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What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

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Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#651

Post by scotty79 »

kaitaincps wrote: post #606
scotty79 wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with lab-leak theory that it's basically unfalsifiable. No matter how strong evidence you gather against it you can always dismiss it with ease.

Ditto for zoonosis. The problem is that people treat the zoonotic transfer hypothesis as some kind of default, the incumbent to which we must defer in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary. This is a mistake, given the proximity to the WIV and the nature of the work being done there. If the pandemic had started in some remote village nowhere near a lab this line of argument would be far more compelling.

To disprove zoonotic origin it would be sufficient for one person to step out and say "I made covid" and present a sample very similar to originally discovered covid strain and maybe some documentation regarding his experiments. It would immediately disprove theory of zoonotic origin of covid.

Nothing like that is possible for lab-leak theory. Even catching animal that has a virus very close to original form of covid wouldn't disprove lab-leak theory because lab-leakers would just say that the animal just got covid from humans.

As for validity of zoonotic origin hypothesis it's a default because every virus ever that troubled us came to us from other species of animals without any additional technological assistance from us. Unless you count hunting, cooking or husbandry a technological assistance.

It's now very well known that coronaviruses have huge variability, are able to mutate quicly and cross barriers of species so it's overwhelmingly more likely that sars-cov-2 came to us without any technological intervention.

We have no idea where the pandemic started. Only where it was noticed. Vast majority of covid cases give only flu-like symptoms. First cases might have happened in some village that had too few people to notice any spike in severe cases. Only when a person from the village visited market of a densely populated city and thousands of people got infected so that tens of them started landing in the city hospital the whole thing had a chance of getting noticed.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#652

Post by lazyeye »

blitzar wrote: post #646
harishcs wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Australia was one of the few countries which called for an investigation of all possibilities and the reaction from China was swift and furious. For most countries, concerns about trade and geopolitics outweigh everything else. The US (and I would add France, which built the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan) has additional reasons not to investigate, as you said.

Not long after Australia pointed the finger at China, it emerged that Australian Government Labs had been doing gain of function research on bats ... If the bar for proof of guilt is "swift and furious reactions" then by the playground court rules; "whoever smelt it, dealt it" and "whoever said the rhyme did the crime"

This sounds exactly like the kind of disinformation the CCP would be creating and promoting.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#653

Post by dpbriggs »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #628
dpbriggs wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Non sequitor. That's not the statement I'm referring to. It's certainly the case a virus emerged from nature with all or most of the properties we saw in the original. Unless it was engineered in Loas lol

Good job defending your point. If the error bars weren't so wide on the biological clock idea why we would we be having this discussion? Does the west supress that, and you're one of the few smart ones who have the truth?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#654

Post by lazyeye »

mikeyouse wrote: post #84

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…

In terms of a natural (non-engineered) virus leaking from inside a lab (zoonotic transmission can happen either side of a wall), how is the current evidence pointing in one direction?

Not sure where the "weird insinuation" is?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#655

Post by dpbriggs »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #186
sixQuarks wrote: post #48

Let’s not forget that talking about the lab leak hypothesis last year resulted in censorship among social media platforms and YouTube This is why free speech is important, it is impossible to rely on “fact checkers”.

Let's not forget that the lab leak hypothesis was championed by political figures who were embarrassed that they were woefully clueless about how to implement pandemic response plans, even though their agencies already had those plans in place for years, and that their aligned media pushed these conspiracies without evidence.

Why is that a justification for heavy-handed censorship of a topic? Do you think that's right?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#656

Post by lazyeye »

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…

"not that scary..."

What an utterly extraordinary thing to say!

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#657

Post by dpbriggs »

booleandilemma wrote: post #386
VoodooJuJu wrote: post #372

The lab-leak hypothesis has been suppressed because it is a politically unauthorized thought. If the hypothesis is investigated and proven true, powerful people stand to face justice, which is of course unacceptable to these very people, and so the idea has been banned by way of media silence and by way of association with other unauthorized politics, i.e. with those who are right of center.

Not to mention you’d see a rise in anti-Asian hate crime as disturbed people take out their frustrations.

That doesn't make sense. How is that any worse than the dominant at the time explanation of bats being sold at a seafood market to be eaten. That's way more visceral than a lab accident.

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#659

Post by dpbriggs »

nomoreusernames wrote: post #93

Well, I for one am a firm believer in the Labrador-Leak hypothesis. Anyone who disagrees surely is not a TRUE scientist. Just look at the numbers. More labradors than ever before. Statistics never lie. Everybody knows that Labradors are dogs.

What are attempting to communicate with this comment?

Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?

#660

Post by logicchains »

trasz wrote: post #488
byecomputer wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste. Saved a lot of money this year making Covid-19 at home using the SARS viruses I already have. Takes like 2 seconds

Now we need someone to implement an LLVM backend to emit RNA.

And a Rust frontend! That way the viruses can't leak.
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