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The media's lab leak fiasco

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Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#361

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #125
zdragnar wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cover up didn't need to be colossal, just for everyone to point to occams razor and call anyone with a hint of curiosity a racist. The fact that the origin of the outbreak appears to be in the same vicinity as a lab that experiments on similar viruses alone is sufficient reason to want a thorough investigation. Otherwise, the odds that nature produced such a virus, in such a location, make for a crazy coincidence…

We had SARS-1 crop up in Guangdong in 2003 when the nearest known related virus has been found in Yunnan some ~700 miles away. There just wasn't a lab there to leak from. This time it popped up about ~700 miles away again, but where there was a lab. The actual chances of that happening are probably about 1-in-10 / 1-in-20 if we understood the movement of people and animals within China that produced both outbreaks. T…

It's not an impossible coincidence, but what prior estimate of the probability that an arbitrary pandemic is lab-origin are you applying that to? Of the ~dozen pandemics in the last fifty years, one (the 1977 flu pandemic[1], which killed ~700k people) was probably lab-origin. A 1/12 prior plus a 1/10 coincidence in favor of lab origin is pretty close to even odds, so what evidence takes it back down? You can't just say "because pandemics are usually natural", since that's what the 1/12 prior already captures.

You present many reasonable arguments that natural origin is possible, and I agree that it is. That doesn't mean lab origin is impossible though, and it doesn't mean the possibility is negligible unless your prior is very heavily biased against it. Considering that a lab-origin pandemic has probably happened before (and has even been dismissed as clearly natural by the WHO[2], before the later scientific consensus corrected that!), I don't see where you're getting the confidence you've expressed in other comments that the origin of this one is certainly natural.

As to exact numbers, I agree that it's reasonable to consider only the urban population, since emergence would probably be in a city. There's no reason to limit the population to China, though--natural emergence elsewhere in SE Asia would also have been possible, and the WIV's research program is distinctive not just in China but in the world. It seems like our disagreement hinges mostly on that first prior (considering that a pandemic emerged, but no other information), though.

1. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0904322

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#362

Post by fsckboy »

wearywanderer wrote: post #282
Lazare wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak". Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of func…

> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a re…

while you are correct that lab-leak is "theoretically" a distinct hypothesis, in this specific case the apparent splicing of pangolin virus parts together with bat virus parts is a highly suggestive smoking gun for man-made, especially when you consider that this lab does splicing experiments

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#363

Post by fsckboy »

BurningFrog wrote: post #247
scottrogowski wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be the top comment. Social media companies can either be monopolies or they can put limits on the speech of their platform... but they can't do both. While not against the law of freedom of speech, political moderation processes are certainly against the intent. Every once in a while we get a case like this where an unpopular fringe opinion becomes mainstream and underlines the point. But this isn't just…

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

WARNING: BurningFrog aspires to be Emperor

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#364

Post by RickJWagner »

So Tom Cotton is owed an apology, and the American people can stand to remember they were badly misled by 'scientists' and the media just before a presidential election.

It's not like people are allowing themselves to be led around and told what to think or something.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#365

Post by cookiecaper »

svara wrote: post #209

This story is a real clusterfuck and really hammers home the point that humans are bad at dealing with probabilities and uncertainty. You mix some nationalism in and it becomes completely impossible to have a reasonable discussion. This article already starts with a false dichotomy: "I missed the furious initial skirmish in what’s become the Long Discourse Wars over the idea that the SARS-CoV-2 virus came from the Wu…

> No matter what anyone tells you, there is zero evidence that any part of the virus is engineered (and it isn't even entirely clear what such evidence would look like, in general!).

I'm not a biologist so I don't really know what any of this means, but there seems to be debate around the presence of a "furin site" [0], which apparently could have emerged naturally, but also could have been artificially spliced in the course of gain-of-function research. Is that how GOF research is normally conducted? I don't really know anything here, but at least some people believe there are genetic markers indicating potential lab manipulation, thus adding another datum in the long list of circumstantial evidence.

[0] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1266805310313967617.html

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#366

Post by armchairhacker »

throw0101a wrote: post #253
BurningFrog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I would do, if elected Emperor over this, is to add warnings or links to debunkings of fringe theories, but never delete them. The power to silence will always be abused.

> or links to debunkings of fringe theories Sadly won't be helpful, and may actually make things worse: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belief_perseverance * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backfire_effect * https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont...

IMO I think it's useful to avoid getting moderates and people who don't know better caught up in the mess.

For people who are already convinced, they're already convinced. Banning the content entirely also doesn't help. People are very good at spreading information, even if you manage to ban all conspiracies from the internet, you have TV, the newspaper, private networks, and just word-of-mouth.

Another good tool would be to teach kids how to identify misinformation. You don't have to worry about belief perseverance when there's no belief yet.

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#367

Post by fsckboy »

gamblor956 wrote: post #319
Lazare wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would help explain how the virus got from the mine to Wuhan; it does not help explain how the virus mutated from a bat virus unable to infect humans to a virus that was extremely good at infecting humans with, so far, no intermediate stages identified. Much of the problem with the zoonotic explanation is that no evidence of the process has been found. Was a third virus involved? We haven't identified it. Was a t…

We haven't found any evidence about what happened in the lab...because China barred WHO researchers from visiting the lab do look for that evidence.

"China barred WHO researchers"...

and the WHO researchers themselves engage in (and fund) the same type of experiments as the Wuhan lab (and the Wuhan lab itself), and so had very little incentive to investigate or implicate themselves either...

and further, there actually is evidence of what went on in the Wuhan lab, see https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#368

Post by vosper »

neither_color wrote: post #34

There’s a question as to why that fake consensus emerged. But I think the more troubling question is: How did people let the original story of what Tom Cotton even said go so badly awry? Essentially Cotton said something that was then transformed into a fake claim of a Chinese bio-attack, then the fake claim was debunked, and then the debunking was applied to the real claim with little attention paid to ongoing disag…

> No amount of branding will convince me that "fact checkers" are any more objective and impartial than regular newspaper columnists; fact checkers are what editors are supposed to be. There's no academic rigor to fact checking

Matt Taibbi recently published an article about how the role and visibility of fact-checking has changed over recent years (the meat of this is in the second half of the article)

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/fact-checking-takes-another-be...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#369

Post by skylabmelody »

wuwuno wrote: post #263

Another political article about how it's not possible that the Chinese were studying the virus and some underpaid lab tech screwed and and exposed himself and then did what humans always do, the tech tried to cover up the mistake. Nobody has still explained how the Chinese knew they had a problem in early December when they only had a handful of cases, like less than 100 cases. This is the question that needs to be a…

They were no wild animals sold at the seafood market, only seafood product. Picture of people eating bat soup were taken in Palau island. Wild animal market pictures were taken in Guilin, Gongguan or even Tomohon market in Indonesia. Youtube, Twitter and Facebook were spammed with fake videos claiming to be from Wuhan wet market although they were from these other locations. An interview in a Japanese documentary in Wuhan: https://youtu.be/N4ABOJ1y5iM?t=429

Nobody seems to remember that by the end of March 2020, there was a report about Guilin and Gongguan wild animal markets already reopening: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8163761/Chinese-mar...

Re: The media's lab leak fiasco

#370

Post by XorNot »

wearywanderer wrote: post #282
Lazare wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bit of a fuzzy overlap between "man made" and "lab leak". Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. Certainly the lab was doing research; there's an ongoing debate over what they did, who funded it, whether what they did technically qualifies as "gain of func…

> Specifically, the lab leak theory more or less assumes that the virus was collected from the mine, taken to Wuhan, and some research and experiments were done on it, resulting it some changes. I disagree, the lab leak hypothesis is independent from the lab [inadvertently or deliberately] mutating the virus. The lab may have merely possessed the virus, having made only the mistake of transporting the virus from a re…

So here's the thing: the more improbable thing about the lab leak hypothesis is that the lab would even have had enough virus, in virion form, to cause even 1 human infection.

Biological materials are hard to grow and store. Very few people have ever been infected from handling corpses from much more pathogenic viruses (i.e. the black death was one of the only significant ones, and that's because it's a bacterium). And that's about 70kg and trillions of bacteria to "maybe" end up contaminated.

In-vitro scale research on viruses has been going on for a long time, in BSL2 facilities (your university bio-labs for students probably met this standard), and people getting infected from much more contagious human-viruses in those settings just doesn't happen.

The scale of difference in quantity between a smear of virus particles on a petridish (pretty much immobilized, and, as we know, at serious risk of being destroyed by the trace UV from fluorescent lighting) and the quantity from an active infection in a human cough is multiple orders of magnitude (also a massive difference in exposure path: COVID spreads principally by going in through mucus membranes as aersolized droplets - dead tissue doesn't produce these, neither do immobilized particles).

No one pushing "lab leak" has ever proposed a mechanism by which it happened - they just assume it can, because they don't work in a biology lab and have no idea about what biological research actually looks like.

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