Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 868 posts

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

#431

Post by etc-hosts »

willmadden wrote: post #411
chimprich wrote: post #33

The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here. A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2

What are you talking about? The NIH funded the research through Ecohealth alliance. It was funded from the US and created in the Wuhan lab. We've known the virus was created in a lab and not natural since early 2020. https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...

you're really going to make us watch a 45 minute youtube video?

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

#432

Post by lamontcg »

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…

The initial outbreak cases were clustered around the wet market, not around WIV, and the cases weren't linked to WIV. There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. Instead you see a cluster of cases that look exactly like it spilled over from the wet market.

And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. All the research they were doing on live virus was based on SARS-CoV-1. You can't get SARS-CoV-2 out of that. And while they sequenced RaTG-13, there is no evidence they ever had live virus, and RaTG-13 is still around a thousand mutations and a few decades of evolution away from SARS-CoV-2.

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

#433

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

standardUser wrote: post #137
dekhn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/politics/covid-lab-lea... and https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/27/media/covid-19-origins-lab-le... In short a few prominent people claimed it was racist to suggest that China's research or wet market contributed to the origins of COVID. They were mistaken but with the highly politicized environment, it helped distort opinions at a critical time. The claims of racism have since been de…

It's not racist to blame China, but it is racist to accuse/harass/disparage Asian people and that was what was happening in America. Pushing back on the lab leak theory was at least in part to stop the dumbest among us from blaming their Asian neighbor. That and the lack of evidence.

It was racism to suggest that China’s only level4 bio lab that received funding for coronavirus research was the source of the leak…

But not racism to declare that the virus must have come from a wet market where the savages eat uncooked bats and pangolin.

Now the goal posts have shifted to “lack of evidence” knowing full well china would nuke the city before admitting they caused covid by negligence.

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

#434

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

willmadden wrote: post #410

The furin cleavage site in the virus was synthetic. The peak prosperity guy blew the lid off of this in early 2020. I guess that was a "conspiracy theory" though? https://peakprosperity.com/more-evidence-covid-19-may-not-be...

Find me a conspiracy theory that was found to be true AND was pushed by the left. I haven’t seen one yet.

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

#435

Post by defrost »

vcdimension wrote: post #424
defrost wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means what? "Rootclaim" then bet $100,000 on being able to back that claim in a independant structured 18 hour long debate of their own devising .. and lost the $100,000. The Rootclaim assessment was worthless. See: https://protagonist-science.medium.com/lableak-truther-loses... Or watch the entire 18 hour debate in which that claim was shredded. Given your user profile about: it's easy to see why you might giv…

Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it. I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-... I also know from e…

> I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate

It was 18 hours.

Three blocks of six hours.

Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments.

Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate.

The case that you put forward lost.

It was debated by the person that put it forward.

He lost.

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

#436

Post by lamontcg »

scarface_74 wrote: post #209
hansvm wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

And don’t forget that TikTok should be banned and now it should be saved.

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

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

#437

Post by ricksunny »

jfengel wrote: post #128
shadowgovt wrote: post #66

I simply cannot use this as signal to update my priors on the theory given how politically charged this issue is and the new administration. We cannot ignore the timing or the fact that the release appears to be the direct consequence of the previous director not believing the information he had passed the evidential bar and the new directory believing it does. It's new signal on the question, which is always nice-to…

I don't think anyone is updating their priors. It's just a loud restatement of existing priors.

Society is like a meta-brain. One neuron may believe something to a different degree than the others - i.e. different priora. Highly-reported channels like this are the society brain updating its priors at large.

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

#438

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#439

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #223
stvswn wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's begging the question to claim they were proven right. Sure, they were proven right in some respect, but if the research itself caused it (and let's be real, it did) then they were proven right in a manner that doesn't really speak well of their record. And yes, they were influential in arguing for continued grant money to study coronaviruses. They were also influential in arguing against the Obama administration…

The research didn't cause it. The scientific evidence that the outbreak began at the market is overwhelming at this point, and there's never been a shred of evidence for the lab leak. If you think otherwise, then you have not been following the scientific publications on the subject for the last 5 years. So yes, EHA has been proven right, and you're hounding the very people who dedicated themselves to warning the wor…

This is a fascinating exhibit. To effectively summarize favorite take on Covid, “the peasants will go to their graves before they admit they were fools”.
Post reply on HN