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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#621

Post by trompetenaccoun »

Izkata wrote: post #485
byecomputer wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before find…

There's another interesting point that seems to have flown under the radar: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... Dunno if that point is just offices or whatever though.

No, there's a lab in there. This was the lab originally called out by Chinese whistleblowers.

Also you have the wrong address, put in the Chinese name on Baidu and you'll find it's in walking distance to the market. Like literally just across the street.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#622

Post by dTal »

notriddle wrote: post #512
scarmig wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go.. For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual str…

A zoonotic jump that happened to occur inside of a wildlife research facility due to bad lab technique is not that scary. If it's proven true, it's pretty likely that the lab operators will fix it. Could you imagine being the guy who caused the COVID-19 pandemic by forgetting to sanitize some tool? I bet whoever did it would be the single most careful and clean research scientist in the entire world after that kind o…

>I bet whoever did it would be the single most careful and clean research scientist in the entire world after that kind of episode.

"Fire you? I just spent a million lives training you up!"

(For those who don't get the reference, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_j_watson_209882 )

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#623

Post by trompetenaccoun »

byecomputer wrote: post #355
mikeyouse wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't mean each are equally likely.. hence the huge section in the article I linked about bayesian priors.

I sort of lost faith in the article's willingness to take lab leak seriously when they threw this map up[0] and inexplicably did not label where the Wuhan Institute of Virology is on it. For reference[1]. [0] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_... [1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Huanan+Seafood+Market,+Fazha... It's not at all far-fetched to think the virus piggybacked 10 miles before find…

武汉市疾病预防控制中心

That's the Wuhan CDC. It's across the street from the market and has a virus lab. Google Maps will not show you the correct location but you can put the address (湖北省武汉市江汉区马场路288号) and it's close enough. Or use Baidu Ditu and find it's right in the middle of the clusters in your first link, ~300m south of the market.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#624

Post by Izkata »

kgwgk wrote: post #615
Izkata wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the source for GP's source. Ask them.

GP didn’t send a link to that particular outdated section within that site. July 9, 2020 This article has not been updated recently You did. Why? How are your link and quote related to the « 200k+ cases per day in June 2022 » claim? If you don’t know yourself, asking GP won’t help.

On the page they link to, in the section the 241k came from, is a link that says "More detail on the analysis". It goes to my link.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#625

Post by bayesian_horse »

cm2012 wrote: post #462
bayesian_horse wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of transparency in China proves nothing. CYA is standard operating procedure there, regardless if there is any guilt or not. Up and down the chain they will cover for each other, if not for the simple reason they themselves don't know what shit their superiors or underlings are up to... And it is entirely rational, even when they believe that there hasn't been a lab leak, to shut down any investigations into it,…

The biggest evidence for lab leak is that no one can find a wild reservoir of covid 19. The Chinese government and the rest of the world has a ton incentive to find a reservoir and havnt.

That's a very weak argument.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#626

Post by bayesian_horse »

ikrenji wrote: post #445
bayesian_horse wrote: post #314

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/

There's also a difference between leaking a novel virus and one that has been circulating. Also the accusation of "gain of function" experiments making the virus more dangerous.

Of course it is not extremely unlikely that a virus escapes from a lab. To me it seems very unlikely that this particular virus first escaped from this lab and especially that it wasn't a threat before being collected.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#628

Post by bayesian_horse »

dpbriggs wrote: post #365
bayesian_horse wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is a necessary condition. In order to leak from the lab, the virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab. And all the rest isn't plausible if they knew the bat virus they had in their vials had the potential to cause a pandemic. But it must have had some rare "talent" that was as yet undiscovered. Otherwise nothing of the "lab leak" hypothesis makes sense. You can't "gain-of-function" just any…

I guess the disagreement is around the word "undetected". It's possible some failure was covered up and I trust the Chinese government to be capable enough to do that. > virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab That's a weaker statement than the one I replied to. I'm referring to the how it's necessary that it needs to a "pandemicable" virus that enters a lab "undetected" and I guess leaves the lab "und…

The whole point is that the virus that was collected would already need to have some properties that predispose it to become a dangerous pandemic. Which is unlikely because those Viruses are pretty rare.

And the rest of your comment just tells me you know nothing about biology.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#629

Post by bayesian_horse »

kaitaincps wrote: post #600
bayesian_horse wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is a necessary condition. In order to leak from the lab, the virus has to be collected and be propagated in the lab. And all the rest isn't plausible if they knew the bat virus they had in their vials had the potential to cause a pandemic. But it must have had some rare "talent" that was as yet undiscovered. Otherwise nothing of the "lab leak" hypothesis makes sense. You can't "gain-of-function" just any…

Wait, wait...does this whole debate hinge around the idea that you think the WIV staff are reliable, honest agents ? The very idea is hilarious. They operate within an authoritarian regime that restricts their freedom of speech and makes threats against them and their families for non-compliance. It is irrational to trust anything they report as being true.

It's even more irrational to just assume the opposite or whatever you want to be true.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#630

Post by bayesian_horse »

dekhn wrote: post #381
mikeyouse wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a completely common technique - the same way we're tracing the current Monkeypox outbreak. https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/epidemiological-up... And is useful from an anthropological perspective on older outbreaks, also for Monkeypox; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92315-8 The rate of mutations, especially for a virus as transmissible as Covid is a very strong signal.

Thanks- personally, based on my experience in functional genomics, they have far too many assumptions to be trusted as "clocks", even relative ones. Here's the second paper's methods: a molecular clock signal was estimated on the ML tree using TempEst v1.532. BEAST v1.10.433 was used for Bayesian MCMC analysis to estimate temporal nodes. As recommended in Patrono et al., we selected the simplest model: strict clock a…

My point is that if you find multiple samples with the same protein sequence, and those samples have independently diverged, you can easily assume those viruses did not originate by recombination from the Wuhan strain.
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