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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

#141

Post by mullingitover »

rayiner wrote: post #67
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…

As the article observes, “the new analysis … began under the Biden administration.” The new administration has been in office a week. There is a political incentive to release it now, but they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days.

This assumes operatives haven’t been working on this plan long before the regime took office.

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

#142

Post by notRobot »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #134

I have some opinion on this: despite whatever was the source, the reaction that was made by countries (i.e. complete global lockdown of population) means that they were scared as hell. And I haven't seen any govt scared so much on any flu that came out in my life, however some of them were baddest in my life (not mathematically speaking, I know that every set has a supreme element, what I mean that flu can be dangero…

> were suspecting something so bad that could, at least in their theory, kill the population or massively decrease it.

Yeah, a really bad virus.

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

#143

Post by jmyeet »

It's crazy for a Trump loyalist to complain about "politicization" of this process when declassifying and releasing a report with no hard or new evidence is quite clearly a political decision.

The US is clearly setting up China to be the next Big Enemy, the USSR 2.0. The US establishment expects--and arguably is fomenting--economic and possibly eventual military conflict with China. The "lab leak" declassification neatly fits into that narrative.

We may never know the truth or it may take decades to find out.

There's really only two likely theories here: zoonotic origin and lab leak. There are many variants of "lab leak" but the most likely is that it was accidental. It's more fringe to claim it was intentional. This sort of thing has happened before [1].

There is circumstancial data for this like China not cooperating with a WHO investigation back in 2020 and 2021 and a Wuhan Institute of Virology virus database in SEptember 2019. To my knowledge, that has never been recovered or examinted by external parties. My theory is, like every government (including the US), China doesn't want to know the answer to this question. There's literally no upside. Would you want to be the official who oversaw a leak like this? Would you want to be in charge of the government at that time? Nobody wants that. Governments love ignorance.

The zoonotic origin is still more likely but it has the obvious problem that we haven't (yet) identified the host animal. Also, Wuhan is quite far from the bats that might be the likely source.

It might be a complicated origin, such as a person or animal being infected with multiple strains and a replication error creating the virus from multiple sources.

But the main point here is we're going to see a lot of anti-China sentiment being drummed up by the US in coming years. This is bipartisan too.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

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

#144

Post by 110bpm »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #101
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 becam…

I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and found this article [0].

The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points.

"Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors should give more details and justification for their query, especially if they queried the full database but a posteriori restricted their computation. Of note, with such a large database, and despite the fact that the average sequence length decreased, the probability of finding at least one sequence containing one of the 16 patterns previously mentioned may rise to 68% under assumption 2."

0: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...

1: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/virology/articles/10.33...

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

#145

Post by chasd00 »

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?

> while most people (here too) cheered for "fighting misinformation" with censorship?

Exactly right. Remember any comment daring to question the authorities was shouted down to oblivion. Anyone daring to question lockdowns or other draconian measures were met with fire and brimstone. I lost a lot of respect for HN during Covid.

I feel it’s important to not forget the level of adherence to authoritarian rule that infected the population during Covid. Even places like HN were not immune. “Just following orders” was SOP even here.

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

#146

Post by bhickey »

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…

> unlikely we normies will ever know the truth

Thanks for the dose of epistemic humility. I'm willing to go one step further: It's plausible that no one knows the truth. Keeping secrets is hard. If someone knew they might've died in the early stages of the outbreak.

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

#147

Post by NotYourLawyer »

NotYourLawyer wrote: post #60
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?

[flagged]

[flagged]

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

#148

Post by Aloisius »

lr4444lr wrote: post #35
suzumer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, but the rush to the wet market theory was no better.

Wasn't it? Most of the earliest cases had a link to the market, many of whom were vendors including the very first known case. The early cases which had no known link lived/stayed clustered around the market. The market sold live wild animals which were known reservoirs for the previous coronavirus break (SARS).

How can following a trail possibly be no better?

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

#149

Post by giantg2 »

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…

I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't really change anything unless there's hard proof. Even with hard proof, do you think China would pay for anything? I don't think so.

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

#150

Post by evan_ »

rayiner wrote: post #103
manbart wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

or maybe this is one of a thousand studies they performed, and they threw it out because it wasn’t found to be credible
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