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Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

wsj.com

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Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#331

Post by bmikaili »

credit_guy wrote: post #41
boeingUH60 wrote: post #6

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…

The only reason to not say it was a lab leak is to avoid embarrassing those responsible, China first and America second. But little by little people will start accepting that. What should the consequences be? At the very least a tightening of the controls around labs doing bio research. Of course, this amounts to nothing if someone is allowed to outsource research to labs in countries that don't follow the stringent…

AND america? nah man China should pay reparations or face heavy sanctions and geopolitical isolation.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#332

Post by pickovven »

nradov wrote: post #310
ss108 wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. In 2016 when people were like "hurr durr experts suck, they predicted Hillary would win and she lost", it was exasperating. If a model predicted an outcome with 60-70% certainty, and the less likely scenario happens, model wasn't necessarily bad. That'd be true even if it was a 90/10 split.

The model wasn't bad , just useless.

Worse than useless. It likely impacts election outcomes.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#333

Post by juve1996 »

khazhoux wrote: post #234

Time once again to post Jon Stewart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSfejgwbDQ8 I still don't understand how in 2020 people were branded as racist sinophobes for saying that the coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, probably originated from the coronavirus research lab in Wuhan . I know suspicion isn't fact, but that should have always been the leading theory to be disproved. Instead, IIRC Twitter and FB were flaggi…

[flagged]

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#334

Post by baja_blast »

mikeyouse wrote: post #210
andai wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect a human cell line (HeLa). The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Inst…

Yes we have the sequences and no they’re nothing like SarsCov2

No we do not have the sequences, the lab has so far refused to share the sequences in their public database taken down down September of 2019. Plus recently people have discovered through BLAST searches an unreported Chimera virus that got accidentally got sequenced via contaminated agricultural rice sequencing dataset. Which means they had viruses that have not been previously reported. And this makes sense researchers do not publish viruses until they themselves can publish them in a journal. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2....

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#335

Post by dang »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #295
dang wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was flagged by users. We sometimes reverse that and I've done so in this case.

Why? What's the thinking in that decision? This kind of post draws out the lowest quality comments and attracts accounts that comment only on this kind of post.

It seems like significant new information on a major ongoing topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#336

Post by extheat »

anigbrowl wrote: post #237

It's a little perplexing to me that we're getting evaluations from spy agencies and the Department of Energy. I know the latter specializes in nuclear energy in particular, and this has experience with proliferation and adversarial information-gathering. They also supervise biological weapons laboratories (presumably for the same reason), but what they're being asked to do here is to validate a premise (natural or en…

The DOE (as a research agency) does a lot of biological and genomic research and is well qualified to do this kind of research, as other comments here have pointed out. It's not uncommon for researchers in different agencies to collaborate with each other, all labs have different areas of expertise and it would be naive to say any one from one agency is more "qualified" than another. The moniker at the top is not so meaningful.

The "low confidence" has a particular meaning in the world intelligence, and the DOE is also apart of the intelligence community given they run most of the US national research laboratories.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#337

Post by mwbajor »

stevehawk wrote: post #206
abduhl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the substantive difference between "Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says" and "Lab Leak Most Likely Caused Pandemic, Energy Dept. Says"? The only difference I see is that one notes the pandemic ("Covid-19") while the other notes the agency ("Energy Dept."). Or is your comment more broadly that both headlines are bad? If so, then I'd disagree. Both headlines give the most impo…

> Both headlines give the most important part of the story: a US agency currently believes that the pandemic was caused by a lab leak. seems to me you're still leaving out a very important part of the news, which is that the confidence level is "low". so right now the US government has multiple theories, none of which it is confident. it's just that of the reports that is not confident in, it might be the least not c…

You know you're right. Remember when Saddam closed his labs to us? The ones that never had WMDs? What was the "confidence" threshold for invading iraq? I also bet its the same exact people now telling us about more "confidence" levels.

Confidence, high, low, whatever, it means nothing. No one trusts the govt. or media anymore and no one should.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#338

Post by boopmaster »

belorn wrote: post #292
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #151

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…

If all the other origin theories has "very low" as confidence score, then a lab leak is still the most likely origin with a "low" confidence score. It would be nice to see the confidence score as a numerical number in order to understand how much lead this theory has to the second most likely origin theory.

This. Low confidence still significant in that it could have been “low confidence transmission from wet market game”, but that’s not the direction this landed on. It’s likely a lab leak, says the report, but there’s too many gaps to support higher certainty.

Re: Lab leak most likely origin of Covid-19 pandemic, U.S. agency now says

#339

Post by jasonladuke0311 »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #178
ffssffss wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They improved the ability to share info (fusion centers and whatnot), but the desire to do so remains under the auspices of humans.
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