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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

wsj.com

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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#131

Post by corbulo »

Centigonal wrote: post #129
corbulo wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you people get briefed? The guy was fucking President

As president, the guy said a lot of things that were outright untrue [1]. By 2020, he had lost any expectation of credulity just on the virtue of his being president in my eyes, and in those of many other Americans. Now, if he had claimed the virus originated as a Chinese lab leak, and the intelligence community came out supporting that contribution, then that would have been a different story. Information from these…

Not everything a politician said was true, therefore if you read NYT and WaPo you're more well informed than the President. Amazing.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#132

Post by bayesian_horse »

Lab leak of what even? There is nothing magical about virological labs. They don't create new virus out of nothing. Most of the time there is a "lab leak" the virus already had all the potential it had before. In all the cases I can remember, the only reason the "lab leak" was even a significant event (as opposed to a bucket spilling into the ocean) is when the lab was geographically distinct from the endemic occurrence or the virus had been largely eradicated before.

The main problem with "lab leak hypotheses" is that they aren't clear about what went into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Was there an obscure bat virus? Was there something already infectious to Humans (but somehow undetected by other scientists)? Are we alleging genetic editing? "Gain of Function" (which is easier said then done)? That Sars-CoV-2 genome which first hit Wuhan was already a finely tuned killing machine, much more finely tuned than anything a lab could produce intentionally. All of this makes speculation about the Virus having passed through a laboratory somewhere incredibly pointless, except for trying to undermine scientific consensus.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#133

Post by TearsInTheRain »

r053bud wrote: post #116
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Because what good does it do to actually dealing with the outbreak? I assume the government just made a decision that it was politically less desirable to do for a number of reasons. Mainly, probably the continuing attempts at thawing of relations with China.

If China is engaged in a behavior that lead to a global pandemic, we have to know everything about what they were doing so that we can stop this from ever happening again. Who gives a crap about thawed relations after the extraordinary amount of damage this pandemic has done to the world

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#134

Post by bayesian_horse »

downrightmike wrote: post #127

And there seems to be a lot of traditional sabotage using infectious agents in farming, like how triads were infecting pig farms with African swine fever in 2019 (1). Maybe they didn't just use African Swine fever and thought they found something better. There was an explosion of pig farming this century(2), and underhanded tactics should be suspected. (1) https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3042122/chi…

Ridiculous. First of all, those triads would be stupid, if they had done that with Sars-CoV-2, knowing it will hit them, too and wreck all their earning potential.

Secondly, bioterrorism (or whatever you want to call this) using a pandemical Virus is really hard. You have to find a virus that is able to cause a pandemic, and they are really really rare, but never did so (otherwise it can't do that because of the immunity). Sars-Cov-2 was only so dangerous because it was novel. So those triads would have found this needle in a haystack, and they aren't exactly known for running world-class virus finding operations. It's easy to find and smuggle some infectious ASV material. Maybe slightly harder to do so for EBV or the like. Much harder to find a completely novel virus.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#135

Post by bayesian_horse »

Zetice wrote: post #126

Why is this a WSJ exclusive, why was it leaked, why is this only coming out now, why are various government agencies disagreeing with one another, why “low” confidence… This ratchets up the credibility of the claim for me, but there are a lot of strangely unanswered questions that leave me skeptical, still.

It's credible to you because you want it to believe. The article doesn't say what the department of energy thinks went into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Which is a major piece of the puzzle I'd say.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#136

Post by belltaco »

trappist wrote: post #124
belltaco wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump said that not because he had some particular insight, but it was just a way to deflect blame, and that's why it was super amplified across the right wing, but lacking any sort of evidence or proof. Also back then there was a strong suggestion that it was bioengineered at Wuhan on purpose to tank the western economies. Note that he also said covid wasn't a serious thing several times. If that's the case even if…

Trump was a stopped clock on this. I don't think that's paren't point. The point, to me, is that the entire establishment treated the lab leak hypothesis as misinformation for no better reason than that Trump had endorsed it. That is, on no better evidence. And then aggressively censored it.

>The point, to me, is that the entire establishment

And the Energy Department that the sole source behind this story isn't part of the so called establishment? Especially under the Biden admin which people who use words like 'the establishment' and 'deep state' consider the establishment.

Looks like 'the establishment' wants to blame China now, hence the story must be fake and there was no lab leak?

Where is actual evidence of the lab leak?

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#137

Post by fidgewidge »

ttul wrote: post #79
fidgewidge wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not the most dangerous interpretation. The most dangerous interpretation of "lab leak" is the one backed by the most evidence - that they were artificially enhancing viruses so they could develop vaccines against them. The Pfizer guy who got caught on camera by Project Veritas said they were considering doing the same thing. Selling people vaccines for viruses the scientists created specifically to create…

Gain-of-function research serves a legitimate purpose, but if this lean stemmed from GoF work, that is not apparent from the SARA CoV-2 genome. See my link elsewhere in the comments to a TWiV podcast episode that discusses the lab leak hypothesis, and the analysis of the genome sequence suggesting it is not the result of human engineering work.

Lots of very well informed people disagree with you; you'd also have to consider all the other evidence beyond the genome.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#138

Post by fidgewidge »

j_crick wrote: post #81
fidgewidge wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That WaPo article isn't about the quality of research at the WIV, it's an attempted (failed) debunking of the "fringe theory" that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It has nothing to say on what good science they produced, perhaps because there wasn't any. Virology appears to spend its time fiddling with viruses based on the claim that doing so will help create vaccines, except, their work doesn't seem to have contribut…

> their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any vaccine development. On the contrary, look at covid aftermath — it quite did! /s

Touché!

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#139

Post by dang »

someuser54541 wrote: post #51

I'm fairly confident posts like these are artificially weighted to fall off the front page..that seems to happen when a COVID related post gets popular on HN. This post has more points and comments than the majority of stuff on the front page but it's currently on page 3. I've casually noticed something similar over the past ~18 months with posts related to COVID.

It was flagged by users. We sometimes reverse that and I've done so in this case.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#140

Post by Zetice »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #135
Zetice wrote: post #126

Why is this a WSJ exclusive, why was it leaked, why is this only coming out now, why are various government agencies disagreeing with one another, why “low” confidence… This ratchets up the credibility of the claim for me, but there are a lot of strangely unanswered questions that leave me skeptical, still.

It's credible to you because you want it to believe. The article doesn't say what the department of energy thinks went into that supposed lab and what came out of it. Which is a major piece of the puzzle I'd say.

Er, it's credible to me because it's the Department of Energy.

I don't "want" to believe it, and generally believe folks who were touting it as fact up to this point were cranks. Even now it's still extremely murky, and as I said, there are a lot of unanswered questions.

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