Side note: The CIA can publish this, but the CDC can't put out the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Because that's where we are.
CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
351–360 of 868 posts
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#352I don’t know why it isn’t obvious to everyone how this happened. The lab leak theory is true the outbreak started in force in the market where lab employees sold animals used for testing. They probably didn’t know the animals were infected. Earliest cases were among lab employees. Likely the ones who handled and sold these animals.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#353Earlier 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…
If something very like smallpox, thought eradicated, suddenly showed up in some random town, it might be surmised that maybe some animal reservoir for it somehow slipped through the gaps. But if that random town happened to be Atlanta, home of the CDC, known to have some of the few samples of smallpox to still exist, then the relative chance of a lab leak must be thought higher. That's basic Bayesian reasoning. It do…
Smallpox, yes. But another SARS variant (even a somewhat more aggressive one)...
Obviously, it's not impossible.
But, there were even RNA samples from Covid found in other countries, months before Covid really spread in China.
I imagine the main problem with the superspreader event there was more that enough people ended up in the same hospital, and thus it was easier to identify that Covid was a distinct virus.
If it was crawling around in a less dense population, its spread would've been meh, and the hospitals might not even notice the spike much.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.
My priors include all the agencies (the Intelligence Community , arguably the deep state) having ulterior political and personal motives. Does noone remember the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax that the CIA cooked up for GWB? I would not trust any of these agencies to provide objective findings or conclusions, there is a lot of power on the table that's at stake.
I feel that that could've been an honest mistake too.
The intelligence networks there were weak, and if people were talking about it, they may have assumed wrongly that there was something there.
Politicians hunting for excuses to do what they already want to do though, is definitely a thing.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#355If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from. It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people…
The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.
The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.
The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#356If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from. It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people…
The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.
I’ve seen no compelling evidence gain of function has benefited us in any pandemic — or even a theoretical justification.
How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?
Edit:
Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable. You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market. The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to…
These labs were putting coronavirus samples into a forcing environment that drove evolutionary development towards the goal they wanted to study. Creating new lineages of the virus that differed from the original was the entire point! Given that, it’s plausible that sloppy lab handling procedures led to someone being infected with multiple different viruses that were present in the same part of the lab. None of this…
Doesn't have to be the same person either. A sloppy work safety culture is contagious.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#358> 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…
> But the real goal of the constant back-and-forth over where it came from is not about finding the truth; that much seems quite obvious to me. Yes, the annoying thing is that "the truth about covid" literally only matters to culture war grievances, it has no relevance whatsoever to the actual world. If it was a lab leak, then China needs to improve their BSL-4 safety... but they need to do that anyway[0]. If it was…
Wow do we live in the same "actual world?" If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3.
I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened.
In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There would be near global demand for sanctions and reparations, and there's enough anti china sentiment that its a real possibility.
Backed into a corner, the world against them, they would have no other choice. It would be a matter of survival.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#359> 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.
They say that there is no new data. That they are just altering their choice for what assumption is more likely.
Supposedly because they've had more time to think about the conditions of the lab before Covid was released...
But really, nothing has changed except their biases. Nothing has changed on the solid evidence side.
Separately, if there were actual safety issues and stuff was leaking... Then we're incredibly lucky that it was something as tame as Covid, and not one of the more serious kinds of horrors that gain of function research has successfully produced.
Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things that are true: The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation. Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak. The W…
The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market. The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market. Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there. Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable…
> The closest
The closest _known_. The second closest was found in Laos, also 700 miles from Wuhan (BANAL-52). Except it's in the other direction.
So we know that close cousins of CoV-2 are pretty wide-spread.
> Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there
The thing is, does it really matter? We can say with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was _not_ engineered. So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures. But the virus (and its close cousins) are still out there in nature, and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.