Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 868 posts

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

#661

Post by ellen364 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #326
AngryData wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it barely moves the needle, specifically because as you have said we have found other remarkably similar viruses in the past. We have known about coronaviruses for almost 100 years, and we have been studying them due to their dangers for atleast 60 years, and it has likely existed since before humans could be called human. And it has been shown to be a highly virulent numerous times in many different forms. No…

You're not saying it, but you're obviously starting with a very different bayseian prior than my 50/50. As someone that makes forecasts for a living, I'd like to see what you're assumptions are about the base rates there. As for how the facts produce modifications to the base rate, personally I think that a virus identified in a cave over a thousand miles away popping up in a very urban area right next to a BSL facil…

A Bayesian prior of 50/50 seems high to me. It assumes that 50% of new disease variants come from lab leaks.

In the last few decades there have been 1-2 confirmed lab leaks per year. And they're often thing like "we found a vial of smallpox we didn't know we had" not new diseases.

Nature very capably produced colds, flus, a bunch of nasty diarrhoeal diseases, the many and varied sexually transmitted diseases, the hemorrhagic fevers, and so on. For "some new disease variant that I don't know anything about", my prior would be more like 1/99 lab leak to natural origin.

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

#662

Post by vcdimension »

defrost wrote: post #435
vcdimension wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means this; it gives further weight to the lab leak theory, and shows the reasoning behind it. I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate or read all of that article (which makes some misrepresentative statements, and like your response, is rather venomous in tone), but here is the response from rootclaim about the debate outcome: https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-... I also know from e…

> I don't have time to watch the 3hr debate It was 18 hours. Three blocks of six hours. Plus preparation time by both parties and the multiple judges who were chosen to have the kind of expertise to weigh up arguments. Both parties were invested in making a case, and each put up $100,000 in escrow to add weight to the debate. The case that you put forward lost. It was debated by the person that put it forward. He los…

I had a look at Eric Stansifer's write-up of his decision, but I didn't read all of it (83 pages!). He does seem to have a good understanding of Bayesian decision making and hypothesis testing.

What confuses me however, is his dismissal of two pieces of evidence in table 2 which he says should be ignored "following the presumption that HSM is the first SSE", and yet earlier, in footnote 24, he states "We are very specifically NOT conditioning on that place being HSM" (talking about the first SSE location). Can anyone enlighten me about this seeming contradiction?

Another point: while both judges are qualified scientists, their expertise is in microbiology/virology not epidemiology, but it is the epidemiological aspect of the situation that is the most contentious part of the analysis, and AFAIK the part that swung the decision in favour of zoonotic origins for both judges. Without prior assumptions they both agree that the DNA evidence favours the lab leak theory.

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

#663

Post by maxglute »

sumedh wrote: post #660
maxglute wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>US did not allow any outsiders to check out Fort Detrick which means they knew it was a US engineered bioweapon. US has no credibility here. PRC maintains covid came from outside of PRC, they have no reason to let their labs be scrutinized by outside actors just because Mike Pompeo / CIA made up antiPRC propaganda. That's want weak idiots do. Reality is PRC already waste effort entertaining WHO, until US reciprocate…

Has there been any global virus outbreak from Fort Detrick or the US? US govt funded some research in the lab which leaked the virus in Wuhan, is Chinese govt funding Fort Detrick?

Likely Spanish Flu. People thought H1N1 started in US because US reported it first. Later it was thought to have originated from Mexico. PRC propaganda notes strange pneumonia with covid like symptoms in Fort Detrick area prior to covid going global. Is that enough propaganda for US to open up their sovereign soil for international investigation? The point is CIA claims has just as little credibility as PRC claims, except US has done even less to dispel PRC propaganda than vice versa and historically just because a country was first to identify and warn of a disease, doesn't mean they originated it. Some patient zero / traveller / trader from Laos where the bats are from goes to Wuhan, one of the largest transit nodes in PRC and the virus cultivates is just as plausible. Or a CIA released bioweapon from Wuhan w military games months prior if one eats extra dose of CCP propaganda. But then reminder Pompeo was head of state at the time and he'd go full retard on PRC.

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

#664

Post by timschmidt »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #642
timschmidt wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

I don't know how you can read about the half dozen or more documented cases of lab leaks in this thread - regardless of what you believe about covid - and call heightened restrictions for experimental work with human-infectious viruses security theatre. It's not sci-fi horror movies folks are worried about, it's people making mistakes the way all people do. The way you seem to be doing.

We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats. If protecting all of humanity from the next pandemic is too much work for virologists, maybe it's best that they consider another career?

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

#665

Post by maxglute »

bragh wrote: post #637
maxglute wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if the US pays for the damage the things that have escaped its borders have caused, Or just covid. I remember after PRC lockdown when regional countries were publishing their inbound repatriation flight test data and basically they only got very low digit covid positives, i.e. it was epidemiologically containable. At same time you have all the news of western travellers spreading covid to different countrries becau…

The reason borders were kept open was that it was considered xenophobic to close down the borders and globally public health guidance was saying that the virus was affecting only old, very young and people with weak immune systems. Only in the middle of March 2020 did countries start restricting travel and by then it was way too late.

Whatever the reason (many reasonable at the time), this was after PRC did a full lock down, with outbound flights limited to repatriation, i.e. they weren't trying to spread the disease, other countries wanted their citizens back while PRC did one of the harshest locked downs in modern history. Can't blame others for thinking CCP was over reacting, but ultimately, PRC locked down during period where covid spread in PRC was minimal and signifant first incidents in many countries were from western travellers, who thought things were going to be fine.

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

#666

Post by rixed »

macns wrote: post #559
miguelazo wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s most disturbing and highly irresponsible about comments like that and all of the reporting on this development is that there’s almost zero acknowledgement that the lab in question was being funded by the US government and much of the Gain of Function research was being directed by a US nonprofit with ties to the US government.

Sources for this? Deserves it's own post if data are there to back it up

Seriously, wouldn't have it been appropriate to do just the minimalistic wikipedia search before contributing to this thread?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology

This lab was an international cooperation, from back in the days where there were such things.

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

#667

Post by hoppp »

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…

Just more reasons for a trade war that is not good for anyone

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

#668

Post by haunter »

ribcage wrote: post #582

Mankind for some reason is blind. Doing CTRL F for the magic word in this Hacker News thread yields no results. There was a political conflict amongst Chinese people which had it's peak at the moment the virus appeared. If not for the virus, that conflict would have ruined China's image for decades and centuries to come.

> There was a political conflict amongst Chinese people which had it's peak at the moment the virus appeared.

Hong Kong protests?

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

#669

Post by audunw »

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.…

The best theory I’ve ever read, wrote about miners working in caves with bat who came down with serious pneumonia, or something like that, in the area that the lab sampled viruses from.

The viruses could evolve quite a lot in an immunocompromised individual.

The virus was then probably leaked as part of the work to sequence its genome. So they wouldn’t have published anything on it yet.

I don’t think they did any GoF research or engineered the virus in any way.

I’m fairly certain China knows a lot more about what actually happened though.

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

#670

Post by nickburns »

harshreality wrote: post #625
yobbo wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lab leak and zoonotic origin are not mutually exclusive. The lab leak hypothesis means "accelerated evolution" through either caged animals or "in vitro cells" infecting the lab personnel. Gene splicing and such are not necessary to make the argument. The observed fact pointing to this is the number of generations required to produce the divergence between the first SCoV2 variant and the closest wild ancestor. It cor…

Although it's not specified in common dictionary definitions... "...zoonosis (a disease communicable from animals to man under natural conditions)." —Laurie Garrett, _The Coming Plague_ (Ch 14, section IV) Which is naturally how the word is used virtually all the time. Transmission from lab animals kept for study in a biolab, you could argue either way. Transmission from humanized lab animals purposely subjected to s…

Most accurately, lab leak and spillover event are not mutually exclusive theories.
Post reply on HN