201–210 of 494 posts
So what would evidence, rather than speculation, look like in this case? A SARS-CoV 2 genome sequence dated before December 2019? Somehow identifying patient zero and corresponding records of their exposure at the lab? I’m skeptical that any hard evidence will be found. It seems to me the origin is likely to remain speculative indefinitely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand your impetus to tell others to 'stick to your lane' but I respectfully disagree and cite their post and your response as why. OP had what you deem a misapprehension and they deem a valid point. By voicing their point as they believes it, you were able to retort with evidence you feel should convincingly disprove it. To me, this is reasoned, diverse discourse correcting for unintuitive misapprehensions, a…
It’s taken me a little while to parse this one. HN has always felt like a good/safe place (to me) to talk about interesting things with a mix of experts and lay people. When it gets down to science though, agree or disagree need to be left to the experts. I can’t be the expert/final arbiter because my knowledge isn’t good enough (although I have some capacity), and so I am encouraging OP to go with the experts on thi…
We don't rely on experts to tell us what we know or have the capacity of knowing. The hard to access ideas have already been articulated and written down in this case. OP is absolutely right to be misapprehensive in light of these studies and the perception of "it doesn't compute". By virtue of surviving to human adulthood, and to even be here admitting there may be the makings of ignorance in themselves, they've already proven they have a higher than average meta-awareness of their own capabilities, which means they have a similar basis from which to evaluate other people's action.
What they've seen from the experts in the field is a growing rift, and far from a universal consensus. They've seen an abnormally ineffectual and particularly inexplicable reaction from official sources. As a non-expert, if they weren't consumed with misapprehension, they'd be a fool.
All "official" means of rebuttal to disprove lab origin are stymied by refusal to submit to inspection by the rest of the world by the origin nation in question, and we have evidence of official orders to obfuscate any evidence trail that may have existed in the early stages of the pandemic.
You can dismiss the motivation for why (saving face/survival), but no reasonable non-expert with even a passing interest and the capability or inclination to follow the threads laid bare in those papers should shy away from trying to reason from it. The hard part that requires an expert is done. The paper is written. The known has been hewn from the unknown. The question people should be cogitating on is as follows:
"Given what I know my species is capable of, and the circumstantial proximity of all the physically mandated ingredients for this to even be a possibility, is it unreasonable that this crisis could have an origin from the one place on earth staffed, equipped, educated, and mandated by it's reason for existence to engage in the academic pursuit of the processes that could lead to a virus such as this?"
You do not need to be an expert to consume or evaluate the output of experts. We rely on experts to handle that which no human has handled before, or to quickly handle that which few have handled before, and we are not willing to walk the path to know. This is not that. Further, if everyone left it to the experts, there would be no experts. "Stay in your lane" has no business being aired in any context in which one or the other is in the process of endeavoring to further their own understanding. If a human being has done it, a human being can do it, and not one person on Earth has the standing to tell another not to reason to the best of their ability, or through communication with peers seek to surpass their previous limitations in that department. Science has not, and never should be, only the Ph.D holders need apply. Especially when the questions being asked are far away from technical minutiae, and closer to "Given everything that would be needed to make it happen was there, should we consider lab origin as worthy of delving into?"
Given material I covered earlier in the thread (on the ill-advised endeavor of blindly deferring to the fox on matters relating to the security of the hen house), the answer should strike expert and non-expert alike as worth looking into. The expert can be forgiven for not deeming it worth it, at least, as they have much more pressing issues to attend to in trying to stop/prevent the next thing. The non-expert on the other hand should be seriously weighing how much we trust our neighbors when they say "Nope. Nothing to see here. Why are you looking anyway? How dare you! Questioning our handling of internal matters!"
Tell someone they're wrong when they have facts wrong, or don't have all of them, guiding them in the right direction, but don't dare tell a person to cease in their attempts to enlighten themselves and reason from what is in front of them. Especially on a forum where the entire point is to share knowledge with the very experts who should putatively be being deferred to.
Stay in your lane. The nerve. The unabashed gall. Here, of all places.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.
Why give a government with modern day concentration camps, forced organ harvesting, and military occupation of free countries like Hong Kong the benefit of the doubt on biological weapons research gone awry?
Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!! But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!! There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0] That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to…
Well, sadly, the damage is done. And it has certainly exposed our unpreparedness, broken/outdated protocols among agencies and exposed deep divisions in these United States. Just imagine if this is a test case, we’ve really exposed ourselves. I am quite certain our adversaries are watching and learning.
As a percentage of the population more Americans have died from covid than the Vietnam war. The wartime comparison is apt.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.
Right, in the conclusion they refer to "means, timing, agent and place" which seems to frame this like one would prosecute a criminal trial in the absence of "smoking gun" physical evidence. If the researchers at the heart of all this were located far from the epicenter of the outbreak, then you'd need to find a good explanation for why it started where it did, which is why I think it should be mentioned as a distinc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t think it is important to understand the root cause of COVID-19 ? It is going to kill millions of people, potentially reduce the life expectancy of tens of millions more and severely impact everyone on this planet.
No you have me backwards. I don’t understand for what cause CV19 May have been made purposefully. I don’t see who it would benefit.
When Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier suggested that COVID-19 could be man-made, I started taking this view more seriously. Now seeing additional papers coming out supporting this, the case is getting stronger. I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to sprea…
Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper: 1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans. 2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which m…
A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.
Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.