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The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance…
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Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2
True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this. Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.
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Some accounts I've read suggest the Wuhan lab was operated under conditions more akin to BSL1. Think your High School biology lab or your dentist.
My source of information is the hundreds of hours of This Week in Virology episodes I have listened to since March 2020, so with that in mind as my bias: Reputable western scientists who have worked with Wuhan virologists professionally have a lot of respect for the Chinese scientists and the Wuhan lab generally. But the fact that many virologists have professional friends at the Wuhan lab does not rule out that the…
tbh the general impression given by China's known attempts to cover anything up tend to give the opposite impression, precisely because of their default to autocracy. This is a government party that generally covers up stuff by banning it from being talked about, regards "she regrets making that comment and wants to stay at her home and not play tennis or talk to the media any more" as a reasonable coverup, and made such a clumsy attempt to silence the doctor first raising the alarm COVID symptoms that be became a hero inside China and the officials responsible got their wrists slapped. Allowing lab staff to communicate with the outside world and release papers on COVID origins considered plausible by uninvolved overseas virologists would be an uncharacteristic way for the Chinese government to act if they suspected there was something to be uncovered...
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And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.
Probably they still aren’t sharing all the information they have with each other. I had thought that was supposed to be much improved post 9-11.
The lab leak hypothesis makes the most sense. The lab in Wuhan which researches coronaviruses conducts experiences on animals, including bats. Like other labs, there are dedicated personnel for hydrating and feeding the experimental animals. Notably, there are "wet markets" in Wuhan where live animals are sold, including bats, which harbor coronaviruses. Someone who is working in the facility in charge of maintenance…
Why reach so hard to link this to a Wuhan wet market vs a generic leak? They didn’t sell bats at the market as far as I have read, and what’s the difference? Lab leak is a lab leak.
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True. And yet, it shows that there is a large scientific community & apparatus willing to experiment with this. Circumstantial evidence is not proof of wrongdoing, but it is reason to ask more questions. Why were those questions censored? Why were they ruled unacceptable "misinformation"? It seems to me that we were asleep at the switch.
The counter to that is that the experts in coronaviruses knew they were the likely next epidemic and that they were doing their best to characterize the threat as best possible but unfortunately failed before the spillover came. The scientific community knew how close we came between SARS and MERS, a small mutation of either could’ve been much more virulent and pathogenic, so of course they were trying to research.
I'm more than happy to entertain the idea that the research is and was worth it. But we need to have an accurate accounting of recent events. They tried to completely shut that down. Thankfully, lately it seems that they failed.
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Also article mentions FBI has “moderate” confidence it was lab leak. I find that very interesting given it wouldn’t be so much based on scientific analysis but some intelligence collection the FBI has.
And the WSJ piece says the CIA is undecided! I wonder what explains the different assessments.
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Actually as a side question, why does the reporting on this story in particular use the somewhat unusual phrase “US Energy Department?” It is the Department of Energy, right? I seems like a little nitpick, but there are lots of agencies in the US, sometimes there’s a little nobody agency with a name similar to a big deal one… as a style thing, reporters should stick to the common names for big agencies, so we can be…
I think in cases where there are two large agencies that can be abbreviated to the same acronym people who work for those agencies tend to use names that don't lend themselves to that abbreviation. So in this case it's the Energy Dept and Education Dept rather than something that might be turned into the ambiguous DoE.
There's a lot of bad headline-writing on this subject today. Here's the NYT's headline: Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says And then the sub-head (or dek, if you want to sound like you're in the know): The conclusion, which was made with “low confidence,” came as America’s intelligence agencies remained divided over the origins of the coronavirus. So we have a conclusion: 'lab leak most likely cau…
After seeing lots of Twitter threads about Nate Silver, condemning his lack of "certainty" in his predictions ("It's such a cop out! Since he never says yes or no one way or the other he always has an out when he's wrong!"), I'm even more convinced not just that people don't understand statistics, but they willfully don't want to.
Nothing seems certain at this point, but, let’s say the pandemic was actually caused by a lab leak. That’ll mean the world was brought to an economic standstill and millions of people died because of the errors and carelessness of some people…will there be consequences? What will be the assurance that such deadly mistake won’t occur again? If it was actually a lab leak, then it’ll definitely rank as the most costly a…
I'd still say the Iraq War was most costly and fatal mistake in the 21st Century. Hard to compare, admittedly.
If that's the case it'll just slowly outscale any singular event like the Iraq War over multiple human generations of deaths and damage.