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Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

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Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#531

Post by origin_path »

bialpio wrote: post #470
seydor wrote: post #6

Well I hope that at least the next lab-made pandemic will insert some beneficial mutations to humanity. In a way, the lab-leak hypothesis is comforting, because it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease, despite the facts of modern life, record human population and rates of travel. If it is not lab-made, then nature may do this again soon with another vir…

> (...) it means that nature with its own means did not manage to manufacture such a highly-transmissive disease (...) I think I'm less optimistic than you in this matter. There's at least one counter-example to that statement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu that has the same order of magnitude of deaths as COVID-19, but in a world where population was ~4x smaller and I'd expect less mobile / interconnecte…

Nobody actually knows how many people died of Spanish flu. Look at the range of estimates provided and where they come from - you'll discover that the distribution is enormous, partly because the high estimates come from epidemic models. But such models always seem to overshoot by large amounts, so their estimates aren't credible.

Putting that to one side, Spanish flu happened in the context of:

- A society that didn't know viruses existed at all, only bacteria.

- The very recent discovery of aspirin, which was believed to be a wonder drug that could cure anything. Doctors didn't know what doses were safe and had a habit of prescribing lethal overdoses to people suffering from the flu.

- Widespread censorship by the authorities due to WW1. It became known as "Spanish Flu" mostly because the censorship was just less aggressive there, so that's where reports emerged from first.

For tech firm employees systematically censoring reports of bad reactions to vaccines, there are lessons here that still apply to the modern day. Spanish Flu would probably have been less deadly in a society with less censorship, and which was less likely to mass prescribe brand new miracle pharma products.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#532

Post by origin_path »

kurupt213 wrote: post #447
dmix wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 33 cities including seven provincial capitals are under full or partial lockdown covering more than 65 million people > It said that outbreaks have been reported in 103 cities, the highest since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020. Crazy, it's like the rest of the world moved on but China is still in 2020.

Their vaccine being worthless didn’t help

Irrelevant - our vaccines are also worthless by this point. They don't work against Omicron and there's no difference in infection or fatality rates between vaccinated and unvaccinated by now. There hasn't been for months. Or actually, infection rates are usually reported to be higher in the vaccinated group but by how much depends on age and number of doses. There was a difference at the beginning, although it's unclear how reliable that data actually is (even in the west).

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#533

Post by NovaVeles »

tzs wrote: post #247
oxff wrote: post #52

I mean guys, it supposedly started next to a lab that studies the virus and they've yet to find the original bat population spreading it. If I made a Contagion 2 film that asked you to suspend your disbelief wrt. these two facts you wouldn't buy it.

> I mean guys, it supposedly started next to a lab that studies the virus and they've yet to find the original bat population spreading it. It often takes years or even decades to find the original animal source of viruses. Sometimes it is never found, such as with ebola.

For example the origin of the 2002 SARS out break was only established in 2017/2018 - so 16 years after the fact.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#534

Post by masswerk »

What has become of early Covid reportings, like the (alleged) Italian finding of Covid-19 in blood samples from Sept. 2019 taken in Lombardy (and similar findings in sewage sampoles from Barcelona)?

Has there been any clear proof established, either for the support of this or to the contrary?

[1] "Coronavirus emerged in Italy earlier than thought, Italian study shows" (Reuters, 2020-11-15): https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

[2] "Researchers find coronavirus was circulating in Italy earlier than thought" (Reuters, 2020-11-16): https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-italy-tim...

[3] "WHO asks for re-checks of research on when coronavirus first surfaced in Italy" (Reuters, 2021-06-01): https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#535

Post by WithinReason »

igouy wrote: post #492
WithinReason wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would you accept as evidence of "no lab involvement"? Read the last sentence.

You seem to want to play a guessing game.

Not sure why I have to spell it out: Finding COVID in animals in the Huanan market and tracing them back to a wild population infected with COVID would be a knock down argument against a lab leak.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#536

Post by est »

tmoravec wrote: post #7
est wrote: post #4

A picture is worth a thousand words, here is an aerial shot of Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) https://i.imgur.com/v4xg9u1.jpg source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-27/did-covid...

Maybe I'm daft but might I ask you to elaborate what you wanted to say with the picture?

Ctrl+F in this HN comment thread, search for "market", you can see how many people got the wrong idea.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#537

Post by Genbox »

masswerk wrote: post #534

What has become of early Covid reportings, like the (alleged) Italian finding of Covid-19 in blood samples from Sept. 2019 taken in Lombardy (and similar findings in sewage sampoles from Barcelona)? Has there been any clear proof established, either for the support of this or to the contrary? [1] "Coronavirus emerged in Italy earlier than thought, Italian study shows" (Reuters, 2020-11-15): https://www.reuters.com/ar…

The laboratory leak could have happened anywhere between the first collection of a virus sample from bats in 2017 and up until the pandemic start in end of 2019. It is likely the virus was transmitted by personel from Wuhan Institute of Virology to Italy before the first doctors pushed the big panic button.

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#538

Post by forgotpwd16 »

tynpeddler wrote: post #509
forgotpwd16 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's about a separate personal desire to regulate supposedly risky research. Referring to: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787 So a paper on a lab-made coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells from Wuhan on topic about the origins of a coronavirus related to SARS that can infect human cells that caused the pandemic from Wuhan, is a separate personal desire? >It's about a completely diffe…

What is often missed is that chimeric viruses are easy to detect. The viral genome will show clear evidence of manipulation from random base insertions and clear homology with all the ancestral viruses. Hiding the signs of manipulation would either require vast amounts of time and resources (the expense and man power would make it very difficult to hide) or straight up science fiction technology. The chimeric origin…

That's a much better counter argument to the lab-origin. The

>The chimeric origin hypothesis is not a plausible explanation for the origin of sars-cov2, which means the nature link is not relevant.

seems to be incorrect. By a simple search: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7744920/

Now the two distinct genomic lineages seem to indeed present a challenge to lab-leak hypothesis. It's explained in the original study[0] that the second lineage B came from A by intra-host evolution. Due to the molecular clock of the virus the single-introduction origin of the pandemic from a lineage A can be ruled out.

[0]: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8337

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#539

Post by [deleted] »

igouy wrote: post #520
credit_guy wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read your link, and except for words, I see not explanation why the market hypothesis is more likely. Just "I thought that, and now I think this". The rest of the article says that the reports were deemed by the WHO to be "inconclusive". And what else do you expect? Conclusive evidence for the lab-leak hypothesis should be hyper-ultra-uber strong, because its consequences could potentially be requests for trillions…

> because there were no documented cases of live bats or live pangolins being sold in that market. Was selling live bats or live pangolins legal?

[deleted]

Re: Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis

#540

Post by masswerk »

Genbox wrote: post #537
masswerk wrote: post #534

What has become of early Covid reportings, like the (alleged) Italian finding of Covid-19 in blood samples from Sept. 2019 taken in Lombardy (and similar findings in sewage sampoles from Barcelona)? Has there been any clear proof established, either for the support of this or to the contrary? [1] "Coronavirus emerged in Italy earlier than thought, Italian study shows" (Reuters, 2020-11-15): https://www.reuters.com/ar…

The laboratory leak could have happened anywhere between the first collection of a virus sample from bats in 2017 and up until the pandemic start in end of 2019. It is likely the virus was transmitted by personel from Wuhan Institute of Virology to Italy before the first doctors pushed the big panic button.

Hum, there are a few things promoters of the lab theory haven't accounted for: meanwhile, strains that are closer related to the wild type have been found in Laos and Vietnam and the Wuhan lab didn't sample there; the (in)famous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market is actually quite a distance from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (it's about half an hour by car and there's a river in between) and there have been no traces found related to this route or to the geographical and/or social vicinity of the lab.

Meanwhile, there has been quite a number of reportings (on two studies) severely undermining the lab leak theory. Generally speaking, these (US) studies claim to have genetic evidence for an animal-human-animal-human transfer in Nov. 2019 at the wet market and swab samples of cages tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Here's a sample:

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715

[2] https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/covid-19-originated-at-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62307383

[4] https://www.newsweek.com/wuhan-lab-leak-theory-undermined-ne...

(For me, there are political motives too strong behind the lab leak theory, to accept a mere conjecture that fails to connect the dots. Grave accusations require proof. Especially, if you haven't ruled out contradicting candidates.)

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