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

telegraph.co.uk

211–220 of 833 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it’s not inactionable. If it happened once (accidentally, I’m presuming), it can happen again. It’s not like the Wuhan lab is the only source of such research. So it’s entirely legitimate to question the value of such research, especially if a leak could result in a global pandemic.

That doesn't answer the question about what the West is supposed to do to China should the lab-leak hypothesis be true.

> what the West is supposed to do to China should the lab-leak hypothesis be true.

The west, or society, should use this as evidence of basically not trusting information from the government of china, if it is contradicted by more neutral or western sources, in the future.

So, for example, if someone is talking to you personally, and they try to use evidence from that government, and you have other evidence from western sources that contradicts it, you should just laugh in their face. Call them a mean name and ridicule them.

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

#212
post #74

Trust the science and experts, huh? What a joke. A genocidal totalitarian regime that harvests organs from non-violent political prisoners may be responsible for the worst accident in human history and the people we count on for the unbiased truth are covering it up. I wonder what they'd do for more funding. Being called anti-science is starting to look like a compliment. And their's more: >Chan said there had been t…

No post body was provided.

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

#214
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 TWO BLOCKS? Or a 40min drive? This is why the lab leak theory feels conspiracy-adjacent. Too much exaggeration. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/640/cpsprodpb/D961/production/... > The institute is a 40-minute drive from the Huanan wet market where the first cluster of infections e…

There are multiple labs in Wuhan. Wuhan institute of virology is the main on people like to talk about but there was indeed another lab a block or two away from the wet market. I don't know if both were doing virology experiments. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Center_For_Disease_Con...

It’s a Level 2 facility, not studying bats or coronavirus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/head-of-who-team-investigating-...

> “They also reported no storage nor laboratory activities on CoVs [coronaviruses] or other bat viruses preceding the outbreak.”

> The lab is classified BSL-2, a safety level at which air ventilation controls aren’t particularly strict, as they are in more secure labs. At that level, lab workers are usually dealing with pathogens that either cause mild disease in humans or which don’t typically spread through small particles that linger in the air. Researchers at that level don’t necessarily wear masks.

> The Wuhan CDC lab tested all of its staff for Covid-19 antibodies, it told the WHO in February. All staff tested negative, except one who tested positive, it said. That person was infected “due to family cluster transmission,” the WHO-led team’s report’s annex says.

> But Dr. Ben Embarek is the first to so explicitly question the team’s conclusion, published in a joint report with Chinese counterparts, that a lab accident was an “extremely unlikely” hypothesis.

> That wording was only reached after a 48 hour period of intense negotiations with Chinese counterparts said Dr. Ben Embarek, who said he would have preferred to designate an accident inside a lab as merely “unlikely.”

> The lab hadn’t published any work with bats since 2013, he said.

> “As far as we understand, they work mostly with parasites, not as much with viruses, so they have worked on parasites from bats.”

Yet, after fighting to label the lab leak theory “unlikely”, he throws a bone to the conspiracy theorists:

> “It’s also possible that someone is trying to hide something,” he added. “Who knows?”

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

#215

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…

> Such as?

> What’s the next step

Stop trusting sources or information coming out of china, if western sources contradict it. Thats the next step. Update your informational priors, to disregard them. And then also convince other people to disregard them, and make fun of people you know, who uses those sources, if there are contradictory western sources.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean it is non-actionable? If it was a lab leak we can determine what conditions lead to the leak and adopt better safety measures. The lab leak was most likely a protocol error and without a collective awareness of the cause, the population cannot push our elected leaders to demand better safety protocols.

Who is "we"? And if it's a weapons lab, what makes you think China is going to allow geopolitical adversaries to poke around to make a more secure and safer environment? This idea works with countries that can't defend themselves against the West such as Iraq, but it's always backed by an invasion. No such option exists in the case of China, so their sovereignty will remain unsullied.

Well, at the least the US could refrain from supplying further funding to the WIV, and any other virology labs.

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

#217

I’m curious if anyone has investigated the recent leaks from Project Veritas ( https://www.projectveritas.com/news/military-documents-about... ). It suggests once again, that the NIH/NIAID grant to EcoHealth Alliance was in support of gain of function research at WIV involving SARS-like viruses. As a reminder, EcoHealth Alliance’s president, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on various WIV papers that explicitly descr…

If true, this would be insane. Covering up the leak, hiding early treatments, killing millions of us. And I'm not implicating CCP in this, those docs point to USA origination.

At the moment I feel like it all just fits too easily. So skeptical about whether or not it's a convenient plant.

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

#218
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…

Here's an excellent video covering the data on the mice/omicron hypothesis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH1u1GIPU2A It's by Dr. John Campbell who I just discovered and his coverage of the pandemic is by far the most informative and evidence-based that I've found so far.

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

#219
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…

Or, y'know, altered lab mice for further GoF...

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect you've locked onto the specific denotation of "source" as being an individual article. That is not the only denotation of the word. It can also refer to, as examples, persons or journals.

I absolutely haven't. A source can be an article itself (as in the content), or it can be an organisation (a joirnal, a newspaper), or it can be a person. I'm saying that the source isn't the medium over which the content itself is delivered. So for example, the New York Time is a source, so is any given article and it's associated author. However, the blank paper on which it was printed isn't a source, neither is th…

True, that's another sense of being sourced from a journal
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