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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

#481

Post by tripletao »

lamontcg wrote: post #444
Enginerrrd wrote: post #288

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…

> Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. The outbreak was likely to happen in a large population center near where the bats were. The actual probability that it went north and happened in Wuhan was probably 1-in-12 or so. And the first time there was a coronavirus spillover and pandemic, it happened in Guangzhou. So we rolled 1d12 once and didn't get a 1 and then rolled it again and d…

> Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study.

As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:

> We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.scien...

Wuhan was "closer to the bats" only in the sense that New York City is "closer to the alligators" than Boston. There's little reason to choose that phrasing except to deliberately mislead.

I've warned repeatedly that the failure of competent scientists to engage with the real possibility that their research caused this pandemic will result in a blunt and damaging backlash. We're watching that damage now in real time.

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

#482

Post by morepedantic »

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]

>Just think about it

This always proceeds a cogent point.

>what's the difference between negligence and malice?

Wrong, these are both theories of Chinese negligence. Did you mean the difference in culpability for positive and negative action? The lab leak is negative action by the Chinese government, and positive action by some subset of the Chinese citizenry. Zoonosis is positive action by the Chinese government. China (government U citizenry) are 100% culpable either way.

Malice only appears in fringe theories about intentional release, which isn't a lab leak by definition.

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

#483

Post by sleeplessworld »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #337
hindsightbias wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it will fit a western centric ideology but there is zero mystery with people going into hospitals in Nov. It would be surprising if it weren’t so. It’s flu season and Chinese don’t go zoom their Dr, they go and check into the hospital. In other countries, it would be considered sociopathy to go to work with a flu, but we’re all Real Americans so anything different means… conspiracy.

I'm actually aware of the cultural differences there. Going to the hospital is not usually the same thing as being "hospitalized" though, and it would be relevant for us to make that distinction to determine how much that tidbit pushes us one way or the other. I had originally read "hospitalized" some time ago, but i just checked the intelligence briefing and it definitely does not indicate actual hospitalization. So…

If one were either the director or a senior leader of a more-or-less covert biolab doing research that is definitely supposed not to be discovered, would you have done your job if you had not established a procedure for medical treatment of sick or infected employees using local and probably covert resources? - And likely including local isolation of infected or potentially infected people? Whether or not people from this supposed type of biolab turns up at public hospitals does not seem to indicate much.

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

#484

Post by morepedantic »

Retric wrote: post #355
jtc331 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened. The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

The risks don't change. Our risk assessment accuracy changes.

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

#485

Post by oneshtein »

theptip wrote: post #388
zmgsabst wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The theory is quite clear, if you know which strains could hop to humans then you can prioritize monitoring them, just like we monitor influenza types in animal populations now. The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.

[flagged]

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

#487

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

Retric wrote: post #355
jtc331 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened. The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

> The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained.

Strongly, strongly disagree. When even a teeny risk of escape means that millions of people could die, I think a much better argument is to simply make certain types of research completely off limits.

I'm certainly not the only person who thinks this. Zeynep Tufekci, who in my opinion had the most rational commentary during the pandemic, argued that much virus research just doesn't work from a cost/benefit analysis. For example, even if the root cause of COVID wasn't a lab leak, it's probably not a great idea having researchers milling around bat caves collecting sick bats and what not - it's very possible a zoonotic virus made the jump not necessarily in the lab but from researchers specifically looking for zoonotic viruses.

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

#488

Post by oneshtein »

dehrmann wrote: post #419
jyounker wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been two other spillover events from coronaviruses in the last 30 years. One of those (SARS) was from Chinese wet markets. Wuhan has a population of 13 million. It would be surprising if the city didn't have a lab doing virus research.

There are 42 BSL-4 facilities in the world. I'm too lazy to do the math, but I'm curious what percent of the world's population is near one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#List_of_BSL-4_...

One of these BSL4 had major incident on Sep 16 2019, just before start of epidemic.

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

#489

Post by Glyptodon »

That said, "lab leak" still doesn't mean "virus built or engineered by humans for nefarious reasons."

I think the conversation about this has been repeatedly horrendous because it seems like people don't really understand that there are lots of degrees between "virus in research lab" and "genetically engineered bio-weapon." Though obviously there's more embarrassment and culpability on China's side (by most standards) with a poorly controlled lab situation than some rando, basically serf by implication, selling bush meat at a bazaar.

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

#490

Post by lamontcg »

tripletao wrote: post #481
lamontcg wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now add in the fact that the outbreak occurred right next to a BSL lab. The outbreak was likely to happen in a large population center near where the bats were. The actual probability that it went north and happened in Wuhan was probably 1-in-12 or so. And the first time there was a coronavirus spillover and pandemic, it happened in Guangzhou. So we rolled 1d12 once and didn't get a 1 and then rolled it again and d…

> Also, not surprising that the lab was in a major city somewhat central and closer to the bats than e.g. Beijing. Because that is what it was set up to study. As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan: > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in W…

> As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:

And SARS-CoV-1 occurred in Guangzhou. The closest known relative virus (WIV16) is 96% homologous to SARS-CoV-1 and was found in Yunnan as well, which is over 1,000 km away from Guangzhou. Either the range of the bats carrying these coronaviruses is much larger than anyone in the world (including Dr Shi) knows about, or else the "blast radius" of the animal trade in China is considerably larger than anyone knows about.

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