gonna make someone like Apple pull out of China when they should already be doing th…

Ban gain of function research because it killed 20 million people? Your logic is like BP saying “hey it doesn’t matter how the oil spill started . . .”

It's actually even worse. It's like, "we don't care how the oil spill started, or even if there are oil spills, or even if 'oil' and 'spill' actually have any business being used together, because what use could pointing a finger have?"

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#137

Post by perryizgr8 »

rhino369 wrote: post #91
perryizgr8 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snopes and the science page on reddit are not confidence-inspiring sources, to be honest. We need an authoritative investigation (led by WHO/CDC) into the origins of the virus to be able to make knowledgable statements. Until that happens, there is only hearsay and speculation.

I wouldn’t trust the CDC or WHO. We need an independent group who don’t have any baggage on this issue. CDC can’t be trusted to even make a simple covid test and they don’t want to admit scientific research killed 20 million people.

Sad truth is that CDC/WHO are one of the most competent authorities on the matter, and they have experienced experts in the relevant fields. Only when politics comes into play, that the organisations' actions and intentions are called into question. The ideal thing would be to somehow remove international political considerations from the equation and then ask WHO to conduct an investigation.

Of course, the chances of that happening are probably lower than an actually lethal virus leaking from a lab.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#138

Post by RandomBK »

torstenvl wrote: post #90
bsder wrote: post #83

And we have research now that hypothesizes that Omicron incubated in mice and then jumped back to humans. If that hypothesis is true, then we have a fine example of something running in the background in a reservoir and then Hey, Presto! suddenly appearing to be mutated specifically for humans. If that's true, then all manner of "weird" things suddenly become both plausible and probable without any human intervention…

"If you find that [a government] has lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve any evidence whose contents or quality are material to the issues in this case, then you may draw an inference unfavorable to the [government]." West Virg. Jury Inst. 5.03

That may work for domestic public opinion, but getting any international sanctions to stick on China would require a lot more than circumstantial "they won't let us investigate" evidence. International "law" (if such a thing truly exists in practice) is wonky, and rarely based on nuanced views or established facts.

Even domestically, that above quote only applies in specific cases - civil cases, or criminal cases where it can be proven evidence was actually destroyed. I'm not personally aware of clear evidence of bad-faith destruction of evidence right now on China's part. China's refusal to allow a third-party investigation would then be more similar to pleading the 5th, something even US courts are prevented from punishing.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#139

Post by torstenvl »

bobwaycott wrote: post #127
torstenvl wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem very convinced of your position. But there's a whole world of options in between "unactionable" and "invade China."

Such as? Assuming the best, the parent asked a bunch of questions (in an admittedly dismissive and argumentative way) to try and invite some kind of response that explains what China gets out of it, and what the world does next if we could somehow prove China created the original virus. So … let’s assume China created it. Now what? What’s the next step and response if it was an accident ? What’s the next step and res…

If you honestly dispute that there are options in foreign affairs between "do absolutely nothing" and "full scale military invasion," then our worldviews are so far apart that I don't think fighting about it on the Internet will be a good use of time for either of us.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#140

Post by analog31 »

Jimmc414 wrote: post #18
dane-pgp wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> warned it could damage “international harmony”. I've never understood the argument that people would want to suppress the (accidental) lab-leak hypothesis out of a desire to protect the image of China. If the lab-leak hypothesis is incorrect, that doesn't change the fact that the virus originated in that country, it just means that the virus emerged from a wet market. I'm not Chinese, but I'd imagine that a country…

I agree. Should Galileo have suppressed his observations to protect the Catholic Church? If he had, would it have been in the name of science or something else?

An amusing factoid is that the Vatican astronomers bought one or more telescopes from Galileo and confirmed his observational data.
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