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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#571
post #166
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny then how for the first few months of the pandemic the emphasis and public guidance was on desinfecting hands and surfaces and endless debates about how if masks actually help.

I distinctly recall a virologist on public television early in the pandemic saying the hands and surface disinfection rituals were for psychology. He was not recommending masks either because there weren't enough to go around for everyone. The debates about masks in the west, even after production ramped up, were a consequence of the initial confusing messages from officials. I've never seen it debated in Asia where…

As a resident of Asia I can tell you that people were wearing masks in late-January 2020, as soon as the outbreak was apparent in Wuhan.

This wasn't the first rodeo for SE Asia, scars of past pandemics has made the response here much more automatic, orderly and effective.

I think also supplies of masks etc were much more robust here because they were already worn in daily life due to pollution, normal sickness, etc and a massive medical tourism industry that was about to be shutdown and have their supplies made available.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so? The bats are generally from Southern China, Laos, Cambodia, .. Nowhere near Wuhan.

There are tons of horseshoe bats in Hubei, that particular misunderstanding needs to go away.

Too late to edit, but here's an article from 2018 following a group of scientists into a cave 60 miles from Wuhan to study horseshoe bats:

https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1002326/how-chinas-bat-caves-...

Unfortunately for us, tons of bats carry viruses of all types and some of them are literally found on the campus of the WIV:

18.5% of Japanese housebats sampled in one study had beta coronaviruses: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQ9ScdVXsAIZntp?format=png&name=...

Those bats are regularly collected for study at the same academic complex that hosts the WIV:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQ9U624XoAAvQol?format=png&name=...

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#573

I initially dismissed the lab leak hypothesis because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane. Then it turns out that that is precisely the type of research the Wuhan lab does regularly. And then when our prime minister merely suggested an investigation, China put punitive tariffs on billions of dollars of our ex…

> ...because surely nobody would be stupid enough to make new SARS virus strains on purpose. They’re worthless as biological weapons, and the risks are insane. If we wait until the next pandemic hits, we will be months or years behind the curve, trying to understand it and develop treatments. Millions more people will die because we'll have been caught on our back foot. Lucky for the human race, viruses are statistic…

This kind of logic seems sane until you stop and think about it for a while.

First off -- and this should be enough by itself -- the research the Wuhan lab did hasn't appeared to have helped in a material way to fight the COVID pandemic. So they gambled, lost, and there is nothing to show for it.

But that's not the insane bit. The truly insane bit is that over 20 million people died for this little "experiment" of theirs.

I'll try to come up with an analogy of how truly bonkers this is:

Imagine one day, a nuke unexpectedly blows up New York, and millions upon millions of people die. It's an ICBM of some sort, but not launched from an expected enemy launch site. Everyone assumes it must be a terrorist attack, which is then "confirmed" when rocket booster fragments are found near the launch site -- in the United States -- discovered to be two different models of rockets jury-rigged together. Clearly terrorists got their hand on a bomb and did whatever they could do to launch it! Problem solved.

... and then it turns out that the DHS has a program where they would build random combinations of boosters and upper stages together with mis-matched warheads, and launch them for "testing" to so that they could "learn what terrorists might do".

Clearly it wasn't terrorists, one of the DHS experiments went horribly wrong.

... and then instead of being horrified, people would justify this by saying: "If the DHS hadn't done these kinds of experiments, then we wouldn't be prepared for when terrorists launched a makeshift rocket! How would we know how to shoot one down? We need to learn these things before we are attacked!"

Meanwhile, millions are dead from the experiment -- not the terrorists. The DHS experiments of course did not lead to better missile defence. The rocket wasn't shot down. Not to mention that that's not what terrorists generally do. Or they may not even be able to do this kind of thing anyway.

But this is precisely the type of thing Wuhan was doing. They were playing with the biological equivalent of global nuclear armageddon, and they weren't even doing it in a BSL 4 lab! It's the equivalent of the DHS rocket experiments building nuclear-tipped rockets out in the open with random local contractors in the same way SpaceX is building their star ship. They were doing experiments to combine SARS and flu-like viruses in ways that might never happen in the wild. They weren't just accelerating natural processes to find out what might happen, they were doing entirely novel things that's only possible in a lab.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#574
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't disinformation. It was no secret that one of the reasons masks weren't recommended for general public use was that hospitals and clinics should be supplied as a priority. If you got a different impression than this message, blame wherever you get your news from.

What, the US Surgeon General? https://archive.ph/KgfXW > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! > They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk! It's hard to get more direct than that. It wasn't just about preserving supply for healthcare workers, high-level government officia…

That sounds 100% compatible with what I wrote.

You will also note that in the early pandemic, it was completely unclear that non-N95 masks, such as surgical masks (let alone cotton masks) would have a positive benefit. That changed later on, of course.

That statement reflected the best information available at the time, but it was designed to be as simple and actionable as possible, not to communicate highly-technical nuance.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#575
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a hypothesis that fits the data perfectly (but that could have a somewhat low prior): - A poor studen has discovered that there is a demand in the wet market for bats. - The student works at a lab that either has an in-house breeding area for presumably healthy bats, or that buy such bats from an external vendor. - The student sees the opportunity for some extra income by selling some of those bats to the loc…

The prior might be higher than you think https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...

Thats an opinion piece in a tabloid, without a shred of supporting proof for that claim.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#576
post #477
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I can find social media posts of friends in April of 2020 sewing cloth masks to donate to hospitals/medical clinics to help them backfill their mask shortages.

Multiple sources in USA claimed masks were not needed for people without the disease. Heavily implying it was useless. I of course knew that was BS from the get-go. But nonetheless they did say it. https://time.com/5794729/coronavirus-face-masks/

Yes, we used to think non-N95 masks (let alone cotton masks) wouldn't help, and then when we got more data to the contrary, we had to update this belief. That's unfortunate, but normal.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#577
post #238
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how you do scientific criticism. Your comment is unsubstantiated opinion/accusation.

It’s an order of magnitude more information than you or the other commenter provided. Saying: “Wrong, I don’t like that.” is saying nothing at all. Be specific you fool.

To be more specific, you will note that you actually have no idea if I liked it or not, because I didn't say anything about that.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#578
post #240

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vir…

This is garbage appeal to authority designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to trust this source you hid any arguments behind. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

This is garbage appeal to ignorance designed to make people embarrassed to hold an opposite view. I learned nothing from your comment and was simply told to ignore expert opinion. It’s not fostering discussion and it’s strawmanning those you disagree with.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it extremely unlikely given what I know about biology and how viruses and epidemiology works. Lack of transparency in China is no proof, it's standard operating procedure. They'll try to CYA even if they didn't do anything wrong, maybe especially then. The simplest and most probable way the pandemic started really is the way pandemics usually start: by a pathogen jumping from an animal species to Humans, witho…

it is really not extremely unlikely. mainly because it happened multiple times previously in china with sars epidemic. there is a precedent https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

Just so we're clear -- your evidence for lab leak is based on the way samples were handled after the last big zoonotic pandemic in China.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#580

For those with a bit more background in the sciences, there's an increasingly massive amount of evidence to support Zoonotic origin. Philipp Markolin has a good rundown: https://protagonistfuture.substack.com/p/natures-neglected-g... Most of the "evidence" for lab leak is just weird insinuation -- it's increasingly hard to pin down what the advocates for that position are even arguing (e.g. whether it's a natural vir…

Two reviews of Markolins work are worth reading before you take it seriously: https://twitter.com/EmaNymton90/status/1540235304854032385?s... https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1507092599945166849?s=2...

Ah yes, reviews written by the eminently qualified "Not my name" spelled backwards and a data analyst for a bank... I'll pass.
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