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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#371

Post by stetrain »

Trufa wrote: post #47
stetrain wrote: post #12

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself. 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the…

Concerning number 1) that is doesn’t change the Consequence I agree, but the response I thoroughly disagree unless you means strictly short term. Came or not from a lab, SynBio and gain of functions experiments have the potential of re-doing this of way worse. So basically the only truly important response that is not damage containment is to prevent this from happening (or happen again). Honestly beside fringe group…

I meant how we were dealing with COVID-19 as it spread, not future consequences which I agree do matter.

Once we identified and sequenced the virus, knowing the origin wasn't going to change how many people were on ventilators in hospitals.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#372

Post by VoodooJuJu »

The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a politically unauthorized thought.

If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#373

Post by _jal »

ChemSpider wrote: post #354
mikeyouse wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that in opposition to my point about it being weird insinuation, you posted a bunch of weird insinuation promoted by some of the dimmest people in congress? There was a legitimate debate in 2020 about the origin of the virus, which the emails "released" by the House adequately demonstrate. Now nearly all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, which is given as eviden…

> all of the people in those emails have updated their priors to favor zoonosis, According the to released FOIA'ed emails, these scientists changed their mind within 1-2 days from "wow, could really be a lab leak" to "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" - why that? None of them can explain what made them change their mind on this short time frame in spring 2020. Was there new knowledge? A break thru experiment? They ref…

So, more weird insinuation.

Got it.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#374

Post by stetrain »

127 wrote: post #81
stetrain wrote: post #12

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself. 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the…

Wasn't SARS-1 stopped largely with contact tracing? You're saying that understanding the origin of the virus does not help the production of a vaccine in any way?

Knowing where the virus is, how it spreads, and its genetic sequence are of course important. But I don't think CNN running segments about whether it came from a lab or a bat in 2020-2021 would have helped with any of those points.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#375

Post by mikeyouse »

byecomputer wrote: post #355
mikeyouse wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.

I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before find…

You do realize that your two points are in direct contradiction?

You're mad at the author for not pointing out the WIV (Which had 0 confirmed cases anywhere near it until much later in the pandemic which is what the two bottom charts are referring to) but then you also grant that it looks like the market was the center of spread?

In any case, they directly address this;

> Importantly, even pneumonia cases that had no association whatsoever with the market (no work, travel, visits, or contacts there) still centered around the Huanan market and could not have been subject to ascertainment bias. The market was the only place in Wuhan where early cases had a clear association. There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city, other clusters only started forming later in Jan-Feb (Weibo data, shown above) and became more representative of the city’s population density.

> It is worth mentioning here that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (the alleged ‘escape’ laboratory working on CoVs, not shown in map) is located on the other side of the Yangtze River, South West of the Dong Hu lake, more than 16km away from the Huanan market, and no sickness clusters of cases were shown anywhere close in December 2019.

As for:

> It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before finding a nice home for itself at a wet market, after which it went gangbusters and infected lots of people.

You still need to explain how there are two distinct lineages at the market among the first cases!

Picking and choosing one data point to be skeptical of is useless, the totality of the evidence needs to be weighed.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#376

Post by tim333 »

giantrobot wrote: post #211
sixQuarks wrote: post #48

Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.

Quoted post unavailable.

I've followed quite a lot of the lab leak discussion and I wouldn't say that's true. If anything the most popular people to point fingers at are Daszak and his associates who are mostly pretty white.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#377

Post by eric_cc »

giantrobot wrote: post #324
eric_cc wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Practically everybody knows this already and yet this comment shows up every time freedom of speech is discussed. Censorship is bad even when legally permissible. And we should still fight corporations acting unethically even when the law is on their side.

What is unethical about not wanting to carry speech you don't agree with, is inflammatory, or outright misinformation?

Large platforms (twitter, YouTube, etc) banning views that they don’t agree with gives them power to truly shape society by controlling acceptable discourse.

What they deem outright information may in fact be true. And even allowing clear misinformation (1+1=3) is important. We need people to learn to process information not protect them from it. Using 1+1=3 analogy, wouldn’t you want people to rally around tooling people to learn math?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#378

Post by peteradio »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #353
dpbriggs wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the lab-leak theory to be true, a "pandemicable" zoonotic virus (a VERY rare thing) has to somehow make it into a lab undetected. That's not a necessary condition and it's ridiculous to think that's the only hinge by which the hypothesis stands. Another far more plausible idea is that a mistake occurred somewhere and it was covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before. An input to a mole…

> covered up. This has occurred before in authoritarian regimes before. To be fair, cover ups aren't exclusive to authoritarian regimes. Futhermore, in this case, The West seems to be willingly and shamelessly towing the Communist Party line. Can we add conspiracy to the smell being given off? Science should be obcessed with truth. Geez. Looks like science isn't immune to cover ups and conspiracy either. "What is the…

JFK was an obvious government coverup not sure why you would choose to group the two.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#379

Post by stetrain »

ShannonLimiter wrote: post #91
stetrain wrote: post #12

I think understanding the origin is important, but I also understand why it wasn't a media fixation during the pandemic itself. 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic 2) Unlike the nuclear analogy in the article, pandemic virus outbreaks happen naturally, and fairly frequently. Combined with the huge increase in global travel, when one does happen it can be around the…

> 1) Understanding the origin doesn't change the consequences or response to the pandemic I have the opposite opinion. If there was a lab leak and a coverup, this meant that the Chinese government likely knew earlier and had more information about the nature of the virus and how it spread. That could have saved millions of lives. We spent the first several months of the pandemic under the belief that it wasn't airbor…

I meant the consequences and response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021.

Of course there are longer term and big-picture consequences if it was a lab leak. Which is why I said it was important to research and understand the origin. I just get why it wasn't top priority during the actual pandemic response.

Edit: And of course there are geopolitical implications. I think the same point applies, at the time the focus was on the response and avoiding inciting a political battle over something that wouldn't have a near-term benefit.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#380

Post by jmyeet »

There are obviously some conspiracy theory versions of this but the main origin of a more sane lab leak theory is by exclusion, which is to say that it existed because no other theory had definitive proof.

The most obvious alternative candidate is zoonotic origin. To many this is still the leading theory and it's likely the most plausible. But the smoking gun for zoonotic origin is finding the wildlife population of origin. This hasn't happened yet. Given the attention, that's a little weird but it's not that weird. Sometimes it takes years.

The most plausible form of the lab leak theory is that this was an accidental leak of a strain they had. Even that raises questions. If it's a strain they had, where did it come from? You run into the same issue as zoonotic origin. Could it be the result of gaint of function or similar research that would've modified a wild virus? That's possible too.

The only evidence here is circumstancial. China had, for example, not cooperated with WHO early on in investigations. Any investigations have been limited in their terms of reference. There was a DNA database of coronavirus strains that was taken down in 2019. Kind of weird timing but no tdamning. When I last looked into it this hadn't been examined by third parties. Maybe that's changed now?

So what's happened? Nothing. Because there hasn't been significant movement here on this or any other theory.

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