Why do we ignore history and not consider the possibility that COVID was intentional - by a rogue government or corporate cell, or a individual such as Dr. Bruce Ivins (Amerithrax, Ft. Detrick)?
What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
681–690 of 792 posts
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#682Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant.
We do know that the pandemic started in Wuhan, or certainly that that’s the first major population centre it hit. Had it started elsewhere that’s where all the early hospitalizations would have been.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#683Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both of your points are directly and conclusively addressed in the post.. > First, because viruses travel easily – so even if 100% of early cases were around the market, it could have reached the market via a lab worker There were two distinct lineages at the market with a cluster of positive environmental samples in the wild animal section. I would love to hear a plausible theory on how two unrelated lineages came t…
> There were two distinct lineages at the market No there were two distinct lineages in two separate crossover events, the market was just one of them. Which is even worse for the lab-leak hypothesis.
No, we don’t know there were two separate crossover events. The two lineages are more likely to be the result of a minor mutation having occurred during human-human transmission, i.e. subsequent to the initial (single) crossover event.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
A layman can have explained the pieces at play and how they should work together, that allows the layman to point out logical inconsistencies while taking for granted they do not understand all the low level bits and pieces.
Not in medical biology. It doesn't work that way.
In anything that is true, if you can't describe it to funders what you are hoping to accomplish in laymans terms then you will not get funded. Funders understand that particle physics searches for new particles no need to understand the nitty gritty, they can even ask interesting questions "can a new particle cause us any sort of worry that we might destroy ourselves?" etc. You apparently argue that we can't even string together high level concepts into causal sequences when we enter the realm of medical biology. How is that even a science?
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#685Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The main reason to suspect that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV is that we know that gain of function research on bat-borne sarbecoviruses was taking place at the WIV.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#686The whole world is tired of COVID. We all just want to move on. Besides, what are we going to do when we do confirm it was a lab leak? We can hardly make these lvl 3/4 facilities any more secure than they already are, and it’s not as if China will ever actually take any form of blame (nor would the US, if it leaked there).
Not have those labs? That’s one solution. Is the study of virology worth all the loss and suffering caused by a pandemic?
That’s a great solution until we have to deal with something like the black plague and find that we have nobody that ever researched anything similar to it.
Then instead of 1% of the world population we lose 30%.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I would point out here: Shi Zhengli is the principal bat-borne sarbecovirus researcher at the WIV. When the pandemic first came to light, the first thought Shi Zhengli had was, "Oh my goodness! That might have have come from our lab! Let's investigate! I wonder if the municipal health authority has got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China." Zhengli goes on t…
> "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China" Which in itself is an extremely odd statement, to the point I think it might have been taken out of context or mistranslated. If it was going to happen anywhere, Wuhan was one of the most likely candidates - to the point they built the lab there to do the research.
If I could Snopes-whack just one persistent myth in this debate, it would be that one. It’s completely untrue. And the WIV used the human population of Wuhan as a control in their experiments because there was so little exposure to zoonotic viruses within that population.
I’m not entirely sure where this pernicious myth started. I do remember Maggie Koerth pushing that line on Twitter with some kind of smug joke at some point, and it getting lots of enthusiastic upvotes. When it was later pointed out that Koerth had got it wrong, she pretended that by claiming the WIV had been built in the area to study bat coronaviruses, the area she had in mind was “China”. This is like arguing that it makes perfect sense to set up a lab in New York to study rattlesnakes. (Of COURSE you would; the USA is where the rattlesnakes are!)
So Shi Zhengli’s comment makes perfect sense, and was not taken out of context. The WIV was not studying bat-borne sarbecoviruses in Hubei, and had not been set up there to do so. All the interesting viruses were down in Yunnan, a thousand miles away. She meant exactly what she said.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey Alina, thanks for contributing so much to the discussion. One thing that always made me balk was this interview on CCTV which shows researchers collecting bat samples (feces etc) while seemingly skimping on PPE and admitting to getting bit by the wild animals and having a clear skin reaction all the way back in 2017 [1] - Do you have any comment on that in particular? Supposedly these are researchers from the Wuh…
Hi Jamal, Yes, there is quite a bit of evidence (photos and interviews of the scientists) showing that the virus hunters in Wuhan did not always wear appropriate protective equipment while hunting for potential pandemic viruses in remote areas. We describe this and provide citations in VIRAL (will be on page 127 in the paperback). In any case, even with full PPE, you can get bitten or exposed to animals and their pat…
Nice, I am a voracious book reader so I'll keep my eye out for your title.
I definitely support your push for getting gain of function research reconsidered, I can't imagine anything but nefarious ends to that kind of thing whether or not it is the culprit behind what we've all gone through over the past couple of years.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
A standard serology chain through animal populations showing a plausible path to Wuhan would make the lab leak hypothesis unlikely, or at the very least redundant. We do know that the pandemic started in Wuhan, or certainly that that’s the first major population centre it hit. Had it started elsewhere that’s where all the early hospitalizations would have been.
People have various definition what they found plausible. Majority of researchers think path leading from bats through civets is plausible enough given the evidence.
As you said, Wuhan was only the first major population centre. First human patient or even first hundred patients could be from a small village that don't even have hospital nearby to have a hospitalisation and one or two elderly village dwellers dying because of "flu" wouldn't make anyone curious or cautious.
This virus could have evolved a lot in those first few patients because there selection pressure for improving human to human transmission was the strongest and there was a lot of low hanging fruit for the virus.
Re: What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
The prior might be higher than you think https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/47531/did-a-chi...
Thats an opinion piece in a tabloid, without a shred of supporting proof for that claim.
?
The discussion in there links court documents where they establish that he was selling lab animals.
https://wenshu.court.gov.cn/website/wenshu/181107ANFZ0BXSK4/...