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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

#471

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #245
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows I'm struggling to see the practical difference. Ebola naturally evolved. I'm not sure I'm be more incensed if an American lab released natural versus artifical Ebola into the population.

One way to look at the difference is that a "natural Ebola" almost certainly would have spread at some point anyways, and so it wouldn't affect the total number of world deaths in the end, just make them happen some number of years sooner. Whereas an "artificial Ebola" would never have existed without it being intentionally created, so all the deaths aren't just time-shifted, they wouldn't have happened otherwise. Th…

[deleted]

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

#472

Post by tripletao »

westcort wrote: post #398
braiamp wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Read carefully, "...have prompted many researchers..." To change the text, one would need to change the minds of all of the many researchers, and have them administer retractions. Argue over what happened in that year, I guess, but the fact remains that the genetic clock of viral mutation does not stop unless a virus is kept in storage. Also, was the year of mutational change accrued from 1976 to 1977 or from 1918 to…

Exactly. The paper linked in the grandparent is questioning the exact date of reintroduction, not whether reintroduction occurred. The usual guess seems to be

> the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus (C.M. Chu, personal communication)

https://www.nature.com/articles/nm1141

That part is genuinely uncertain though, and probably unanswerable. Historical surveillance was weak, and those who do have information may not wish to implicitly confess to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

No one is seriously questioning that it spent ~20 years in a lab freezer. There was some speculation about virus frozen in the Arctic or such; but since that's never been observed to happen any other time, and multiple labs were known to be working with frozen and thawed virus, I think that's pretty abandoned.

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

#473

Post by csomar »

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

If only there was an inter-national body that everyone contributes to and that does these things /s. Both parties here are at blame: China didn't fully cooperate with the WHO and the US recently kicked it out.

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

#475

Post by chadcmulligan »

foobarbecue wrote: post #263

One thing I've always wondered is: how many labs are there in the world doing gain-of-function research on coronavirus, as the Wuhan Instutute of Virology was? Intuitively, it seems to me like there aren't that many, so it's a pretty interesting coincidence that the virus started right next to such a lab. However, if coronavirus labs are common, then it's not an coincidence. Can anyone point to research that answers…

When you say it that way it was an incredible coincidence

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

#476

Post by miguelazo »

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…

What’s most disturbing and highly irresponsible about comments like that and all of the reporting on this development is that there’s almost zero acknowledgement that the lab in question was being funded by the US government and much of the Gain of Function research was being directed by a US nonprofit with ties to the US government.

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

#477

Post by miguelazo »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #324
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…

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.

Except for the part they left out which is that the lab was being funded by the US government and its GoF research directed by a US nonprofit entity with strong ties to the NIH.

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

#478

Post by roenxi »

Fomite wrote: post #334
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Occam's razor in this situation is the people people claiming the lab leak theory is most likely are interested in the truth and feel that a lab leak is the most probable cause. It never made sense either way to see how the virus came into existence to be a political question.

Whether or not someone gets punished is largely irrelevant. It isn't like 1 billion people in China would have sat down and decided to violate lab safety protocols; there'd be some supervisor somewhere who made mistakes. What happens to such a hypothetical person is irrelevant in the scheme of the damage the virus caused.

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

#480

Post by [deleted] »

lamontcg wrote: post #432
KennyBlanken wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Al…

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