391–400 of 868 posts
It was never an implausible theory so the censorship over it was foolish. Of course the immediate jump to conclusion in the first few months by some who found it politically expedient was no better either. People need to be more comfortable saying I don’t know but we are looking into it.
All other theories sound as made up bs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> - Democrat aligned mobs routinely invade the Capitol building without facing similar charges It’s the internet, can you link to some concrete instances where they did this? Were Congress people forced to retreat when they did it (assuming your claim is that they were roughly similar in extremity?)?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/31/politics/trump-undergroun...
They interrupted a proceeding two weeks ago.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5087021-protesters-trump...
They fought with police a few months ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIbMhuo1F78
They occupied part of the building until arrested last year.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/24/nx-s1-5050443/capitol-buildin...
For their large scale violence, Democrat mobs prefer to target civilians — eg, their live-streamed murder of Antonio Mays Jr, by a militia that first fought police and then seized a city park. As part of a coordinated attack on dozens of cities resulting in over seventy murders.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/everybody-down-wha...
None of that resulted in anywhere near the charges of a protest by Republicans that turned riot when police tear gassed a peaceful crowd.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't been following it closely but I am guessing the documents from the Select Committee were the closest thing to "compelling evidence" The Intercept wrote an article about it: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re... It begins as: House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their…
I phrased that poorly: I understand how WIV could have caused a pandemic, but I don’t understand the other direction — how WIV doing gain-of-function would help the situation in which there was a zoonotic origin, eg at the wet market. The person I was replying to said that our opinion on gain-of-function should depend on the origin — but I don’t understand how gain-of-function would have helped at all. Only how it po…
I am not in the sector but AFAIK there has been no direct benefit from GoF. There is huge potential which some experts believe outweigh the risks, which is why it is controversial, and that is why it has been politicized.
Protecting the funding and ability to continue the research would explain why scientists have a preference for spillover as opposed to leak. Then there are the politicians...
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.
While I am very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis as an infectious disease epidemiologist, the DoE has a fair amount of expertise via the national labs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a paper from 2014 that tried to estimate the annual chance of a pandemic from a lab leak. They estimated it at 2%. I assumed they overestimated a bit for effect and put it at around 1%. Pandemics have historically happened somewhere around ever 100 years. What's that annual probability? 1%. So if you knew NOTHING else, from a bayesian standpoint, if you have to differentiate a once in a 100 year spillover or…
To me it barely moves the needle, specifically because as you have said we have found other remarkably similar viruses in the past. We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have previously shared this little known, but factual, event on Hacker News. It is simply a Wikipedia article--the 1977 Russian Flu ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu ). This is not my statement, note this well dang, and read or argue with the editors of Wikipedia if you want (not me), but the following statement stands firm: "Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian fl…
> Reanalysis of the H1N1 sequences excluding isolates with unrealistic sampling dates indicates that the 1977 re-emergent lineage was circulating for approximately one year before detection, making it difficult to determine the geographic source of reintroduction. We suggest that a new method is needed to account for viral isolates with unrealistic sampling dates. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2887442/ I w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wrote this awhile ago on a previous thread about this: To my mind, there are a few reasons why people are so fixated on the lab leak thing 1) It makes the pandemic deterministic (bad lab security means an outbreak) instead of stochastic (wildlife spillover). That is, to be frank, even as an epidemiologist who is very skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis, a comforting thought. 2) It's a popular topic in the Substack…
There's a greater burden of proof for spillover when there just happens to be a lab doing virus research near the epicenter of the outbreak.
Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.
Can someone help me understand why a lab leak looks worse for China than zoonotic spillover? Why would Senator Cotton need it to be a lab leak to give him more leverage? From what I understand, one theory is that China has for decades tolerated unsanitary wet markets that allowed dangerous diseases to evolve, get stronger, and eventually transmit to human hosts. They'd been warned about this over and over again and h…
Because a lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory.