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Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

thetimes.co.uk

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Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#371

Post by Fomite »

aaplok wrote: post #72

> The investigators believe the Chinese military had taken an interest in developing a vaccine for the viruses so they could be used as potential bioweapons. If a country could inoculate its population against its own secret virus, it might have a weapon to shift the balance of world power. This part doesn't make sense to me. Coronavirus is known to mutate constantly and rapidly. Having a vaccine against a strand mig…

To be frank, given SARS-CoV-1 as well as MERS, and the known prevalence of coronaviruses in and near China, if I was the military I think I'd be justified into looking at viruses not as potential bioweapons but as a force readiness problem.

The U.S. has done this, and indeed, most of our public health infrastructure is an outgrowth of it.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#372

Post by LeonB »

rich_sasha wrote: post #32
LeonB wrote: post #11

Early on the article makes a conjecture that others also make which I think is part of why the topic is so hot: “Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science.” The words “in science” are my problem here: people thinking this is a “scientific” question. It’s a history question, a political question, and could be made into a f…

> But science does not ask this kind of question! I disagree, it is a scientific question. Whether we can answer it in isolation of politics and prejudice is the question for me. But if you observe some gravitational waves in a single event, you can correlate it to optical or radio observations, you can try to analyse the signals to match them to existing hypotheses of gravitational waves origination etc. The singula…

The top level question is not a scientific question.

In order to investigate it, many many many smaller questions may be asked, some of which are scientific.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#373

Post by distortionfield »

smeagull wrote: post #368
Matl wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The indirect evidence of a lab leak theory is overwhelming frankly. There was some indirect and even some more direct evidence of Iraq doing nuclear weapons research in some capacity at some point too, this is incredibly dangerous line to go own without being 250% sure. Indirect evidence simply doesn't cut it. > No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of build…

[flagged]

No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#374

Post by [deleted] »

distortionfield wrote: post #373
smeagull wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.

[deleted]

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#375

Post by qwerasdf5 »

distortionfield wrote: post #373
smeagull wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.

Can you please list the other "totally reasonable and likely ways"? I'm interested.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#376

Post by irjustin »

startupsfail wrote: post #370
godelski wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one credible is saying china intentionally released the virus or built it with the intention of building a weapon. To add to this, most countries have turned away from infectious biological weapons because they are near impossible to control. The the release of them might harm your enemies, but at a serious cost to yourself. It is like trying to cut off your enemy's leg by cutting off your own arm. It ends up ki…

Can the lab be sued out of existence for damages? It is quite clear that they did amplification research as they’ve planned. And had inserted the furin site into the coronavirus . And they’ve mismanaged the research and they’ve let the virus to spread. This had caused a lot of damage, in particular the deaths, economical damage, long-covid damages, mental illnesses and diminished IQ (covid brain fog). There’ve been s…

That requires corporation of a foreign government that isn't friendly.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#377

Post by irjustin »

qwerasdf5 wrote: post #375
distortionfield wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it doesnt. All the “indirect evidence” of the lab leak hypothesis could be interpreted multiple other totally reasonable and likely ways, and it would be irresponsible to motivate foreign policy on that “indirect evidence”.

Can you please list the other "totally reasonable and likely ways"? I'm interested.

"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that?

The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#378

Post by distortionfield »

irjustin wrote: post #377
qwerasdf5 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please list the other "totally reasonable and likely ways"? I'm interested.

"Reasonable" could be simply truly accidental like someone carried a vial, drops it and then someone gets sick from that? The point the parent comment is trying to make is all we have is speculation and you can speculate either way. Just make whatever you want up in your head that doesn't include malice.

The point is we will never know and anyone claiming otherwise is selling you something

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#379

Post by tripletao »

pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

> Additionally, the closest relative to SARSCov2 that has been identified (RaTG13) was found in a cave in Mojiang county in Yunnan, over 1,000 km away, with no evidence that it was ever studied in the Wuhan lab.

As others have noted, this is mostly wrong. The WIV is the only lab in the world ever to publish a genome for RaTG13. They'd published a portion (under a different name, Ra4991) before the onset of the pandemic. The similarity to SARS-CoV-2 made it obvious they had something relevant, so they published the rest after. Perhaps you meant there's no evidence that the WIV ever had live RaTG13, and that's true--indeed, there's no evidence that anyone ever has, and some highly speculative claims that it might be an in silico fraud.

It's also not the closest relative anymore. From your other comments here, I believe your knowledge is about a year behind; you're repeating many old arguments that even those arguing most strongly against a possible research-related origin have long since abandoned.

> The map presented upfront from is also misleading, the early cases clustered around the market not the lab [0].

The market was the first big cluster, but the earliest cases show much less structure. See the paragraph beginning "A later study by academics at Wuhan University located the hotspots in Wuhan where people were reporting on social media that they needed treatment for Covid", which I believe is intended as explanation for that map (though that's not completely clear to me).

In any case, there's no reason to expect the first identified cluster in the same location as the first introduction. For example, SARS-CoV-2 must have been introduced into other continents at airports and seaports; but the first clusters were elsewhere, at nursing homes, choir practices, and other locations where the (a) the virus spread easily, and (b) the patients are likely to get sick enough for people to notice.

> Furthermore, several different isolates were found in the market, indicating that SARSCoV2 had been circulating before the epidemic took off.

I guess you're referring here to Pekar et. al? Their "different isolates" are literally just two SNPs apart. Roughly 1/10 of human-to-human transmissions result in two lineages at least that different, so this seems intuitively like it could easily evolve in cryptic human spread. Pekar did some complicated epidemiological modeling that claims otherwise, but I don't think it means much; see for example the criticism at

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.10.511625v1

https://twitter.com/NimwegenLab/status/1563490916006264833

https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1509431997713764352

Re: Inside the Wuhan lab weeks before Covid

#380

Post by _gabe_ »

pcrh wrote: post #55

After a quick read of the article, it presents no new data, and is replete with innuendo pointing at the Wuhan lab, rather than any direct evidence. Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses. So the fact that the Wuhan lab worked on coronaviruses is not in itself an indication of any i…

> Most importantly, the general reader should know that all labs researching viruses do research on dangerous viruses. After all there is no incentive to research benign viruses.

I'm curious how you came up with this heuristic. It seems to me that there's plenty of incentives to study benign viruses: the primary one being to develop a deeper understanding of the biology of viruses in general.

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