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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

#291

Post by calf »

spanktheuser wrote: post #172
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…

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

My prior includes neither agency can provide genetic analysis which would be the easiest way to convince a professor of virology that this theory has any merit.

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

#292

Post by sherburt3 »

philjohn wrote: post #255
nxm wrote: post #124

But the fact checkers back in 2021 labeled the lab leak theory as false/misinformation. Meanwhile anyone who suggested it was labeled a conspiracy theory by the main stream media.

That's absolutely false. If people claimed that it was definitively lab leak in origin, it was (correctly) labelled as false. Can you cite me examples, with wording, of people positing it, but not claiming it outright, who were censored?

[flagged]

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

#293

Post by arp242 »

nxm wrote: post #122
steveBK123 wrote: post #62

It was never an implausible theory so the censorship over it was foolish. Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few months by some who found it politically expedient was no better either. People need to be more comfortable saying I don’t know but we are looking into it.

Back then anyone who suggested the lab leak theory was immediately labeled a conspiracy theorist by main stream media.

The major reason for that is that many were doing this in language that was generally considered racist and/or mixed in some other weird stuff like how COVID lockdowns were like the Jewish persecution, rants about masking, or that type of stuff. I'm not saying everyone did that, but there was a huge overlap.

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

#295

Post by rayiner »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #181
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> they couldn’t have meaningfully created the analysis for political reasons in five days CIA has been in the hot seat for long enough to be politically sensitive. Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce multiple reports for every conclusion. It's not implausible that this happened here. In any case, we're talking about a partian topic with low- and moderate-confidence reports with a President who has zero chanc…

Could be that too. But that’s not a flattering comparison!

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

#296

Post by Hikikomori »

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.

Sure they could, they seem to be using chatgpt for executive orders so why not this.

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

#297

Post by ak217 »

m348e912 wrote: post #277

Curious if this lends credibility to the Indian research that was dismissed early 2020. The paper claimed the covid19 virus was man-made. https://sundayguardianlive.com/news/fauci-described-indian-r... "...Indian researchers wrote that the composition of the 'inserts' in the Covid virus was similar to one found in HIV-1."

No. The paper by Pradhan et al. was withdrawn and its methodology refuted in https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00129. Spike protein sequences in SARS-CoV-2 don't have any unique similarities to HIV-1.

> Putting these together, we believe that there is a close evolutionary relation between 2019-nCoV and bat coronavirus RaTG13. The four insertions highlighted by Pradhan et al. in the spike protein are not unique to 2019-nCoV and HIV-1. In fact, the similarities in the sequence-based alignments built on these very short fragments are statistically insignificant, as assessed by the BLAST E values, and such similarities are shared in many other viruses, including the bat coronavirus. Structurally, these “insertions” are far away from the binding interface of the spike protein with the ACE2 receptor, as shown in Figure 2, which is also contradictory to the conclusion made by Pradhan et al.

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

#298

Post by lolinder »

whoitwas wrote: post #294

Hasn't this always been the most likely cause? I thought practically all evidence pointed to that. I haven't even heard a competing theory.

The competing theory is that it was transmitted from living animals sold at a wet market in Wuhan.

Either story isn't a great look for the CCP: either they failed to maintain sufficient health protocols to keep diseases from spreading in wet markets, or they let a dangerous virus leak from a lab. There's no theory for its origins that have the CCP looking competent, so I'm not sure why it's such a politicized topic.

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

#299

Post by Sabinus »

giantg2 wrote: post #284
therealpygon wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should realize experience in a tangentially related field and there being a lab somewhere in the area is not the same as insight and evidence. That’s like saying that if a new flu came out of Atlanta, the fact the CDC is there proves it came from a lab, and must be true because someone’s janitor cousin who worked there one summer said it was true. “Low confidence” means that there is a lack of evidence and the st…

Actually, it's more difficult to prove a wild origin than a lab origin, because labs have papertrails and witnesses. I never said I was right. I said it makes a lot of sense and I believe it's probably true. This is the sort of thing that neither of us can prove to the other at this point. You seem awfully aggressive to prove something though.

>because labs have papertrails and witnesses

If you have access to the labs. Second hand information and extremely delayed visits to labs in a one party state are a whole other matter.

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

#300

Post by Retric »

wk_end wrote: post #241
Retric wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carful when assuming how a lab leak must have unfolded, there’s many possibilities. A single worker gets infected/accidentally releases multiple variants, sloppy worker messing up twice doesn’t seem that crazy. A lab leak is also consistent with an infection person visiting a location that experienced a separate variant. And that’s just a few options there’s also things like an intentional leak followed by another in…

> I’ve read that the lab was intentionally set near that wet market... That seems unlikely, given that - per Wikipedia - the WIV opened in 1956 and the wet market opened in 2002.

I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because:

“Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news coverage due to the timing. But I think that was more confusion as they shouldn’t be working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility.

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