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The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

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Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#451

Post by lamontcg »

uvesten wrote: post #342
Jeema101 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be that you're confusing cause and effect, though. How do we know that the virus (or a precursor) wasn't already circulating in China, and was simply detected in Wuhan because of the fact that there are experts in coronaviruses who reside there? (Also I'm not entirely sure your statement about the gain of function research is correct. A Google search doesn't seem to provide any evidence one way or another.)

There's so many attempts to muddy the waters it would be funny if it wasn't so serious. Even though I'm not sure you attempted to do that here, it certainly reads like it. So, basically, you're saying that (many, we know how contagious covid 19 is) people got sick and put into hospital/died with a novel respiratory disease in another (or several other) chinese cities first. However, that was covered up or unnoticed _…

The most straightforward explanation is that factory farming of animals provided natural bioreactors to execute "gain of function experiments" where bats gave the animals viruses which eventually jumped to humans.

What China and the CCP wants though is to have this debate centered around if it was lab produced or not. They can rely on western scientists to debunk the lab created hypothesis. That leaves their own theories about it originated in Italy as the standing theory for their own domestic consumption. And that avoids looking at their animal farming practices and keeps them from having to crack down on that whole economy, which would be highly disruptive.

And this keeps factory farming conveniently entirely off the radar as a cause of this pandemic. The next pandemic could easily be a virus that hops to humans from pigs or chickens in the USA. All the yelling both ways about lab origins is a very effective smokescreen to avoid doing anything to prevent a future pandemic. NOTHING will happen to prevent future pandemics over yelling about lab causes other than making some people in America very, very angry about China. What we should be doing is thinking about factory farming practices and reducing our diet of meat and animal products.

This would mean that we might have to admit that the insufferable vegans were right all along, and then change our own behavior -- so its much easier to just get super angry at China.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#452

Post by marcosdumay »

_trampeltier wrote: post #170

For me it felt allways a bit strange how fast china acted. The virus was very fresh, nothing was known, just a few cases and china totaly locked down millions if people. Two, three months later, when we already had high numbers if cases in the west, lockdowns started in the west also. But everybody said, "we know nothing about this new virus". For me it allways like, china knew much more about the virus early on.

China built a new giant hospital after all the hospitals on the city were overcrowded and people were dying on their entrance, and instituted a lockdown after the new hospital became crowded.

All of their speed was on the time between the decision and implementation, they din't display any prescience.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#453

Post by scotty79 »

followtheplot wrote: post #294

"... proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence." "The natural emergence theory battles a bristling array of implausibilities." This is a fantastic article, but amazingly almost all of it is year-old news. Most of this was known in March 2020, and nearly all of it by the end of 2020. How does it take so long for the trut…

Or you can look at this and say that nothing more convincing was found to support this idea in a year so it isn't any more feasible explanation than it was a year ago when we didn't know anything about this virus and how easily it mutates to infect humans easier. And it mutates a lot, perfectly spontaneously.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#454

Post by scotty79 »

raducu wrote: post #368
koheripbal wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the reality is that we have no new data on the origin of covid-19. No on-the-ground analysis has been allowed in China.

But the article explains why no data actually leads credence to the lab-escape hypothesis. For SARS and MERS we had data within months. We don't have data on animals because it was a lab-escape event. The claim that lab workers got flu-like symptoms in late 2019 blew my mind. I wish I had time to investigate myself, but I'm 90% convinced that the reporter is correct and this is a lab-escape event.

"The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses."

US government had many perverse reasons to believe things that turned out to be false.

I'm putting exactly zero trust in what US government says about what happens or happened in other countries especially those deemed by them as adversarial.

And even if such thing happened it's way more probable that it was just common seasonal illness.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#455

Post by caseysoftware »

pmoriarty wrote: post #442
caseysoftware wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The grandparent comment seems to be a critique of the third category, where they seem to want the mainstream media to give more air time to conspiracy theories in direct contravention to the consensus of the scientific community: which is that SARS-CoV-2 came from nature, not from a lab. My actual criticism was closer to your first category: "where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of…

What's more sensationalistic: that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin or that it was lab made? Sensationlism is squarely on the side of the conspiracy theores.

I noted four separate questions. You incorrectly assumed my position on the first and are now arguing with an opponent you imagined into existence.

Read past the "a)" because those are way more important and may be discoverable.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#456

Post by tnzm »

pmoriarty wrote: post #442
caseysoftware wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The grandparent comment seems to be a critique of the third category, where they seem to want the mainstream media to give more air time to conspiracy theories in direct contravention to the consensus of the scientific community: which is that SARS-CoV-2 came from nature, not from a lab. My actual criticism was closer to your first category: "where serious discussion and inquiry is thrown out the window in favor of…

What's more sensationalistic: that SARS-CoV-2 had a natural origin or that it was lab made? Sensationlism is squarely on the side of the conspiracy theores.

There is no such thing as "conspiracy theories". "Conspiracy theory" is itself a loaded term used equate any independent research critical of mainstream consensus with the ravings of lunatics. A theory can be:

(1) either confirmed, debunked or unproven;

(2) either originating from an authoritative source, originating from a non-authoritative source, or of unknown origin;

(3) either promoted, downplayed, or ignored by any particular media outlet.

These are, again, three orthogonal axes that you are implicitly, and stubbornly, conflating.

Anyone sensible is not even asking themselves if "conspiracy theories" are true. They're asking themselves where the hell they come from, why are they so contagious, what prevents societies from effectively containing them, and what are the long-term effects on our societies' health.

Or maybe anyone sensible is looking to profit from the confusion, and I'm a raving lunatic... Have you considered becoming one yourself?

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#457

Post by anonAndOn »

walleeee wrote: post #259
uvesten wrote: post #251

I think most people are confused because of CCP’s successful disinformation campaign, and also out of fear of being seen as prejudiced. The fact is that an epidemic with a corona virus (never before or since seen in the wild) with a peculiarly efficient ability to infect humans started in the _only city in the world with a lab where gain-of-function experiments on corona viruses_ is located. Just apply occam’s razor,…

The Chinese state is by no means the only body pushing politicized information regarding covid origins It doesn't make much sense to single it out here, the most plausible version of the lab leak hypothesis is that covid is the result of cooperative research undertaken by American and Chinese scientists and funded by both governments Edit: I'd love to receive a substantive counterargument from the downvoters

I think you underestimate the carelessness of humans and their ability to understand risk. Years ago I saw a graduate student break important lab rules and bring home a genetically modified plant to show some friends and I how cool it was. Had that plant somehow cross pollinated with its wild cousins, who knows what kind of damage it could have done. The genie may never have ever gotten back in the bottle, kinda like SARS-CoV-2.

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#458

Post by belval »

jcims wrote: post #434
pizza234 wrote: post #192

I'm very confused by the article. There has been an extensive analysis by a virologist on Reddit[¹], who claimed that, very simply, SARS-COV2 is a so-called "mosaic" virus, while man-made viruses are inevitably "chimera" ones. The article does not seem to make this distinction. The virologist also chimed on HN (besides, calling BS on people who were, out of ignorance, spreading false beliefs), but it seems he's not p…

Minor detail, but the title of that reddit post instantly turned me off. It's indicates the author is clearly willing to state opinions as fact, and even though they walk it back in their TL;DR, it reeks of the same type of manipulation that conspiracists thrive on.

I can't dig up the thread, but the author kept pasting his reddit thread in the comments of another HN story a few weeks back.

He does come off as very arrogant, a lot of his replies were like "yeah but we'd know".

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#459

Post by tripletao »

altacc wrote: post #197
BillyTheKing wrote: post #114

the fact that this theory is still around after more than a year and not completely debunked is quite telling by itself. I thought this was a complete conspiracy theory last year, but the longer it sticks around the more likely it does become.

Debunking a theory doesn't make it disappear. Sometime it can do the opposite and reinforce the theory. In this case there is no smoking gun either way and a natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin. That lack of absolute certainty, which science is often comfortable working with, leaves room for alternative theories to circulate and attach to those who like the sound of them for various reasons. It is…

> natural origin is much harder to trace than lab origin

Why do you think that? Natural origin should leave closely-related viruses in nature, and animal sampling should find that. Such evidence was found for both the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels) within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, after about the same time and a much more intensive effort, we're still waiting.

Lab-accident origin is easy to trace only if the people working in the lab disclose everything they were working with. This requires both perfect honesty and perfect knowledge. The WIV did lots of work sampling viruses from nature, in remote bat caves that very few other humans would ever enter--around Yunnan to be clear, about 900 miles from Wuhan--and they could have leaked a novel virus before they even had a chance to sequence it. Of course that's still more likely to imply someone's lying, thus the accusations of "conspiracy theory"; but by that standard every human deception in history is conspiracy theory, including every intelligence operation, every Ponzi scheme, every cheating spouse, etc.

I'd put lab origin and natural origin around equal probability myself, and I'd consider anything between 10/90 and 90/10 reasonable. What would you estimate?

Re: The origin of Covid: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box?

#460

Post by scotty79 »

dataflow wrote: post #186
tomp wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is easily explained by a combination of past experience (SARS), Chinese dictatorship (Western countries can’t realistically solder people into their homes), hubris (“our medical system is so good that we could easily handle a pandemic”), wokeism (locking borders is evil) and scientific failures in medicine (if it’s not proven by randomised controlled trials, it doesn’t exist). Add a bit of political infighting i…

That's a mix of some 5-6 factors... what does "easily" mean here?

"easily" part is that they all exist and they simply need to add up. No intricate interaction between them is necessary.
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