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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

#551

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #127
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how conspiracy theories become unfalsifiable. You're now positing that a lab worker got infected with multiple variants (which wouldn't exist in the lab, by the way, since they would work with cloned virus), then traveled across town and spread the virus at the market. The evidence all points towards a spillover (two, actually) at the market, but you can always make the lab leak theory ever more convoluted to…

Why do you believe that lab workers only work with cloned viruses? Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there? Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely. There's a good chance that the lack of safety was in the culture and not just one careless person. In November and December, several Wuhan Institute personnel were reporting unknown illnesses and took standa…

> Do you know the exact nature of the research that was going on there?

We actually have a very good idea of what research was going on there. The groups in question publish their research, give talks at international conferences, upload the viruses they discover to US databases, talk with colleagues abroad, etc. We have a very good picture of what they were working on, and every indication is that they didn't have any virus closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

> Two spillovers at a lab that has one spillover does not seem that unlikely.

If that were the case, you'd see the outbreak centered on the lab. It wasn't. It was centered on the market, on the other side of town. So you have to start making implausible - and obviously motivated - assertions that two different lab workers went and infected people at the market, without infecting any of their colleagues or anyone else along the way.

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

#552

Post by wk_end »

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_...

If the work on coronaviruses that WIV was doing was at BSL-4, I'd be more skeptical of a lab leak origin. It was being done at BSL-2; see Ralph Baric's testimony covered in this Vanity Fair article:

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-...

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

#553

Post by Anotheroneagain »

Fomite wrote: post #426
oa335 wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please share the reasons why you are skeptical?

A few reasons, though as I note in another comment, I'm not an expert in spillover events, my area of interest kicks in about a week later. So there's a few: 1) People I trust are skeptical, including people who are opposed to gain of function research. I've found Angela Rasmussen to be one of the better voices in terms of discussing the evidence for a natural origin, but she's far from the only one. 2) We have had t…

The virus evolved in an AIDS patient.

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

#554

Post by quantumwoke »

110bpm wrote: post #144
throwawaymaths wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a 23? bp sequence that is directly lifted from the moderna hiv vaccine patent (which preceded covid-19 by a decade). now an exact match of that length isn't impossible, but which is more likely? that this managed to be exactly correct on accident? or some grad student was told to just copypasta every furin cleavage site in the database into a GOF library and surprise surprise the most virulent form that becam…

I wanted to learn more about where this claim comes from and found this article [0]. The linked commentary [1] raises several interesting points. "Unfortunately, the authors did not provide details of their BLAST research. The patent database that they used contained 24,712 sequences. Yet, by querying BLAST, we obtained a database of 46,121,617 patent sequences with an average length of 560 nucleotides. The authors s…

Given we are on HN, it seems more likely that the claim originated on substack. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29938732 this may be one of the progenitor threads.

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

#555

Post by morepedantic »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #76
wkat4242 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests the Wuhan wet market was the origin. Those are not mutually exclusive theories. It could have been a lab leak that was then superspread by the visit of an affected lab worker (or someone they came into contact with) at the wet market.

They really are mutually exclusive theories. The current evidence points to at least two different spillover events (of slightly different variants) at the market, followed by spread of the virus in the communities surrounding the market, eventually radiating out to the rest of Wuhan. There is solid evidence now for each of those statements. If you try to reconcile that with the lab leak theory, you end up with an ev…

Read the paper. It claims that this is consistent with 2 spillover events, but it's also consistent with 1 spillover and an early mutation. The mutation between the 2 lineages could happen on either side of the spillover.

But a 2 spillover event suggests there was a pool of infected animals with multiple lineages that were all already capable of zoonosis. So why only a single secondary event? This suggests the pool was small, contact was limited, and that the pool wasn't sustained for long. OK, then it's comparably likely that a mutation would happen on either side of the spillover.

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

#556

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

jtc331 wrote: post #336
jdietrich wrote: post #320

If we actually care about public health, we should act as if both the lab leak and zoonosis theories are correct. We should take laboratory biosecurity, wet markets, the bush meat trade and intensive livestock management equally seriously as threats. We should do this because we have no idea where the next pandemic - and there will be a next pandemic - will come from. It seems fairly clear to me that a lot of people…

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.

Nobody in this thread seems to know what gain of function means. It's a very broad term covering a large percentage of all virology research. If you ban it, you might as well say that we don't want to do any research into understanding viruses from now on.

When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.

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

#557

Post by morepedantic »

ioulaum wrote: post #379
jandrewrogers wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US intelligence likely has more evidence than they will publicly discuss. It is a matter of public record that parts of US intelligence (not CIA) had been tracking COVID in China since at least November of 2019. That they coincidentally happened to be johnny-on-the-spot when the initial infection(s) happened, long before anyone was paying attention or trying to create a narrative, suggests that they probably have mor…

They could as well say "We aren't sharing our real sources, but we have high confidence." But they are saying that they have low confidence, and that there is no new evidence that changes anything. They're just changing the way they're biased, because they think that the lab's conditions weren't particularly safe. But then, we might as well expect that dozens of dangerous viruses should've gotten out.

There are documented cases of coronavirus leaks from labs in China, but not dozens. Then again, there aren't dozens of SARS either.

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

#558

Post by morepedantic »

lenkite wrote: post #151
mrkramer wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US will keep discrediting China as long as there is no conclusive evidence of what exactly happened. The burden of proof is on China. But let's be honest if it was a lab leak of this scale and consequences in US, US wouldn't admit it as would probably no country.

There will be no major discrediting of China since the bat coronavirus research at Wuhan labs was funded by the National Institute of Health. This was firmly and unequivocally established by the hearing held by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Refer to “Overseeing the Overseers: A Hearing with NIH Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak”. Dr. Tabak testified in this hearing that the NIH was funding gain-of…

The NIH partially funded GoF research in contravention of policy. The funding for the worst of the GoF proposals was denied, but there is evidence that the WIV performed the research anyway.

Yeah, the NIH isn't blameless if the lab leak hypothesis is true.

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

#559

Post by macns »

miguelazo wrote: post #476
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.

Sources for this? Deserves it's own post if data are there to back it up

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

#560

Post by tripletao »

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…

I'm not aware of teams other than Dr. Baric's at UNC and Dr. Shi's at the WIV proposing to enhance sarbecoviruses by genetic engineering. If anyone knows of more, then I'd appreciate a link.

SARS-CoV-2 might also be a naturally-evolved virus collected and accidentally released by researchers. The field for that is a little wider. I believe the WIV had the world's biggest collection, and the closest relative published before the beginning of the pandemic; but the BANAL viruses collected by the Institut Pasteur du Laos are now closer. I think there's a few more teams, though with smaller volumes of work.

Naively, I'd think "an American-funded lab in China with American collaborators had an accident" blames China less than "Chinese wildlife traffickers supplying Chinese tastes for exotic wildlife had an accident". The political perception is generally not too tethered to reality, though.

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