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CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

nytimes.com

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Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#401

Post by selimthegrim »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #369
Fomite wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That this is someone's fault and they can be punished is, I think, the reason people want it to be true. Rather than the world is a terrifying place that sometimes kills millions.

The zoonotic theory has no evidence to support it whatsoever . It's the viral equivalent of the 'Magic Bullet.' - No samples were ever found, nor were any sick animals, in the market where it supposedly started. Period. Nothing. - No evidence of genetic mutations and variants leading up to crossover, no intermediary host ever found. - It just happened to start infecting people in the city of a lab which had been doin…

You might want to check out the rootclaim debates or the preprint by Cilibrasi and Vitányi (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.22.216242v1....) with code - https://github.com/rudi-cilibrasi/ncd-covid

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#402

Post by absolutelastone »

hansvm wrote: post #314
pstuart wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Clarifying: Many of the pardoned individuals have video evidence of assaulting police with weapons and claim to be part of organizations diametrically opposed to BLM, Antifa, and the FBI. Are they: 1. Lying, masquerading as Trump supporters in deep cover for many years (secretly a part of the organizations you're blaming, despite playing part in an attempted coup that would have opposed those organizations and despit…

I think that was sarcasm?

As for the pardons, many were just commutations. They did 3 years or whatever in prison by now. And many full pardons were just misdemeanors for trespassing or whatever anyway. It make more sense to focus on specific people who were violent and got away with nothing.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#403

Post by pclmulqdq »

mikeyouse wrote: post #383
shakow wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But SARS outbreak was from a single strain, wasn't it? It's not the “two zoonosis” that I find to be low-probability, it's the “two zoonosis of two different strains at the same place & time”.

The two Covid strains were closely related with only a few mutations difference between them. As you’d expect if eg two different raccoon dogs were infected with the same virus and one of the lineages was preferred.

You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#404

Post by blackeyeblitzar »

cyberax wrote: post #364
blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic: 1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887…

> President Obama had banned it through an executive order. Can you provide a link to the executive order? It sounds seriously strange.

I can’t find the actual order but a search turns up many articles about it. Here’s one:

https://www.nature.com/articles/514411a

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#405

Post by duxup »

drewbug01 wrote: post #17

> 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…

I remember watching the movie War Games (1983 film) and even as a kid when they announced nuclear missiles had been launched and "confidence is high" I thought "That's a really good way to indicate that there are indications that something might be happening, AND indicate how much you believe it when you talk about things that you can't confirm."

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#406

Post by Sporktacular »

TZubiri wrote: post #368
lolinder wrote: post #306

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…

[flagged]

Why don't you just answer the question? A lab leak makes China look incompetent.

It means sick animals infecting lab staff. It doesn't make it look malicious, it doesn't mean engineered bioweaponry, actively playing with fire or any other unsupported conspiracy nonsense.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#407

Post by KPGv2 »

lolinder wrote: post #306

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…

I don't think it's an attack on China. It's a political attack on Fauci, who became public enemy #1 for conservatives early in the pandemic. They've been looking for reasons to blame him (oh, who just incidentally helped protect those dirty gay people during the AIDS crisis), and now our President has stripped him of security detail and announced he wouldn't feel responsible if something bad happened to him.

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#408

Post by rayiner »

ioulaum wrote: post #359
rayiner wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

What change in “biases?” You think a government agency put together a new assessment in four days?

Re: CIA now favors lab leak theory to explain Covid's origins

#409

Post by jyounker »

ioulaum wrote: post #354
Dalewyn wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the run-up to the second Iraq war there were a steady trickle of articles documenting the corruption of the intelligence process.
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