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US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

reuters.com

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Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#511

Post by spyder »

spoonjim wrote: post #465
JenniferRM wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe in BSL-5 labs? Must be in rural isolation, NOT a city. The administrators and janitors and everyone has to sleep inside the fence. Getting out requires spending 40 days in a quarantine hotel in a different nearby fenced area. Armed guards patrol the fence. (EDIT: To be clear. BSL-5 doesn't exist yet... but it should.)

You’re not going to get any good researchers to live in a quarantine bubble for their whole lives.

Yes, just like no researcher will travel to Mars. /s

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#512

Post by eggie »

eecc wrote: post #460
mcswell wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong, even deceitful, for a couple reasons: 1) No country (officially, or afaik in reality) has a bio weapons lab, and certainly not "all over the world". Nobody (well, nobody official) ever said the Wuhan virus lab was a bioweapon lab; it's a virology lab. 2) The Wuhan virus lab has been experimenting with corona viruses for a long time, including gain of function, and it had a history of problems. 3) There…

Sorry to ruin your narrative, but SARS-CoV-2 was circulating well before it showed up in Wuhan. https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim... Perhaps people noticed it when it hit Wuhan and freaked out because of the Research Institute thinking “oh shit, is this what they’re playing with?”

The antibody tests do have a degree of cross-reactivity with other coronaviruses, but if this is reliable it's a fascinating finding.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#513

Post by mytailorisrich »

eggie wrote: post #510
mytailorisrich wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also mounting evidence that the virus was in France in November. Now, it still most likely came from China but this adds to the reasonable suggestion that the Wuhan market was simply the first large outbreak but not near the origin of the virus. My 2c is that the virus will be found (if we do find its origin) to come from a rural area in Southern China.

Preface: This is rumor, although one that would require extreme cleverness and coordination to fake. A US intelligence contractor that collects location data from apps on phones made a presentation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shut down from October 7 to 24, 2019. This was reported in the popular US press [1]. You probably missed that in the nightmare flood of last year. I did when it was first reported..…

I think it would be very useful to stop sharing FUD articles ("rumors"...) at this point...

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#514

Post by odiroot »

ttz wrote: post #53

First gen Chinese, grew up in NA. Have contact with relatives "on the ground". My own experience: Don't ever trust the Chinese government on issues that could potentially involve the reputation of the party. Note that I'm not saying don't trust what CCP says, ever (sometimes they actually do good things) - just not on issues that involve anything to do with how the world might perceive them. Which is exactly what thi…

It's like in any communist state before (we had the same in Poland).

You can blame an individual, even sentence them to death, but you cannot ever criticise the system/party. Nor shine a light at any evidence that the system is wrong. This is a deadly sin.

For the party to admit, there's flaws in the system, would collapse their whole authority.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#515

Post by AmericanChopper »

buran77 wrote: post #55
f430 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the CCP is innocent why not prove it to the world by sharing their data? Why hide things?

While Chinese authorities may very well be to blame for this, your reasoning is flawed. Governments hide a lot of things for a lot of reasons, whether nefarious or not, especially when it comes to sharing with foreign powers. The "argument" that "if you've got nothing to hide then you have nothing to worry about" is is just as worthless when promoting encryption backdoors as it is now.

Then The WHO should be saying "we can't eliminate the possibility of a lab origin because China is engaging in a massive coverup and won't let us investigate anything" rather than "Laboratory contamination can be excluded because...".

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#516

Post by lrem »

edanm wrote: post #435
mr_toad wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how could you possibly not wonder whether our current standards for the sampling and manipulation of poorly-understood pandemic-candidate viruses are adequate? Wait are we looking to improve and make sure that this doesn’t happen again, or do we just want someone to blame so we can continue to do nothing?

Doesn't it depend on what we find? For the most probable outcomes, it's about improving (whether it's a lab escape that requires tightening how labs work, or a natural origin that requires, well, something). Of course, if theoretically this or another pathogen was discovered to be human-made / engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical), then obviously it might have "holding someon…

The "on purpose" bit seems highly implausible. AFAIU the ones with the means would have been the Chinese national labs and maybe their US collaborators. But releasing this right in their backyard would be an implausibly idiotic move on the Chinese part. Planting it by the US would both be terribly hard and a predictable own goal.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#517

Post by pinipedman »

e9 wrote: post #378
travisgriggs wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or is there a deep irony here? I find it interesting that one of the oft maligned attributes of religious communities, especially those in authority in said communities, is this same behavior. Do good things and be open, but also very much protect the brand. As a naive westerner I've hear/learned/assumed that Chinese communism/society was areligious. When described as you (OP) put it, it seems that abst…

Grew up in USSR. The basic premise of communism is that it's the best possible way to organize society. If you are not happy then it's not the problem with the communism(how could it be? it's the best!) but it's the problem with you. From that premise all sorts of bad things happen like you are not allowed to complain about communism or question it etc. Not unlike any authoritarian government or cult.

This is true of capitalist economic systems and democratic political systems. The USSR was not unusual in eliminating heterodox views, not that it was ever communist in more than name.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#518

Post by MertsA »

garmaine wrote: post #476
himlion wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, start clinical trial immediately after vaccine creation. At least until the point where it's safe for humans to use the new vaccine.

You can’t do a trial when there is no outbreak.

You can if you want to show really great efficacy results to the regulators, just omit that pesky control group. Buy my tiger repelling rock, prevents 100% of tiger attacks.

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#519

Post by andai »

saiya-jin wrote: post #485
hayst4ck wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this quite convincing: https://project-evidence.github.io/ Summary (IIRC): The most likely explanation of its origins is a person who collected bats for a lab in Wuhan contracted the disease in the cave where bats were collected.

that ignores the finding of Covid in September 2019 in Italy, which would make connection to Wuhan lab questionable

https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN27W1J2

Very interesting. Does that mean Covid was in Europe 3 months before the supposed patient zero in Wuhan (December 8?)

Re: US raises ‘deep concerns’ over WHO report on Covid’s Wuhan origins

#520

Post by andai »

lrem wrote: post #516
edanm wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it depend on what we find? For the most probable outcomes, it's about improving (whether it's a lab escape that requires tightening how labs work, or a natural origin that requires, well, something). Of course, if theoretically this or another pathogen was discovered to be human-made / engineered on purpose (not a real scenario in this case! Purely a hypothetical), then obviously it might have "holding someon…

The "on purpose" bit seems highly implausible. AFAIU the ones with the means would have been the Chinese national labs and maybe their US collaborators. But releasing this right in their backyard would be an implausibly idiotic move on the Chinese part. Planting it by the US would both be terribly hard and a predictable own goal.

Would your definition of "on purpose" cover the following?

> In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.[11][12]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

You make a good point. The wet market is only 20km from the lab, so if this one is lab-based (and not a bizarre coincidence) it seems much more likely to be an accident.

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