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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

#611

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#612

Post by maeil »

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…

> or because they've become addicted to being "the lone voice in the wilderness", despite it not being a risky position to take.

This frankly makes me distrust you; in 2020-2022 this was absolutely a risky position to take for most public figures, let alone those on academia, let alone those connected to epidemiology. This remains the only time and topic I've seen blanket banned from discussing across all major US social platforms. Try looking up what the vibe was like in 2020-2021 especially.

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

#613

Post by nialv7 »

CMay wrote: post #275
Leary wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things that are true: The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation. Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak. The W…

The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market. The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market. Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there. Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable…

I was curious so I did a quick research on the previous SARS-CoV-1, the one that caused an outbreak back in 2003. Looks like they weren't able to find the natural reservoir for that one either. We did know it came directly from masked palm civets sold at local markets, but we don't know how those civets were infected. They were raised in farms, and no virus was found in those farms.

And the closest natural match? WIV16 at 96.0%, again found on bats in Yunnan, again very far from Guangdong - where that outbreak started.

So I think it must be because Yunnan has a lot of bats? that's why all the closest matches are found there?

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

#614

Post by maeil »

Leary wrote: post #191
CMay wrote: post #154

Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak. The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak. The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak. It's important to note that…

Things that are true: The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation. Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak. The W…

How many times do we need to repeat "lab leak != intentionally lab engineered"? Your most relevant parts are all about the latter. You know this, yet muddy the waters.

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

#615

Post by maxglute »

CMay wrote: post #154

Things that are true: "Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time." The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak. The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak. The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak. It's important to note that…

>If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that,

This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims.

>If China was more transparent and cooperative

If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.

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

#616

Post by Paradigma11 »

Dalewyn wrote: post #304
spanktheuser wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My priors include none of the agencies having expertise in epidemiology.

My priors include all the agencies (the Intelligence Community , arguably the deep state) having ulterior political and personal motives. Does noone remember the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax that the CIA cooked up for GWB? I would not trust any of these agencies to provide objective findings or conclusions, there is a lot of power on the table that's at stake.

The CIA was very skeptical about the WMD story and there were lots of leaks that made that clear.

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

#617

Post by tripletao »

Fomite wrote: post #464
why_at wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on point 4? Your comment is interesting but I don't entirely follow.

Basically, things like "It started in Wuhan near the WIV" implies that we actually have found the first case, etc., when this is notoriously difficult to do, especially with a disease that can have mild or asymptomatic presentation.

I agree with that statement. Even with prior warning, and knowing the virus could be introduced only at an airport or seaport, Western public health authorities managed to trace approximately zero cases to their introduction. So it's hard to believe the same tools would succeed at the much more difficult task of tracing the very first cases in China.

That makes it odd that you're promoting an author who has claimed such evidence shows conclusively that spillover into humans--and not just a super-spreader event--occurred in the Huanan Seafood Market. I suspect that if you looked personally at the methodology behind the conflicted (Rasmussen's doctorate was under Vincent Racaniello, a longtime proponent of high-risk virological research) authors' claims, then you'd find them much less worthy of repetition.

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

#618

Post by maeil »

wk_end wrote: post #513
Retric wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they are actually related but it’s something I read presumably because: “Wuhan Branch of the CAS.[4] Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it was founded in 1956 and opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory[5] in 2018. ” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology There was also a separate BSL-2 facility that moved right before the outbreak which also got news cov…

They in fact were working on coronaviruses in a BSL-2 facility, which is another thing that helps make the lab leak hypothesis more plausible. E.g. from Vanity Fair: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-... Baric testified that he had specifically warned Shi Zhengli that the WIV’s critical coronavirus research was being conducted in labs with insufficient biosafety protections. When he urged he…

Similarly:

In 2004, nine people were infected with Sars and one person died after two researchers were separately exposed to the virus while working at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing. In November 2019, just a month before the first confirmed case of Covid-19, more than 6,000 people in north-west China were infected with brucellosis, a bacterial disease with flu-like symptoms, after a leak at a vaccine plant. [1]

The Chinese facility hosts one of no more than six BSL-4 labs in the world that had been conducting contentious “gain of function” research on bat-related pathogens before the pandemic, according to Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University [1]

Just given the above, the statistical likelihood of coincidence is so absurdly low it alone means there needs to be overwhelming evidence to the opposite to overcome it. At no point has this been the case.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/a0badd5d-4d88-4a3b-b019-61c6d8275...

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

#619

Post by nialv7 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #168
snowwrestler wrote: post #166

I think it’s important to note that there are really two “lab leak” theories: One in which the virus developed naturally, was collected in a remote location, and was being studied in a lab when it leaked from the lab into nearby human society. One in which it was not a dangerous virus originally, and it became dangerous in the lab through human agency, either maliciously (e.g. bioweapons research) or accidentally (e.…

> These two theories get mixed up constantly, either by accident or on purpose, who knows I'm struggling to see the practical difference. Ebola naturally evolved. I'm not sure I'm be more incensed if an American lab released natural versus artifical Ebola into the population.

I think the natural-virus-leaked-by-lab theory hinges on the argument that, (assuming it was true, then) had the lab leak not have happened, SARS-CoV-2 wouldn't have made to jump to human by itself. And this is where the Ebola analogy breaks down. Because SARS-CoV-2 has a higher basic reproduction number than Ebola, meaning it's more transmissible. And it's also much less deadly than Ebola, meaning it has much more opportunities to spread.

Remember, it is a virus that caused a global pandemic, despite all the efforts made to stop it. Based on that, I think it is highly likely that whether the lab leaked it or not, it would have made its way to humans by itself. In other words, there would effectively be no way to tell one scenario from the other.

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

#620

Post by mdhb »

mdhb wrote: post #545
Dalewyn wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Politicians hunting for excuses to do what they already want to do though, is definitely a thing. Just to be clear: The people in charge are the CIA, not GWB. GWB was simply the right useful idiot at the right time in the right place.

That is very literally the opposite of what actually happened. I don’t know where you are getting your information from but it’s absolutely incorrect. It was Cheney specifically who was relying on Chalabi whom the CIA had repeatedly dismissed as a fabricator which is what was used as evidence.

Here’s an actual account from someone in the room that lays out the entire situation. https://youtu.be/5iNrGhmr5p0
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