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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

#641

Post by dinoqqq »

hedora wrote: post #468
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…

Two things to note: 1) Multiple departments of the executive branch were saying this under Biden too. 2) The US gov’t funded the biological weapons research lab at Wuhan. Mr Cotton has been a senator for 10 years, and therefore was around when the funding was approved. So if he wants to find someone to punish, maybe he should look in a mirror.

Sources?

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

#642

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

timschmidt wrote: post #624
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're right that we should still do the research. But we should be doing it on an island, or a ship at sea, with supplies delivered by drone, and as little population exchange as possible.

That depends on whether the research increases the risk of a pandemic by any appreciable amount, compared to all the other things humans do.

It's kind of absurd that he have hundreds of millions of farmers and hunters interacting with infected animals every day, and nobody cares, but then we have a few researchers interacting with the same viruses under highly controlled conditions, and that's what we're worried about.

The reason is that people have watched too many sci-fi horror movies and listened to too many xenophobic / fear-mongering politicians who want to find scapegoats.

The problem with imposing even tighter conditions on research is that you end up making the research much more difficult, expensive, unattractive to actual scientists who have to live their lives. And all that for security theater, just to pander to ignorant politicians who won't actually be satisfied.

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

#643

Post by mike_hearn »

Fomite wrote: post #346

My present take: As an infectious disease epidemiologist whose expertise lies in the dynamics of infections a week or so after an initial spillover event, I am much more cautious with my opinions on the lab leak hypothesis than a lot of people who took a single biology class as a distribution requirement in undergrad.

Given that epidemiology features no biology whatsoever, being these days purely a matter of playing with statistics, why would you feel qualified to discuss anything related to labs, leaks, or GoF research?

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

#644

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

morepedantic wrote: post #555
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

We don't know how many spillover events there were. Just just know that it's at least two. Most spillover events probably do not lead to a sustained outbreak.

The problem with positing that the mutations happened after spillover is that the timeline is way too short. Multiple variants were present at the market just weeks after the initial human cases. That points to differentiation before spillover, probably on the farms where the animals were being kept.

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

#645

Post by echoangle »

gtgvdfc wrote: post #452
giantg2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have family that have worked on developing NBC equipment for the military. The first thing they said when covid was spreading was that it was most likely from a lab. That was before anyone in the news was saying that. So an independent first-look assessment by someone with experience, followed by later finding out that there was in fact a lab there, has me heavily leaning towards it being true. But it doesn't reall…

I had a Chinese colleague in January of '20 saying it was obviously a leak. I hadn't even heard of Wuhan before, and he told me there is a bio lab there.

And what does that tell you? I could probably find 10 people in every country on earth that claim COVID-19 originated in a lab there. I don’t think being Chinese is a good qualification for determining where COVID-19 came from.

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

#646

Post by tim333 »

It's funny how everyone's opinions have changed now Trump is in power. It just shows how much of what people say is to advance their own interests rather than to say the truth.

Personally I'd guess it was almost certainly a lab leak doing research similar proposed by Ralph Baric (the world's leading researcher on this stuff) as described in his testimony to a congressional committee. His work was proposed for US funding and didn't get it but probably the Chinese conducted much the same research themselves and the research pretty much is to make covid for research purposes. One of the viruses he mentions interest in has an insert amino acid identical to covid.

Re. what the sensible authorities at the time have to say I give you the head of the CDC at the time and the chair of the Lancet covid enquiry:

CDC Redfield: "[The US] contributed to the research that led to it and that's to say is that the US government was very involved in funding the Chinese lab that did this research..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlhvnMpRU0&t=119s

Lancet, Sachs: "Where do you think Covid came from".. "Covid um the question is which lab and in which way. It almost surely did not come out of nature uh it almost surely came out of uh a deliberate research project ..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS-3QssVPeg&t=6493s

Also amusingly on of the scientists most active in implying anyone suggesting a lab leak was a crank or conspiracy theorist at the time of the outbreak was Kristin Anderson. Later his slack chats were subpoenaed and he was saying in them “The main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.” He then got a $7m grant from Fauci totally unrelated to saying the research Fauci funded couldn't have been the problem.

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

#648

Post by andyjohnson0 »

I understand that this is based on an evaluation that started when Biden was president. But, given the timing and the weak confidence level, what's the likelihood that this being made public is just the CIA signalling their alignment with the Trump administration?

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

#649

Post by TypingOutBugs »

otherme123 wrote: post #634
TypingOutBugs wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is occams razor pointing you to a fish market where they didn’t find it in any animals that could transmit it, next to a research center working on similar viruses, where people commuted from there via the market, where documents exist pointing out poor security practices, and where the Chinese government restricted access?

Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market also sold the following seafood items: raccoon dogs, hedgehogs, weasels, badgers, hares, squirrels, civets , rats, porcupines, coypus, marmots, foxes, minks, wild boars, etc. Civets at the very least are known to be the host for SARS-CoV virus that jumped to humans. The first affected people all had in common the market, and not the lab. Samples from the market in early 2020 found a lo…

They sold lots of animals, but they found no viruses in the animals themselves right? Sampling found it in the environment, but not in the animals?

I might be wrong but I swear I read they never found cov 2 in an animal that could transmit to humans

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06043-2

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

#650

Post by rolandog »

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…

Any new theory needs to match evidence for SARS-COV-2 being present in European wastewater during December 2019 [0] [1].

Maybe it leaked from the lab; maybe it was released? As far as I understand (but tbh, I have not kept up as much with immunology news) the alternative theory of the virus hopping from another species hadn't been confirmed, as no reservoir had been found. Does anyone know if that had been the case?

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53106444

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7428442/

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