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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

#171

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mulderc wrote: post #136
derektank wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessmen…

Are the FBI or DOE assessments public? What I last read in the peer-reviewed public literature seemed to point strongly to animal origin and not from a lab.

> Are the FBI or DOE assessments public?

Yes (DNI) [1] and no (State) [2].

[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Declass...

[2] https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...

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

#172

Post by spanktheuser »

derektank wrote: post #113
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…

Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessmen…

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

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

#173

Post by eightysixfour »

bhickey wrote: post #146
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.

There’s an asymmetry of potential evidence for each of the theories as well.

• If it was a lab leak, then even if the people responsible are dead, there was likely data that could trace it back. It is unlikely that data still exists or is findable, for obvious reasons.

• If it was not a lab leak, it may be impossible to find evidence to prove that is the case.

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

#174

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

CMay wrote: post #154

Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak. The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak. The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak. It's important to note that…

There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/).

2. The US state department was aware that China was conducting dangerous research on coronaviruses on poorly managed labs a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic (https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...).

3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...).

4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...).

5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).

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

#175

Post by netsharc »

scintill76 wrote: post #43
ironyman wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, released the following statement about the CIA’s findings on the origins of the Coronavirus: “I’ve said from the beginning that Covid likely originated in the Wuhan labs. Communist China covered it up and the liberal media covered for them. I’m pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theor…

Having no other information, the fact he went out of his way to associate it with Biden makes it seem actually politically driven by Trump/Republicans.

He wants to give it a "it's a bipartisan conclusion, so it's sane!".

Considering it's "with low confidence", someone else could've published the findings focusing on the low confidence rather than the fact that their needle is pointing more towards "lab leak".

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

#176

Post by throwawaymaths »

110bpm wrote: post #144
throwawaymaths wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

FTA:

The absence of CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG from any mammalian or viral genome in the BLAST database makes recombination in an intermediate host an unlikely explanation for its presence in SARS-CoV-2. You can verify for yourself that there are no other sequences with an exact match.

The subsequent comment about statistics of blast searching is irrelevant.

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

#177

Post by Aloisius »

wkat4242 wrote: post #40
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

> There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests the Wuhan wet market was the origin. Those are not mutually exclusive theories. It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.

A hypothetical lab worker which only spread it to the market and nowhere else seems implausible.

I suppose that could happen if what they were carrying wasn't capable of human transmission yet, but was capable of infecting some species of the live animals at the market, but that's a big if.

There's till the problem of the second lineage which would indicate multiple zoonotic crossover events.

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

#178

Post by n4r9 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #79
rufus_foreman wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If I ask "what happened?" whatever you answer will be disagreed with by about half the observers of the question.

There's a certain sort of fanatic who believes that everyone has the same opinions as them under the covers, but are disagreeing purely for performance purposes.

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

#179

Post by scarface_74 »

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.

Just like the “Spanish Flu” didn’t originate in Spain. And information about it was suppressed in the US.

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

#180

Post by aussieguy1234 »

CMay wrote: post #154

Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak. The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak. The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak. It's important to note that…

> China obstructed and delayed the investigation.

You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.

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