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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

#681

Post by mikeyouse »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #546
pclmulqdq wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. That did not happen with COVID, and in fact when we went looking, the closest virus in a wild population was a bat coronavirus located 1000 miles away.

> You would expect, as was the case with SARS, that we would then find the population of infected animals. In the case of SARS, the animals were not culled for months. The entire SARS response was slow - the virus kept spreading in farmed animal populations and kept spilling over into humans. With SARS-CoV-2, the Chinese government immediately ordered all the suspect animals to be culled. No test results for those an…

And relatedly - several of the animals sold in Wuhan with proper paperwork were from farms far closer to the closest Covid ancestors including many in the same province - not to mention wherever else the off-the-books animals were being brought in from.

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

#682

Post by galangalalgol »

lamontcg wrote: post #432
KennyBlanken wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The zoonotic theory has no evidence to support it whatsoever . It's the viral equivalent of the 'Magic Bullet.' - No samples were ever found, nor were any sick animals, in the market where it supposedly started. Period. Nothing. - No evidence of genetic mutations and variants leading up to crossover, no intermediary host ever found. - It just happened to start infecting people in the city of a lab which had been doin…

The initial outbreak cases were clustered around the wet market, not around WIV, and the cases weren't linked to WIV. There was a documented lab leak with SARS-CoV-1 and it killed the affected researcher's mother. That'd the kind of thing you expect to see in a lab leak. Instead you see a cluster of cases that look exactly like it spilled over from the wet market. And there's zero evidence to support the lab leak. Al…

The article I read indicated a number of researchers did become ill and die in the right timeframe, with the wet market they routinely visited following that.

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

#684

Post by disambiguation »

VMG wrote: post #659
disambiguation wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow do we live in the same "actual world?" If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3. I get your perspective: an outbreak is an unfortunate byproduct of the risks necessary for scientific progress. No one couldve known how bad it would be. The damage is done, learn from your mistakes and move on. Very enlightened. In the real world, people will lose their absolute shit. There w…

> If we knew for certain that covid began in the Wuhan lab, it would be World War 3. 1. why? 2. that attitude strongly disincentives the discovery of the truth. If that were true I would support a cover up!

"Why" because of all the latent anger and frustration from the mass death and pain of the pandemic. Its naive to underestimate it. How it unfolds, think WWI reparations from Germany.

"Cover it up anyway" pretty much. There's precedent for this, we never got the full truth about 9/11 either. To this day the 100 page dossier is off limits to the public, probably for similar reasoning. The USA wants to play the board opportunistically without regard for justice or public outrage. And then people wonder why the public feels abandoned by their government.

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

#685

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #473
chimprich wrote: post #33

The CIA is not a neutral party in this. Discrediting China may well be their goal here. A lab leak is not impossible, but there are good reasons to suspect a natural spillover event. There have been a number of studies that point in that direction; e.g. recent genetic analysis that suggests that the Wuhan wet market was the origin. https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2

If only there was an inter-national body that everyone contributes to and that does these things /s. Both parties here are at blame: China didn't fully cooperate with the WHO and the US recently kicked it out.

[deleted]

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

#686

Post by ajmurmann »

Retric wrote: post #520
ajmurmann wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is there to research with GoF that could be worth the massive risk? We had a vaccine for COVID in a weekend. Approval and manufacturing where the bottlenecks.

There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals. One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccina…

Are there any examples of medication that was developed for a disease that came out of GoF where the medication was approved and preventive mass production took place?

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

#687

Post by [deleted] »

ajmurmann wrote: post #686
Retric wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals. One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccina…

Are there any examples of medication that was developed for a disease that came out of GoF where the medication was approved and preventive mass production took place?

[deleted]

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

#688

Post by Retric »

ajmurmann wrote: post #686
Retric wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals. One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccina…

Are there any examples of medication that was developed for a disease that came out of GoF where the medication was approved and preventive mass production took place?

My understanding is success have come more from protocols more than medication.

Take antimicrobial resistance, you need to understand how microbes gain resistance by actually creating resistant bacteria/fungi etc before you can develop efficient countermeasures.

With COVID there was a lot of confusion around using masks and disinfecting public spaces in the early days. A better model of the disease could have been really useful both in the early days and how people responded to mixed messages.

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

#689

Post by jaybrendansmith »

yobbo wrote: post #595
derektank wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both the FBI and DOE, which have their own foreign intelligence gathering capabilities, had previously assessed that COVID was caused by a lab leak with moderate confidence. So while I agree with you that the truth will likely remain shrouded in some mystery, most of us that believed it originated from zoonosis at first (and I would include myself in that camp) should update our priors both based on the CIA assessmen…

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…

...and the most likely scenario is that it was leaked due to a mistake. Sloppy lab procedures. If anything, this should point to MORE regulation around GLP principles with more transparency and oversight, not less. And while I see some merit in determining potential risk, it should be only done with computation and computer modeling now, not an actual virus.
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