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Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#541

Post by op00to »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #418
enriquto wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that)…

To be fair, I believe more the criticism about masks and I'm on the side that they're pretty useless. Their first explanation made more sense. People are certainly reusing them, they keep touching their face to adjust them, they don't respect distancing rules because they have a mask on, a lot of masks are not filtering enough. On top of this they're annoying. With the risk of covid being so low, masks are too much o…

Must be really frustrating to be completely wrong about masks.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#542

Post by KingOfCoders »

raxxorrax wrote: post #510
KingOfCoders wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Sorry, I don't believe this story at all. I believe this is a story people tell themselves to feel better about "the others". The whole analytic lens of white people against minorities is purely made up in my opinion and I have seen no evidence to the contrary. On the other side justification was made up for real institutional discrimination against white people with the same lies that spawned accusations like this.…

"The whole analytic lens of white people against minorities is purely made up in my opinion and I have seen no evidence to the contrary."

There are hundreds of interviews with Trump supporters or Brexiteers that say exactly what I have said. So how you arrive at "have seen no evidence" is astonishing to me. There are election posters for Brexit that are racist. There are books about the topic of people in the UK wantig the Empire back for its racism.

"Back to reality: People never cared much about race."

Ah yes, Ruanda never happened. Or thousands of pogroms. Or the thousands of public hangings in the South of the US. "People do not care about race."

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#543

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #341

If this comment thread is the way the self proclaimed smartest forum on the web deals with articles like this then we're doomed. This article contributes zero actual evidence, is littered with out of context quotes (including of all places the title), doesn't appear to understand the science or the probabilities involved and finally is clearly written with an agenda. It shouldn't have been posted to HN in the first p…

[deleted]

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#545

Post by kklisura »

dash2 wrote: post #300

It’s hard to believe how bad this is. Not the lab leak theory itself, but the fact that scientists found it plausible that a scientific mistake released an epidemic which killed 20m people – and decided they should cover this up because “talking about it might harm science“. This is truly scandalous, and I don’t see how those people can remain in their post.

I find that behaviour more dangerous than any other anti-science or anti-vax movements. That behaviour degrades the public trust in institutions, in science and in scientists. It will breed even more anti-science and anti-vax people for years to come.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#546

Post by op00to »

reallyagain wrote: post #363
t-writescode wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nail in the coffin for me was when they would make articles about “700 people fired from X company for not getting vaccine.” When that company has like 85k people (which they don’t mention in the article and you have to look up yourself, of course), and it’s like “so less than 1% of the employees refused the vaccine?” Even when they tell the technical truth, it’s so full of deception to sell ads I just can’t.

I assume you're talking about the Mayo clinic firing 700 people for not getting the vaccine(given it was exactly 700 people and it was 6 days ago). I opened the first 15 results on Google and every single one mentions the number of people as proportion of the overall company size. The vast majority are in paragraph 1 or 2. Could you link to the article (hopefully from a reputable source) that doesn't mention the comp…

They can’t because the articles all mentioned how few people refused. I don’t know what it is about this shit that drives people to become absolute morons.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#547

Post by RyEgswuCsn »

ratg13 wrote: post #509
cocoggu wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the title of the article is highly misleading. Using "Scientists" instead of "Some scientists" implies that the great majority of the scientists believed in this hypothesis, and there is no evidence for that.

If an article is headlined "Firefighters rescue cat from tree" Is your assumption that all firefighters were involved in the rescue?

It’s not reasonable to assume all firefighters were involved in a cat rescue.

But if one says “Firefighters think cats are cute”, it certainly appears that it implies most firefighters share this opinion.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#548

Post by scotty79 »

throw8932894 wrote: post #484
scotty79 wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all mice, some mice, somewhere. This virus in the form we encountered, spreads among humans best, but it also can spread between a ton of other animals. Most probable explanation is that it originated from civets (second best) and infected a single person with immunity sufficient to suppress it but insufficient to eradicate it. In this person it multiplied and mutated learning how to infect human cells best and f…

It stayed in single person for months, and somehow it got more infectious in this person, without infecting anyone. It is perfectly adapted to stain airborne and pass lungs, but it gained that inside person! And it only gained mutations related to higher infection rate and severity, nothing else, no other random changes. Omicron DNA was "forked" in July 2020. It was not detected until now, when it spread like wild fi…

Let's skip omicron for now.

While the original strain was evolving in patient zero it was acquirng various random mutations.

The ones that were not beneficial for infecting human cells and thriving in humans didn't survive.

Threre were few possibilities.

I don't think it could evolve some mutation that would trigger immune system of that person into overdrive causing it to kill all variants of the virus. Very unlikely.

Other option is that this virus might have evolve lethal mutation and kill patient zero without infecting anone else.

And the third option is that eventually virus did stumble upon mutation that increased viral load that this person was shedding to levels sufficient to infect another person.

And since it managed to break out of a person that was fighting with it for months or years it's no surprise that it did well in the next and next billion that followed.

The above is most likely scenario for me.

I think we'll eventually find closest relatives of that virus in some civet somewhere. But that will prove exactly nothing to anybody who believes in lab leak origin.

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#549

Post by NLips »

himinlomax wrote: post #498
emn13 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this view is overly negative. First of all, consider the timing of this all; this was super early days. People, including many experts, had much less facts then, and the topic was sensitive. I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, but to do so requires a healthy debate - in particular,…

> I think it's perfectly reasonable and even necessary that ill-founded but hard-to-disprove theories such as the lab leak theory at the time are examined critically, There's nothing ill-founded, it was then and is now the most reasonable and plausible explanation for the outbreak. You can do the same back of the envelope calculation today that I did 2 years ago, and nothing has made it less valid: 1. There's 100 cit…

To get the 1% figure you have to include an unstated assumption, which is that a novel virus is just as likely to emerge from this lab as from all top 100 cities put together.

If we try to make a rough calculation from an unknowledgeable starting position, it might be more reasonable to say "just as likely to come from each 1M+ city as to come from each lab [of which there is one]". Then, if we didn't know the geographic origin, the lab probability is ~1% ( = 1/(100 cities + 1 lab)), but knowing the geographic start point you'd get 50%

P(this lab given Wuhan) = P(Wuhan given this lab) * P(lab) / P(Wuhan)

P(this lab given Wuhan) = 1 [this lab is in Wuhan!] * (1/101) / (2/101)

Re: Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab, but feared debate could hurt

#550

Post by morelandjs »

enriquto wrote: post #324
vasco wrote: post #241

You know this effect, when you've been reading the news for years, and finally your favorite source has a story about something you studied or worked on, and you realize how low quality or outright wrong it is? The spell is broken and you realize how little they know about anything they write. Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for a…

> Once government officials and scientists gaslight us about what they think they should, how does one know they wouldn't for anything at all they decide to? For me it was the masks. The masks were my tipping point. At some point at the beginning of the pandemic they said that the disease was totally not airborne and that masks were useless. I remember vividly president Macron (a person that I respected before that)…

It’s not unscientific to change your mind when presented with new evidence, quite the opposite. It is, unfortunately, unpalatable as a politician to be uncertain, even when the facts demand it. I blame our culture of “leaders always know”.
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